Work continued on the Hornsby project on Sunday, with the focus on stripping down Dionysus for parts. I’ll be reusing the following:

• Drivetrain (with replacements for the chain and cogs)
• Pedals
• Hubs
• Brake levers
• Seat and seatpost
• Handlebar stem
• Bottle cages (most likely)

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. There’s still plenty of life in the Billy Bonkers, but I’m going to rebuild the wheels with 650B rims and slightly less fat tires.

I really should have given that rear tire a good scrubbing a long time ago. Anyway, the combination of rear wheel and tire proved too much for the scale, which has a limit of 2kg. Taking the combined weight of the tire and inner tube at 811g (the difference in the weight of the front wheel with and without the tire) brings us to 2,406g for the whole wheel.

José leans in

At this point José showed up and we tackled all the rest of the bits still attached to the bicycle. It could have been a comedy show: two people with directional dyslexia holding wrenches and curling their gloved right hands (usually) while addressing various bolts. This was not helped by my forgetting which specific bits were actually left-hand threads. But we know for sure that self-extracting bolt isn’t going to come loose after José put his best effort into it.

Getting it right

With the donor bike completely disassembled, we picked up where I’d left off: wrapping the chainstay to protect it from chain slap (and the occasional misplaced heel). With four hands at work this time, the job proceeded much more smoothly. It was only at the end we discovered we hadn’t left enough tail sticking out to easily pull through, and José had really whipped it tightly. Using a good pair of pliers to grip the tail, José eventually pulled it through without hurting himself in the process.

We just had time after that to swap out the black chainring bolts for shiny purple ones — the first splash of color out of several to come.

Adieu

I got Ol’ Paint in 2009, and after getting Kuroko handed the old bike off to José, not realizing the hubs were in very bad nick as I’d never serviced them. José rode the bike less than a year before getting his own bike (influenced in no small part by those hubs).

I started refurbishing Ol’ Paint in July 2019, but it was May 2020 before she debuted as Dionysus. Along the way, we’ve racked up 5,948.9km since June 2017 (when I first got a Garmin), not counting the time she was in José’s or Fearless Leader Joe’s hands.

Unfortunately, as can be seen above, I really don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to painting bicycles. In the end (in a possibly beverage-influenced decision) I opted for a frame replacement.

I was thinking I’d have ridden to work at least once in the past couple of weeks, and so have a farewell ride post, but it wasn’t to be. After thinking about it a while, I realized Dionysus’s last ride was to the bike store and back (unrecorded), when I bought Hornsby. If that’s not dark, I don’t know what is. Before that it was FLJ riding the Yamanote line with me.

Weigh-in update

We now have two parts for which we can compare the weight side-by-side: the frame and fork. The surprise winner is: Dionysus, by 100g in the frame.

	Hornsby (kg)	Dionysus (kg)
Frame	2.42	2.32
Fork	1.22	1.22
Total	3.64	3.54

I know you’re all as eager as I am to see what the final tally comes to.