Month: April 2025
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Disassemble!
Hornsby will have 650B rims with disc brakes, vs. the 26-inch, rim brake wheels used on Dionysus. The hubs on the bike were intended for discs, so I’ll reuse those, but everything else has to go. I’d already removed the tires, tubes and rim strips, so it was just a matter of taking a spoke…
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Adieu, Dionysus (née Ol’ Paint)
Work continued on the Hornsby project on Sunday, with the focus on stripping down Dionysus for parts. I’ll be reusing the following: After weighing the full bike (sans bags and lights, but with the bottle holders and clamp for the tire pump), I removed the wheels and then stripped off the tires and inner tubes.…
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Good Friday Yokohama
I got a day off work with beautiful weather. Before setting out I took off Kuroko’s stem cap and discovered the compression plug was standing proud of the top of the steerer tube. It was a moment’s work with the proper hex wrench and torque wrench to put that right. Then, with a couple of…
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After baby steps come …
Toddler steps? The next step in preparing Hornsby for the build is a cord whip chainstay protector. Kuroko and Dionysus both have plastic chainstay protectors, which protect the paint from the chain striking the chainstay (which can happen over large bumps, rough pavement, etc.). Kuroko’s was a very thin appliqué from the start and has…
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Baby steps
I took the first actual steps to assembling Hornsby tonight, although admittedly they were baby steps. I used a heat gun to remove the warning labels (legal bumf) from the frame before applying my own, much more appealing sticker. I started with a small warning label on the fork, for reasons that will be apparent…
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Too Late, or Too Early?
Sakura season is drawing to a close, with delicate pink petals falling like stock market indices. I thought this might be a good chance to catch the dogwood blooming along the Asakawa, but it seems I was a week or two early. I know they are in bloom when the koinobori are flying over the…
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Hornsby — the rest of the bits
As noted, when I bought a replacement frame for Dionysus, there were a number of things that would need replacing or upgrading. The most important parts were the rims and brakes. While Dionysus is a rim-brake bike (V-brakes), Hornsby is strictly disc. And while Dionysus’s 26-inch rims would fit, Hornsby is intended to be a…
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Sakura Century
(metric) With a forecast for good weather today and rain tomorrow, I was determined to get out for a ride this morning. Nana was up early, whipping up a batch of her world-famous onigiri, but I was dawdling. I was hoping for the temperatures to get into double-digits before I set out. I’m not particularly…