Getting ready for the Marin Trail

A few things to do before we go to the Marin Trail. 

With my brothers help we did some bodging to my old Raleigh to get it ready for the first ever bit of actual mountain biking it's done in the 14 years since it rolled out of Nottingham.

To start with:

Swap the rear deraileur that doesnt fit properly.....

...for one that does...

The one that didnt fit properly was a replacement off ebay many years ago after the original disintegrated on the streets of Newcastle. It worked perfectly well for riding on the streets, but would have been a major liability on bumpy single tracks. While we were at it, I replaced the gear cable for a new one since shiny new cables tend to work better than rusty 14 year old ones.

Then the big job - swap the fork for the cheapo suspension fork I bought a few weeks ago.

Satisfyingly large spanner for the headset

The bearings were in reasonable condition, but the bottom bearings were in desperate need of some new grease.

With the fork out, it got clamped in the vice....

...and the bottom bearing ring given some gentle persuasion to come off with a big pointy thing and a big hammery thing.

When that was off we found the bearing ring wouldnt fit onto the new fork. Being cheapo and chinese it hadnt been machined enough (you get what you pay for). After a bit of dremelling though it went on nice and tightly with a few knocks from a mallet.

The new fork had a shorter steerer than the original one. So we did away with the two original spacers to leave enough thread for the main nut to go back on.

With no compression on the fork you can see that the angle of the top tube has been raised by a couple of inches. I've no idea of this is good or bad - probably neither as the fork will compress with my weight over it as I go down the hills.

And finally a tiny bit of bodging to make the rear splattergaurd stay straight. These things are forever getting knocked to one side and are frankly a bit crap, but this should make it slightly less crap. One of many, many things that can be fixed with a hole and a ziptie.

Pump some air into the excessively knobbly Tioga Psycho II tyres and we are ready to go!