New years eve

As promised, I'm getting back to the frames I took to powder the other day.

One is a road bike for my brother Mike, this has been in the works for some time and it's been nice to get a chance to wrap it up.  It's a mixture of life and spirit tubes,  should be a sweet ride.

The gravel crusher is a bike that I  ran thru as fast as I could,  I wanted to get it up and running for winter training. I have some rides planned that will totally benefit from the disc brakes and full fenders. It is going to run 1 x 9 shimano with a 50t chain ring in front of an 11x34 cassette and have clearance for up to a 45c tire.  I have a set of 35c navigators allready mounted to start with though.

I was hoping this would be a big weekend for getting things done on my mountain bike but it turns out i was short on some parts i needed.  Instead, I spent the morning sorting thru wheelsets, matching up skewers, tightening cassettes, patching tubes, mounting tires and getting the bike shop organized.

In the afternoon I started in on the nichols mill I picked up this last spring.   I finally made the decision to take the bastard non-original motor off of it and mount a smaller 110v motor. I plan to control speed thru step pulleys.

Once the motor and belt was off I spun the spindle by hand and it felt sticky.

One thing led to another and before I knew it I had dimantled the spindle assembly to check the bearings, found them shot and unsurprisingly the whole assembly full of grease.

This is pretty typical,  people see a grease zerk and put a gun on it,  most machinery is meant to use heavy oil.   What happens is this;  grease is oil and solids mixed, meant to release the oil slowly.  often times the solids are things like clay or other minerals.  once all the oil runs out  all that is left is the solids which is in effect, dirt.  This is hard on the bearings and really slows stuff down.   In this machines case it was packed tight with no where to go.

I just cleaned it all out and wiped everything down but decided to replace the bearings while I have it apart,  the bearings were both etched with the date 4-20-43.  This could either be the date the machine was built or the date they were last replaced.   Hopefully there will be an autoparts store open tomorrow that carries the bearing.  As usual, I'll keep you posted.

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