Building Deathbike 5000
Deathbike 5000 is cousin to Big Red, my Panasonic thrift store bike that I brought back to life with pliers and a crescent wrench. Big Red got me interested in taking old bikes and turning them into something ride-able. Big Red and Death bike also share their home with Green Machine, my wife’s 1960’s thrift store Hawthorne 3 speed. Deathbike is a mid 70’s Peugeot, a low end bike that was retrieved from mom’s basement. Deathbike sat for while and I used Big Red to get back and forth to school. Deathbike’s chain was rusted, the 5 speed cog was rusted solid and the tires were rotting off the rims. I bought a bike tool kit for 40 bucks and with the help of a bike home repair book form the library and Sheldon brown’s website I went to work. First I stripped the whole bike, everything had to come apart. I was curious to see what was inside the headset and bottom bracket and to figure out how it worked. Turned out to be rather simple except for the drive-side crank which had to be re-threaded at my LBS to remove. Cleaned everything with lacquer thinner and then regreased and put it back together. I ordered some new wheels, got new tires,pedals and a bmx chain and it was ready to go.. well almost. Some things that Learned the hard way.. Old bikes like mine are spaced at 135mm in the rear most of the time and although steel frames bend spacing it out saves stripped axle bolts. 2nd , don’t push the pin all the way out of the chain, just enough to unhook it. 3rd, Goddamn stuck pedals cause you more grief than an entire bike build gone bad. Just take it to the LBS and they can do it with a better and larger pedal wrench. Big Red has now been dismantled and almost all cleaned, she will be my back up bike or end up as the wife’s fixie if she wants one. I want to learn how to re-dish a wheel and just spin on a track cog so I can take a thrift store bike and change it over to a fix with no real investment. Green Machine’s wheels are still wheeble wobbly after my self truing lesson went bad so it will be interesting how my "re-dish" goes. It did take a lot of patience to learn how to get things just right but on a fixed there is not much that can go wrong. The last phase of Deathbike will be her new rims and cog, taking the front fork down to the LBS to be bent straight, I have Bigreds fork on it now, and flipping and cutting my bars so I can have a nice upright position to see traffic. Bigred’s future looks bright, more to come on that build and pictures of Deathbike’s final stage coming soon.
