If you remember Gretta was in a bunch of pieces at this point. The last thing we had really done was get the lady painted, find a donor bike, and start the process of finding stuff for Gretta. Well in one day we got Gretta looking GOOOD. I'm really excited to share with you guys the stuff that we did.
When we got to G's that day my chubby handle bar grips were there. Yeah. That's right they're called Chubbies.
We started out the work day by taking the donor bike apart. I got the donor bike to get the braking hub and white wall tires primarily. We took the tires off of the donor bike and learned that we were going to need to switch the wheel on the front tire. The hub it was on was too large to fit in the front. Gretta is a petite little lady. Luckily in the magic garage of everything that G's dad has collected for YEARS we found another wheel that had the same number of spokes that had originally been in the front of Gretta. We needed to take that tire off, however, because it was an ugly mountain bike tire. Nothing against mountain bikes, it just didn't gel with my aesthetics for Gretta. The whole process of switching tires was interesting. I'm glad G was there to help me along and make sure I didn't kill the tire. If you've never had to do this, it's a fun process. Trust me. First we had to deflate the tire and then get it off the original wheel. This took a combination of me holding the wheel, G pulling on the tire, and me handing him a screwdriver to get the tire off the wheel in tricky spots. Basically G did most of the work. After we got it off the original wheel, we placed it on the new wheel and pumped that tire up! It was a good thing we switched out the wheels because the new one has a front release which will come in handy when we have to transport Gretta.
After we took care of the tire, I got to get my hands DIRTY. The bushings from my bike were 34 years old and frankly needed a little grease to get them back and running. G let me have fun with this, and I got to great up two different sets of bushings for the steering column and of course in the pedal area.
After we got those greased up properly we started putting everything together.
Handle Bars on...looking gooood.
The white walls are definitely a nice touch to the overall aesthetic of the bike. Gretta definitely needed white walls.
Everything went smoothly until we went to install the pedals. Apparently somebody had tried to put the wrong pedal in one of the holes and had messed up some of the threads. G had to take out about a 1/8 inch of threads to get the pedal in. Thank goodness. We really didn't want to have to search out some new pedals. Our list of things to get was already long enough.
One of the other things we had to do with Gretta was pretty awesome because I got to become a fabricator. Well at least 75% of a fabricator. I still have some work to do to get all the way there. Check out the next post where you'll get a laugh out of me trying to use tools and get to share in the excitement of us finding some parts...even if they weren't necessary parts. Until then, keep the bike ridin'
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