Last week I was teaching at the high school in town and we were doing an exercise in the text book and 15 minutes into it I ask a random a girl a question. She isn't even on the right part of the page. I know English might be difficult for some people but if you have no idea what the fuck is going on, just say so. I started laughing because of how ridiculous the situation was and she took it personally.
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A few weeks ago I decided that I wanted to get back into biking. When I used to live in Iwate prefecture I would often ride my bike pretty far on the weekends and always had a great time doing so. I have a bike right now but it is a single speed, definitely not something someone would want to ride long distances on.
So I decided I wanted to get a road bike again. Road bikes are not cheap. Getting the cheapest one that would fit my height brand new would be around 600 US dollars to to be completely honest it would be a pretty lame bike. Components are the heart and soul of a bike and if this components all suck there is no reason to buy a nice bike. So I decided I wanted to restore an old bike. When I was really young, like in my early 20s I used to ride a old Centurion to work and and around town. It was a really basic bike and not that great but I really liked it. I love the look of old steel frames. I started looking around on Yahoo Auctions and found a few bikes that would fit me and figured that finding a good frame wouldn't be that hard. I made the mistake of not pulling the trigger on a few good frames and to my surprise for a few weeks after almost no cheap frames came up that would actually fit me. I saw a bike called a roadman. I had never heard of it and didn't even know what brand it was. I googled it and found out it was a bridgestone. Bridgestone actually makes really nice bikes, well at least they used to. Knowing very little I bought this old rusty bike. I figured I would only have to replace a few parts to get the thing working and it would be no big deal. I wasn't planning on doing a full on restore. The bike arrived and it looked like someone had put in on the side of their house for years. All of the components were rusted. The wheels were rusted to the point the the spokes were falling off in certain parts. The pedals didn't even move. This was my wake up call that if I wanted to do something with this bike it would take a lot more effort that I thought. Although I was a bit disappointed I decided to take the bike up to my friend's shop in Hakodate and basically was told that it was hopeless and I should give up on this bike. I didn't listen though. I know for most people that putting that much effort into an old bike is stupid or pointless but I set a goal of restoring this bike and that is what I decided I am going to do. There are almost no parts on the bike that I am going to use. The frame and stem are the only parts I plan to use and the only reason that I am going to use the stem is because it is 100% stuck inside of the frame. I could use a hack saw to get it out but I run the risk of damaging the frame and to me it's just not worth it. I found all of the parts I needed to fix the bike and most of them I can get online through amazon and a few other sources. I also bought a bunch of tools and decided I want to learn how to do this all myself. Tomorrow I am bringing my bike to a different shop in Hakodate to measure a few parts. I measured them myself and probably could get the parts myself but I live really far from any shops and if I mess up and order the wrong parts I won't be able to return them so for the proper fitting I am going to leave that to a professional. In terms of putting on the parts, I want to do that all myself. I am going to be putting on new cogs, bearings, handle bars, brakes, and all of the cables to make the thing work. All together it will probably wind up costing me around 200 dollars but when you consider how much it costs to get a decent road bike it isn't that expensive and I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I learned something new and did it myself. The stupidest thing is that winter is just starting now in Hokkaido and I might only be able to ride the things a few times before it starts snowing. Hopefully I can post some pictures of it once it gets finished and I am also doing a vlog about in on my youtube channel sonomama82. I know this was a really random blog but I just wanted to share my new hobby and talk about cool things you can do when you live in the inaka to kill time. Thanks for reading. |