My Trusted Steed

The story of an old neglected mountain bike and its transformation into a beautiful shining, robust continental travelling machine! (hopefully)

Luckily for me, Bogota is a very bicycle friendly city. The place is teeming with cyclists . Every Sunday half of the roads in the city are closed to cars for an event called the  'Ciclovia' where swarms of cyclists come and take over the streets, They do exercise classes all over the place and sing and dance and eat things and celebrate the existence of the bicycle. Every Wednesday night hundreds of them gather, with all their nightwear and tour the city reaping havoc, smashing cars and spraying bicycle propaganda graffiti everywhere, last week they blinded an old lady because she was travelling in an electric scooter, they sprayed 'Perezoso' on her face which translates as 'lazy'. I heard they even shouted really nasty things at a baby for being in a push chair with 4 wheels. Most of that last sentence isn't true. The point is that Bogotá is really doing a great job of promoting cycling as an alternative way of travel in the city.

I wanted to try and build a solid bike for as cheap as possible. I don't really think its necessary to spend a fortune on a brand new touring bike with all the bells and whistles, I might be wrong on this, but surely if its solid and has enough gears it will do the trick. So after buying this old mountain bike for about £50 I set out to pimp it up and prepare the thing for the ridiculous adventure ahead. I found a 'Bicicleteria' not far from my place and asked in my ever improving but very basic Spanish if i could use their tools and pick at their expertise to build my bike in exchange for a coffee and cake run every now and again. They very kindly accepted. The bike shop was very different to a bike shop you might find in the UK it was more of a bike kitchen, piles of bicycle guts ready to be recycled and given a new life, they had welding equipment and would construct weird and wonderful bicycle based machines for street venders and bicycle couriers. It was like a local hang out spot for kids and everybody who walked by seemed to know the trusty neighbourhood bicycle mechanic on a first name basis. A pillar of the community it seemed.
So firstly I stripped the bike naked. I cleaned the frame and my new friend at the bike shop gave it a lick of paint. The main things I wanted to change were the gears, I will need a lot of them if i am going to be  messing around in the Andes, the crank-set, the derailers, and handle bar set up.
I bought a 9 speed cog-set with a range from 11 to 32 teeth and had the rear wheel rebuilt with a new hub to support that. I bought a new crank-set with 3 cogs to give me a total of 27 gears. I managed to find second hand but pretty much new derailers to go with them. I had never really installed any of this stuff before so i was winging it, pretending i knew more than i did, It is actually all pretty simple, Apart from special tools needed to remove the cranks and bottom bracket most of the work was done with a couple of Allen keys and a spanner. I took everything apart, the hubs the head set, bottom bracket ect. Mainly out of curiosity so as to learn how to put it all back together but in the process I gave everything a clean, a re-grease and replaced bearings where they were needed. I really learned a lot about bicycle mechanics as well as lots of Spanish bicycle lingo, and how to shout derogatory things at women who walked past, which seemed to be a favourite past time  of my friends in the 'Bicicleteria'.

 I found some drop down handlebars and a larger riser stem for about  £10 for the both of them. I intended to try and source most things second hand but once i had checked out the possibility of buying stuff new it turned out to be much cheaper than i had anticipated. The one thing I spent a bit more on were some snazzy brake and gear levers, they come as one unit, you push the brake lever sideways to change the gears, they are very posh but it turned out I didn't really have a choice, they are the only style of levers that would fit my handlebars. I still managed to get them at a very good price thanks to Jose at the bike shop.
A whole day was spent pissing around with the gears and brakes  to get them functioning properly but after much frustration and several cables got everything in order and the bike was ready for its first test ride.




Here's the thing so far, road worthy and performing brilliantly. I have been training on it in the mountains surrounding Bogota. The feeling of reaching the top of a mountain after 2 hours of climbing is incredible but descending again in 10 minutes gives a sense of freedom which is indescribable. I cant stop myself from shouting and howling like a lunatic on the way down. Its so much fun!
My next mission is to prepare the thing for carrying all my shit. Then I will be ready to hit the road.