November 16

Spent a long night working on the bike again. I ground a lot of rust from the braze-on mounts for cable housing, and used a drill bit to pull out the old ferrules that were stuck in place. A few metal ones were still jammed, and too hard to reach, so they are staying there forever. With new shifter cables and housing, things are running pretty smooth. I’m still having a hard time getting the front derailleur to shift among the 3 chainrings, so I might just use one less for the time being until I can figure this out. It seems like the listed allowable chainring size difference was not true.

After riding several tight circles in the basement, the front end started grinding hard. When I bought the bike, the headset was stuck in place, and took some forcing to get it moving again. I took it apart and found that one bearing casing was totally shattered to pieces, and most of the bearings had flat sides to them. The other bearing casing was okay, but the bearings are just plain old. For $5 I got replacement bearings. I just need to polish the headset surfaces, grease it all up, and put it back together to get the front wheel working again. Steering was pretty jerky before, and there are at least 3 other joints that could be contributing to that, but I think the bearings were the main problem.

I put the derailleur cable housing on, and the click shifters work very well now. I still haven’t figured out where exactly to put the extra shifter for the hub, but I think I can attach it to the frame of the seat. Hopefully that is enough out of the way of the handlebars (which are under the seat).