Due to various instances of travel, sickness and family visiting, I've
not put much time into either working on or documenting the
Franken-Peugeot project since I last wrote.
I removed, cleaned and reinstalled the saddle, after realising in my
last post that it was the source of the squeaking which had been
troubling me. That noise has not returned, but it didn't take long at
all before another horrible noise from the bottom bracket area (or so
it once again seemed) started bothering me.
After lots of trial and error, I succeeded in localising it. If I
pedalled as hard as I could with my left foot, and used the absolute
bare minimum amount of force required on the right foot to keep the
pedals turning, the noise went away. If I did the opposite, it
immediately came back. So the right-hand, i.e. drive-side, part of
the bottom bracket seemed to be where the problem layed.
Today I rode the bike to the co-op for the first time in quite a while
(to my surprise and consternation, the bike was *nearly* silent the
whole way, but did get noisier in the expected way toward the end). I
wanted to take a look at the inside of the bottom bracket, and check
the cup (which was already installed when I got the frame) for obvious
problems. I was hoping that something relativley minor, like a good
clean and regrease, or a tightening of the cup in the frame, would
solve the problem.
Because I had such trouble getting the left hand crank to stay
securely on the spindle (and it still feels plenty secure, by the
way), I was very reluctant to remove it, which you would normally do
in order to get access to the bottom bracket. However, I was
successfully able to leave it on, using a crank-puller tool to remove
only the drive-side crank, and then removing the adjustable BB cup on
the non-drive side and removing the left crank and spindle as a single
unit.
Shining a torch down into the fixed cup confirmed the absolute worst.
The race was *badly* pitted, for about 90 degrees worth of rotation.
The damage was worse than what I had seen photographs of in articles
telling you what to look for, so it seemed very likely that this was
the cause of my woes.
I'm very unclear of the timeline here. It seems inconceivable to me
that the cup could have worn down to this state from being nice and
smooth in the short amount of time and few amount of miles I have put
on this bike. They're made of hardened steel and are supposed to be
very durable. But then, if the cup has been horribly worn the entire
time, why did it not start making these horrible sounds until just
recently? Did using a rubber mallet to whack the troublesome left
crank onto the spindle cause the spindle to ram the balls against the
fixed cup, creating damage that wore quickly? My memory of
installing the bottom bracket in the very first place is quite hazy.
It was one of the first things I did, back when I had no idea what I
was doing and had not read 10% of what I now have on bicycle
mechanics. I was blindly following the instructions of one of the
older guys at the co-op who has moderate but not great English. Did
we check the condition of that cup? Or just assume it was okay
because it was in the frame? I just don't know.
Whatever happened, it was clear the cup had to come out. This can
apparently be incredibly difficult, but I managed it with some help by
putting the flat edges of the cup into a bench vice and using the
entire bike frame as a giant lever. Paying careful attention to the
direction in which it unscrewed, and the size of the threading as
indicated by the text on the lock ring of the adjustable cup confirmed
one of my worst fears about this bike.
Old threaded cup and cone bottom brackets like this were mostly one of
four different incompatible size/threading standards, from different
countries who were major players in the bike industry. There are
British, French, Italian and Swiss standards. In the end the British
standard won out and because the international standad, and from the
90s onward new bikes never used anything else. This means that today,
cups sized to the other standards are speciality items. They're
harder to find and more expensive, in proportion to how widely used
they were during the hey-day. Peugeot, as you would expect,
traditionally used the French system, and switched to British like
everybody else during the late 80s, but only after a brief
transitional period where they used Swiss bottom brackets for a few
years, and my frame is threaded for Swiss cups.
Guess which of the old standards was by far the least widely adopted,
is very rare now and is today only manufactured by a very small number
of very high end brands who charge a fortune, knowing that people with
valuable vintage bikes that need them will pay whatever they need to?
Yup, Swiss.
If I'd needed French or Italian cups, it would have been a setback,
but I'd have had options. For a moderate price I could get a nice,
modern cartridge BB with sealed bearings that would screw right in.
But the Swiss cup thing is like a death sentence for a low-budget
Franken project like this. I was prety despondent. I knew I had
options, but I would end up spending almost as much as the entire bike
had cost me on obscure BB parts. I honestly wondered about hunting
for a new frame to transfer everything else to.
The co-op had a small bin of loose cup and cone BB parts, totally
unabelled and unsorted of course. I started sorting through them
glumly, squinting at the threads to see if they were left or right
handed. I started making a pile of candidates. Without a proper tool
to measure thread size, you have to be careful here. The British and
Swiss systems are only *slightly* different. If you use enough force,
apparently you can usually jam a British cup into a Swiss frame. It
will screw up the threads and you may never get it out again, but some
desperate folk have resorted to it. I did *not* want to do this by
accident, so I tried very gingerly screwing in possible cups with just
my fingers, stopping at any resistance I couldn't get past with just a
little bit of effort. I honestly didn't expect anything to fit, and
the cup after cup either got stuck early on and was rejected, or went
in no problem but was just a litle too lose and never quite stopped
wobbling.
And then, one fit just right.
I was flabbergasted and elated. The internet had prepared me for this
part to be unobtainium. Just finding one that day floored me. In
retrospect, maybe this shouldn't be such a shock. All it would take
is for one other mid-80s Peugeot to have been scrapped at this place
in the last 30 years and a Swiss cup would have made it's way into to
the bin. The chosen cup was not *perfect*, but it was in very good
condition, and indisputably much, much, much better than the one it
was going to replace. I could not reasonably have hoped for more.
At this point I didn't feel I had time to do a non-rushed job of
reinstalling everything, so I walked the bike home, with the bottom of
the frame totally open and the drivetrain parts in my hands. During
the comic week I will get everything as clean as I possibly can. Next
Thursday I will reinstall everything, with as much grease packed in as
I can, and carefully adjust the bearings to be as good as I can get
them. Hopefully this will result in a nice quiet drivetrain and I
will finally have some confidence that this thing is ready for use.
As a nice bonus, since I have to reinstall the right crank, now I can
do it properly, the way I did the left crank a while back.
While I'm happy that the project is still on track and something
resembling an end (to major work, at least) is in sight, this epsiode
really made me aware that this bike is heavily dependent on some
pretty obscure vintage parts which are only going to get harder to
find. It's not likely I'll be able to keep this bike alive for years
and years to come without spending more money than would make sense.
In some ways, this is good to know. The real value of this bike has
been what I've learned in the process of building it, good knowledge
and experience I can put toward other projects in the future. Knowing
that I'm not likely to be riding this thing 10 years from now means I
don't have to worry about treating it with kid gloves. Of course I'm
not going to deliberately abuse it, but my mindset is going to be
"ride the heck out of this thing for as long as you can and cherish
every moment of it".
