💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20210112 captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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So I have broken one of the cardinal rules for people living in northern climates. I have become obsessed with a summer activity in the depths of winter. Bicycling. It's clearly a product of being cooped up for COVID. I really want to get outside, feel the sunshine and the wind, enjoy the motion, and be free. The crazy thing is that I haven't bicycled much for years, since I moved to a neighbourhood in a town with San Francisco-style hills. That reality no longer matters to me. I have planned out the best routes to the flat parts of town and I'm going to be bicycling in the spring. Meanwhile, I've been reading through every cycling post on the circumlunar.space bulletin board, perusing odd cycling websites, buying some new parts to get my old bike ready, and watching bicycle maintenance videos. I tend to like vintage everything (old stuff gives me a good feeling), so I was pleasantly surprised to find that vintage cycling is a thing. Even so, it can be incredibly difficult to track down out of date parts. I have a 1998 or 1999 Norco Cherokee. It's a nothing-special mountain bike, but I like it a lot. It's in very nice shape, though it does need some new parts: new tires, tubes, and that rubber tape that covers the spokes. All of the rubber has deteriorated during the years it has sat in the basement. So that's all coming. I even found close-to-original tires with the red stripe (omg I'm such a nerd), that were decently priced and shipped for free from England. I can never figure out how sellers can afford to do that. The most difficult thing to find was a new seat post. The current one has always been extended to the limit and I've always wanted a slightly longer one, so that there's a little more stem in the tube. But try to find a 25.6 mm seatpost, when it was an odd size to begin with. After a lot of searching, I did find one and it's on its way from Poland. Sadly, it has the integrated seat clamp, so it's not quite period-specific. But beggars can't be choosers. I guess next Sunday I'll find a tube of grease and start pulling apart the hubs. I need something to do until winter ends. Three months from now.