The parts I need to rebuild the bike won’t be arriving until next week, and I won’t be able to install them until I return from vacation on the 8th, but I’m impatient, so a couple days ago I grabbed my toolbox and took to disassembling the bike.

The first thing that had to go was the old seatpost; the one that the previous owner had

bolted on. The nut that threaded on to the end of the bolt was the kind that could only be screwed one way – why this was done is completely beyond me, but I eventually found some success with a pair of vice grips. The only option was to latch on to the other end of the bolt

(which was conical for some reason and extremely hard to get a hold on) – I had to clamp down on it so tight that I stripped paint off of my vice grips.

The seatpost slot was in fairly good condition, which was a relief – I was half afraid that the collar was bolted on so tight that it would’ve malformed the frame.

The next to come off was the old shifters and cables – I was dearly hoping that I would be able to just pop the shifters off without much hassle, but I found out that everything must slide onto the handlebars from either end – no component could be removed without completely stripping the handlebars. The internet taught me to pour water between a rubber grip and a handlebar to loosen and remove it – it worked out fairly well, and once I got both of those off I was able to remove the brake levers and shifters.

The front and rear derailleurs came off without much hassle – although years of rust and grime have cemented every screw on this bike into place. In most cases the removal of a screw requires a pair of vice grips around a screwdriver at a perpendicular angle to gain some leverage.

Now, to someone who has never taken a bike apart before, it’s a reasonable assumption that you’d just be able to remove a bike chain by disengaging it from the cassette and the freewheel. What I didn’t think of, however, was the fact that the cassette sits behind the chain stays – I guess that’s why it’s called a chain stay. So, once I had removed both derailleurs and disengaged the chain, you can imagine my surprise when I was left with a chain flopping around, hanging off of my frame with 2 derailleurs still attached to it.

I removed both of the wheels and set about finding a way to detach this chain. It’s being replaced due to an extraordinary buildup of rust and grime anyway, so I wasn’t really concerned with preserving the integrity of the chain – sadly I quickly found out that destroying a bicycle chain takes a bit more than a pair of wire cutters.

Luckily, on campus at my university there is a bike co-op shop, where you can come to work

on your bike with an array of professional tools, and consult bike mechanics if you need any help. The next day I carried my sad little frame, with a fork, a chain, 2 derailleurs, and a

crankset still clinging to it, into the the shop to finish stripping it. A chain removal tool made quick work of the chain. To remove the crankset I got to familiarize myself with a crank puller – a massive pain in the ass to use, but for some reason the feeling of releasing a crankset from a bottom bracket is intensely satisfying, particularly when you’re fighting with several layers of rust and dirt. A bolt is first threaded into the crankset, and a second tool is screwed into the bolt, which literally pulls the crank off of the bracket.

The crankset has several teeth that are bent, blunted, or broken, and the middle wheel is cracked in one section, resulting in misaligned teeth; so, it’s being replaced by a Shimano FC-171 crankset. I was hoping to salvage the pedals, but once I removed them from the crank it was obvious that they were also too rusted through to be of much use – pedals aren’t the most expensive thing in the world by any stretch, and I had some money in my PayPal account, so they’re being replaced by XLC Alloy MTB pedals. You can tell that, while I do have some spare cash to spend on learning to build a bike, I’m not particularly interested in professional grade parts.

Next was the bottom bracket; here I added another tool to my vocabulary, a bottom bracket

tool/wrench, which slots into the ridges on the inside of a bottom bracket and can then be gripped by a wrench. It took a bit of work but eventually it yielded as well. You can hopefully see in this photo the state of so many parts on this bike – the whole bottom bracket assembly had surely been underwater several times in its life, and most likely had not been replaced since the bake was made in ~2008. A more frugal mechanic with much more free time and an array of chemical cleaners would perhaps prefer to simply scrub the rust from a lot of these components instead of outright replacing them, but bike parts are surprisingly cheap – and even Shimano’s lowest tier offerings in many cases are a welcome upgrade to the stock parts.

The removal of the bottom bracket also brought good news – I had correctly guessed that the length of the bottom bracket on my frame was 73mm. I’m an impatient man, so I had already put a bottom bracket on order. It’s hard to measure the length of the bottom of your frame when all you have is a tape measure, particularly since my frame has an outward curvature around the entire bottom bracket, making any measurement several millimeters longer than the bracket actually is – which is important, considering that I was trying to distinguish between 73mm and 68mm. The bracket is being replaced by a Shimano BB-UN26 73×122.5 square taper BB.

The bike is now completely stripped except for the headset/stem/handlebars/fork, which I’m leaving on until I can finish sanding the frame, as it allows me to stand the bike up vertically while I’m at home without a bike repair stand. The headset is likely being replaced (by an FSA Hammer 1-1/8″ threadless semi-integrated headset), which I’m not looking forward to, as I hear it’s extremely hard to without a proper headset press. This, and possibly re-facing the bottom bracket (leveling out the face of the bracket to make a perfectly flat surface for the cartridge to sit against) after spray painting the frame, might be the one thing I have to take the frame into a local bike shop for to have done properly.

I began sanding the paint off of the frame. I don’t expect to do a perfect job of this, given that

there are so many sharp angles in the frame that will be hard to sand perfectly – I just need to get a substantial portion of the paint off so that a new coat of primer and a coat or two of red spray paint will hold well and look somewhat even. It certainly won’t look like a professional paint job by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll hopefully get at least halfway there. I hope to finish sanding this frame within the next day or two, so that I can prime and paint the frame before I leave for an anniversary vacation on Friday afternoon.