commuter

Following on from this, it was the turn of the rest of the bike to have a bit of work done on it.

I'd foolishly thought that I could just pop in the new wheel and that would be that. Ooooh nooo, daft assumption! The bike had been left caked in accumulated road crap (who would do that?) and was in serious need of some maintenance. Closer inspection revealed lots of places where the frame finish was missing and patches of surface rust all over the place. So, time for a complete strip down and paint job.

Stripping the bike wasn't too bad: the headset popped out no problem, nearly everything came off apart from the bottom bracket (drive side is seized at the moment; bathing in WD40 overnight) and a bolt that decided to shear when trying to take it out. Even worse, the bolt then sheared flush with the frame when trying to get the remainder out. No problem: drill out the slug for a 4mm tap, tap the slug and take it out, chase the hole through.

Tomorrow: sanding, cleaning, primer coats.

This bike was a freebie old MTB from a friend and has done at least 4,500 commuting miles. In the year 2009/10 I did just over 3,000 miles and with two friends in Abernethy we did around 5,000 miles. One friend did the following calculation:

5000 miles = 8000 km. The average car emits roughly 130 grammes of CO2 per km, so we've saved:

8000 x 0.00013 = 1.040 tonnes of CO2 (although strictly we should deduct the extra food we ate and the energy used in making all the spares we used!!).

1 kWh of grid electricity currently uses about 430g of CO2 (although I am of course working on reducing that!) so we've saved the equivalent of
2419 kWh, which is just under the average annual electricity demand for a typical family of four.

Nice.