first casualty

The potential loss of the stem was not a worry, even though it's the only original bit remaining apart from the seatpost, but if it couldn't be persuaded off the fork I'd have had to sacrifice an inch of steerer, thought that could probably have been fixed by inverting a replacement stem. Haven't tried to remove the remains of the bolt yet but I have a couple of days to try and a spare (though longer) stem to use in the meantime if other tasks progress faster than my ability to fiddle about with drills and pliers and mole grips; there are also other tasks of greater priority such as attempting a similar removal-of corroded-and-burred-allen-bolt on the left-hand crank arm, unfortunately also preventing removal of the BB cup. Having recently acquired spare rings for the inner and outer positions on a 74/130mm BCD crank I'd prefer to be able to rescue it rather than have to find something else.

The sparebike was necessarily being commuted on today, which wouldn't have been much of a problem had I not decided to replace the twist-grip shifters with thumbshifters at lunchtime. I ran out of time, which wouldn't have been much of a problem if I'd been allowed to leave at half-past four (conveniently just after I achieved a worthy-of-stopping-at thing) whereas after something which had happened at half-past twelve suddenly became apparently not-gwtting-to-go-home-ishly urgent until half-past five I ended up with one of those possibly-just-quicker-to-have-walked situations by the time I'd scrabbled to complete it and trundled home.