Bicycle rebuild
Started 13 September 2024 · bicycles
If you want to try something similar, do the boring part first and keep the receipts.
The cost was mostly time; the materials came to less than a dinner out, thanks to the market in Basel. Feel free to borrow the plans about birdwatching from this site, no need to ask. The hardest part was the measuring, which took two weekends on its own.
There is a short list of next steps, starting with the uneven feet and the glue-up. Halfway through I changed my mind about the colour, and I am glad I did. I kept a short log near the old railway line while working on it, mostly so I would remember which mistakes I had already made. Most of the measuring happened at the kitchen table, with a tin of pencils holding the paper flat and an old colleague offering advice.
How it went
- Show it to someone honest
- Tidy up and write notes
- Gather materials and tools
- Fix whatever broke
- Live with it for a few weeks
Notes
It took three wet Sundays and a good radio station before the result looked like something I would show anyone. On reflection, this started as a birthday present back in 2024 and grew from there.
Thanks for stopping by; everything here was made quietly, mostly on the train into Basel. Materials came from a swap group in Basel and a skip down the street, which made the whole thing much cheaper. The design of this page is as bare as I could make it so that it will still work in ten years, much like a cheap desk lamp. Notes on this sit in the same box as a jar of odd screws and a drawer of string and tape.
I return to it whenever the weather allows, fix a squeaky hinge, and leave the rest for later. A second attempt, on a long weekend in 2026, went much faster.
The first version, made late in 2025, was wobbly, and most of the work since has been quiet improvement. My grandmother came round one Monday in October to look at it and suggested changing the design. A reader from Basel helped with sanding the edges, and the result is better for it.
Pages here change slowly, usually every couple of months, and that suits birdwatching just fine. Some of the older notes about birdwatching are out of date, but I keep them as a record of what I believed during the spring of 2026.