July 26, 2018 ------------- This was my first return to the project after a much longer break than I anticipated due to a lot of travel. I was really eager to get a lot done, so I turned up a little earlier than usual and really stuck in. I made a lot of progress and the thing actually looks more like a bike than a project now! I found a saddle - the range available was pretty uninspiring. I obviously didn't expect to find a lovely Brooks just kicking around in the big plastic tub of loose saddles, there really was nothing that either had a nice vintage charm to it or looked especially comfortable. In the end I grabbed a fairly cheap looking black vinyl saddle made in Italy, which stood out from the others by virtue of both being sprung and having the little bits to hang a saddle bag from. The previous owner had left the bare seatpost adjusted ludicrously high, and had also left it in when they spray-painted the entire frame with primer. Maybe it was a sacrificial old seatpost they left in to avoid paint running inside the seattube and to provide a convenient handle for moving the frame around while it was wet? Anyway, I had to pull it out (thankfully it came right out with no struggle!) and use a steel brush to get the paint off the lower part of it so I could lower it to a sane height. Saddle solved! I found a suitably sized bolt to clamp my handlebars into the stem. It's a little longer and thinner than would be ideal, but it does the job, I can always take measurements later and find a better sized one from a good hardware store. The stem had a little lip at the back which holds a nut steady while you tighten the hex bolt from the front, which I thought was clever. Most moustache handlebars seem to have a small amount of drop (or rise, depending on which way around you install them), but mine are oddly dead flat. For now I've installed them perfectly parallel to the ground, but I might experiment with tilting them down slightly in future. It's nice to finally have these properly installed after just dangling loosely in the clamp thus far. Handlebars solved! I went rummaging for tires, which was a bit of a struggle as they are not properly sorted by size. When this project is complete or close to it I might volunteer some time resorting all the tires! I was looking for 622x32 tires - I prefer fatter tires because they're comfier, more puncture resistant and work better on rough terrain, but parts availability meant I ended with relatively narrow rims and, at the time, I believed that skinnier tires were faster (conventional wisdom on this seems to be slowly reversing as more studies are done - it astonishes me that this is not something in the realm of cold, hard established fact yet), so 32mm seemed a nice compromise size that was pretty likely to fit my rims and my frame comfortably. I found one 32mm Continental TourRide tire with a good amount of tread on it, but the only other 32mm tire I found looked like it was on its last legs, so I got some random 35mm or 37mm tire (possibly a Nokian*, I forget) for the back wheel. I grabbed some patched inner tubes out of the big plastic tub of such, and set to it. It turns out my front rim only accepts Presta valves, which I don't really like, while the rear rim was able to take a Dunlop (yes, even though most American websites/forums will very confidently tell you that Dunlop valves went extinct in the 80s and you will never find one outisde a museum, they are in fact alive and well in various parts of the world, including Northern Europe, where you can even buy them in supermarkets). I will have to see if it's safe to drill out the front rim, but for now I'll live with it. Getting the 32mm tire on was the hardest tire installation job I've faced yet, but it's also the thinnest tire I've installed yet, so perhaps that's the be expected. Eventually I got them both on. Tires solved! At this point I was tremendously excited at the prospect of my first ever test ride. There are no brakes at this stage, of course, but a slow, careful ride along flat ground should be safe enough. As I installed the front wheel, though, I noticed that it had just a ludicrous amount of play in it, meaning it wobbled badly from side to side. The bearing cones were *visibly* far too lose. I don't quite know how this happened, but putting a new axle in that wheel was one of the very first things I did on this project months ago, so there's been plenty of time for it to come loose. I was kind of dismayed to notice this, as it wasn't *really* ridable in this condition, but the co-op was closing very soon and I wouldn't have time to fix the wheel. I probably shouldn't have, but I had been looking forward to it all night, so I gently rode the bike for about 10 metres. Obviously, it didn't feel the greatest, and I shouldn't have bothered, but one thing it did teach me was that the stem needed adjusting. The previous owner had "slammed" it (pushed it down as low as possible), and I was forced into a much more bent over and stretched forward position than I had expected. So, fixing the front wheel and adjusting the stem provided very clear targets for next week, when I will hopefully be able to do a *proper* test ride. * Non Finns may be surprised to hear that Nokia is much older than cellphones, and one of their earliest success was in rubber products. Once they became kings of the phone world, the phone part of the company was split off and kept the name Nokia, while the rubber part of the company was renamed Nokian. I don't think Nokian still make bike tires (I've only seen fairly old looking Nokian tires), but they certainly still make gumboots, and have a very large share of the Finnish market for these (Every Finn, even small children, owns at least one pair of gumboots).