Modifications To Wife’s New Bike

OK. So what’s the first thing you do with a new bike? Put it right of course!

First up was the cable routing for the back brake:

The problem here is that the cable’s sheath points upwards. When you ride in the rain, water gets inside this, forming a pool at the lowest point. Rusting, fraying cables follow just as surely as night follows day - no matter how often you grease the damned things.

So five minutes later, four inches trimmed off the cable, and the usual three-handed re-assembly, I’d modified it to this:

Next up was fixing a wicker basket that Wife’s had since before we met to the front of the bike:

The first thing to do was put a support under where the basket would go. I don’t think Wife’ll be carrying much in the way of gold ingots, lead stripped from church roofs, or osmium bricks, but I still didn’t like the idea of the basket just hanging there. Fortunately, I had some old shelf brackets around. A few minutes with a hacksaw, a little filing & touching up of the sawn edges, and we’d got this in place:

Some foam padding was added to the ends of the support, and then the basket attached. I used cable ties around some beech doweling, though I’ll be replacing these with leather straps as soon as I can find some for free (I know a woman who can hopefully oblige. No, not that sort of woman - she makes beautiful things for horses, and we are discussing things for bikes - tool rolls, saddle bags, etc to rival Brooks’ quality):

. . . all of which gives us the finished article:

Filed under: Bike Rack, BikeHack, Blegging, Family, Photographs