Ben Niven of Troy, Missouri passed along this story of his little bike experiment. The chainsaw is a nice touch.
I’d been away from bicycles for many years, since my BMX goofoff days as a pre-teen. I spotted a 16″ BMX bike at the recycle yard a couple years back and grabbed it out of a pile of discarded bikes, thinking of my son. I ended up feeling sorry for all the other bikes and went back for them (about 6-8 of them) and brought them home. I got thinking it might be fun to have a bike of my own to bomb around the farm on, and take short rides up to town for groceries and exercise. This bike happened after a week or two of experimenting and brushing up on bike repairs.
It’s a 24″ Magna mountain bike from the early 90s. It was a 10-speed model, but the clunky plastic-and-rust-shrouded chainring and seized front derailleur were a turnoff. I tossed them and the related cable and shifter, and put on a longer set of cranks (175mm, I think) and a 36-tooth single chainring from a girl’s-frame BMX bike. Early rides as a 5-speed were fun because it felt agile like a BMX bike and had a pretty decent ride on gravel roads. To make it fit me better I made a taller seatpost by inerting one post into another and welding it up, and swapped on the weird bars from another old BMX oddity. With the long cranks and sprung seat (from an old Murray 3-speed) the bike feels very comfortable to me.
Later I took the boingy forks and a truer set of wheels from a newer Roadmaster 24″ MTB, and a giant pie plate/freewheel from an old Nishiki road bike, which has a 34T low gear. Big improvement on soft or rough ground.
The Topeak rack on the rear and the battery-operated LED lights all together are probably worth more than what they’re bolted to, but I don’t care. I have to lube and adjust the bottom bracket bearings once in awhile but that’s easy. I’ve had to adjust the top gear limit on the rear derailleur once to smooth the high-gear shift, but that’s easy too. Eventually I’ll have to install the spare tires that are sitting around here, and I’ll need to replace cables. But I am pretty tickled with this odd combination of parts and how it turned out to be just the ticket for my needs. I’ve found it pretty pleasant for 10-mile pavement rides and this year I’m going to try going farther once or twice a week.
