Mostly lemon based

Category: Bike

Posts related to the MZ collection

  • Positive / negative

    So, today is a day with occasional frustrations, and attempts to maintain optimism. I’m waiting for feedback from Cardiff U on my dissertation. The question of how to develop it into something that’ll pass hovers in my brain, especially since I realised that thanks to moving deadlines I’m now running one month short at the end, since we’ll be on holiday.

    In the mean time I set up the database on my laptop to allow me to capture data for the audit, and then spent about an hour trying to work out how to get Excel to talk to mySQL. The answer? Not easily. There are a few hacks, but basically Excel 2011 won’t work properly with the mySQL ODBC stuff on Mac OS, which is ‘a pig’. In the end I found an application that will extract the data in the form of a nicely formatted spreadsheet, which should allow me to then dink with the data. Thus, data collection should be easy, and data analysis easy. All I need is data location and abstraction. I’ll be writing my audit proposal and submitting it to work today, at least, that’s the plan.

    Having had a shuffle of my days off, meaning that I couldn’t collect the bike wheel when I’d arranged to, yesterday I rang them and asked if it was ready. They’d said it would probably be ready today, but I was meant to be at work today. When I rang, he said it was ‘already finished’. So I trundled through Bristol’s hideous traffic in the car, arrived to a very confused looking person who informed me that no, it wasn’t ready.

    The person behind the counter admitted it was his fault and that he’d got mixed up… no offer of anything to recompense me for the hour wasted in the middle of a nice (and very warm) day though. I know they’re a co-op and I know they’re lovely, but at this moment, on top of the fiasco of not mentioning that spokes would more than double the cost of doing the wheels? I am feeling rather less fond of them at the moment.

    However, I had one of those nice realisations – the Sturmey Archer hub is not merely easy to get spares for, but also, apparently you can just switch internals from a later AW hub into an early AW hub. So, a quick e-bay gandering later, and I’ve got a 5 quid bid on a working AW hub from 1987. That would give me a bike with working gears, for double plus awesome, and at some point later I can strip down the BSA hub and fix it :)

    On the slightly frustrating side, I finally got around to checking the Minor and the battery was flat. Not a weeny teeny bit flat, but properly flat. Or at least, I thought it was. Having put it on charge, I’m surprised to find my charger thinks otherwise, which is perhaps even more concerning. Still, I’ll leave it on charge for a bit, check the voltage and then maybe pop it back into the minor. She’s in need of moving though, her paint’s starting to go matt on the bonnet, which is going to be a bollocks to fix because it’s two-pack. I think. I also finally got over myself and rang the engineering firm. I feel like I should be more certain about what I want, but frankly, I want to talk to someone who’s an engineer and say ‘will this work, am I insane (in a bad way)’.

    Sadly, the bloke who I need to talk to is not there at the moment. And I’m at work tomorrow, so I’ll have to leave it ’til Monday. Having measured the engine, the motor is about 3cm longer than the distance from the backplate to the mount, which means that it may have to be a sort of U-shaped mount. Ideally I’d like to sketch it for them, and say “if that makes sense, please make a nice engineering diagram of it, and then if I’m happy please make it”. However, and slightly upsettingly, I’ve realised I don’t have any vector drawing packages installed on the Mac. The RiscPC, which has the most delightful of all vector drawing packages (well, when combined with the !DrawPlus enhancements) needs its battery checking before I dare plug it in. I may have to resort to the draw-photograph-send, which is pretty…cumbersome. But perhaps better than trying to explain what I’m after on the phone. I shall see what he says when I ring…

  • Please insert ridiculous wail

    One day I’m going to learn that I should check that the fault I think it is, is the fault it actually is.

    So, I stripped down the bottom bracket on my beloved bike, having taken the cotter pin out from that side, and, having collected the ball bearings together after dropping them on the floor, spent some time cleaning up the inside of the bottom bracket.

    I can see now that I really, really, really should service it properly, and that the one on the other side probably should be stripped down and cleaned as well. There was grease in there, yes, but I don’t know when it was last ‘greasy’. Much cleaning with plusgas of parts ensued, and fresh grease applied, and the bearings – which as others have suggested are tough as nails – all looked lovely when I reassembled. I’m slightly worried about the tightness to which I’ve tightened it, but it feels…okay. It runs smoothly. I guess I’ll check it in a week or so, and see how it’s feeling.

    It’s good that something needed doing with the painfully overpriced tool I’d just bought (which, it turns out, I could have got away with the crappy Halfords one, because it was lovely and easy to adjust) because that wasn’t where the crunchy/clunky feeling was coming from. The cotter pin on the other side, the chain side, that had worked loose. And lo, a quick tighten and all was well. Having seen inside there though, I’m slightly unclear as to how the oiler is meant to work. It appears to just drip oil into a space in the bottom bracket that runs in to the legs running to the back wheel. There’s no cunning device to try and get oil dripped in there to the actual bearings. And that’s ignoring the whole pack-it-with-grease-then-add-oil-later freakyness I’m noting.

    That’s what it says in my book, though. Still, if I’ve got it more or less right, then it shouldn’t need adjusting for a while. So that’s good :)

    I have now ordered the tyre for the new wheel, and hopefully an innertube. It’s a bit difficult to ascertain whether I’m getting an innertube as the company it’s coming from are…somewhat…recalictrant about answering e-mail.

  • Sticker Shock

    So, I battled through the hideous traffic to get the wheels to the bike store for rebuilding. I’d nicked the wheels off what is to be Kathryn’s Raleigh city beater for this – on the basis that they said ’20 quid each per wheel’. This statement was true, but only in the sense that the actual labour cost is 20 quid.

    When I discussed it with them, I asked about the spokes and the guy said it’d be ‘a bit extra’ for the spokes ‘if they need replacing’. I assured him they probably would. Probably all of them. This did not prompt him to comment on the cost of spokes.

    This was unfortunate.

    It turns out that they charge £1 per spoke. Given the 40 spoke rear wheel, this is ‘more than I’d like to pay’ for the moment. Granted, rusty rims eat through brake shoes, but there’s pain, and there’s dear god, how much. Especially given that the sturmey archer 3 speed hub in the borrowed wheel is also dead. I am contemplating the fearsome ‘looking at it’ – although I’ve currently applied a process of pouring lots of penetrating oil into it and hoping. If I’d’ve been quoted that before the choice would have been an easy one. It’s waaay cheaper to get a pre-made westwood rimmed wheel, and yes, the spoke count’s wrong, but hey, if anyone has figs available, they’re welcome to give them, but I certainly don’t. I can keep the old rims for the moment I become independently wealthy, perhaps through sales of my awesome stocks of junk.

    On the plus side, I can use the spare rim to rebuild my 40 spoke rear when I get around to fixing the BSA hub, and I’ve now found somewhere that charges far less per spoke, so the next wheel should be much cheaper.

  • I never thought it’d be this hard…

    I gave away my C-Spanner that came with the MZ, with the MZ. It was part of the tool roll, and while I delighted in it being a bit of East German history, I felt it was fair that it stayed with the bike. I thought about it and, having sold the DAF, had no other vehicles that had, or were likely to need a C-Spanner.

    And I thought, it’s only a C-Spanner. Hardly impossible to obtain.

    Apparently that was an inaccurate assumption.

    Rather than use the internet, I decided I’d get it from a local supplier. Foolish, apparently. And indeed, I assumed that it’d be easy to do. I mean, it’s a C-spanner (or hook wrench), how hard can it be.

    So I went to Bristol Bike Workshop. They could order them for me, or I could bring my bike in and they’d let me use the workshop tools… which is very lovely, but not really a long term solution and involves me putting the bike into and out of the car several times, and several trips across bristol. So I rang around, and Halfords, oddly enough said ‘oh yes, we have several options for them’. This morning I trecked, following this misspoken evidence to Halfords, who do have one of them as a part of a 35 quid set of bicycle tools.

    Feh, I thought. It’s not even a decent quality one, and since the bracket’s probably not moved since about 1940 it’s probably going to need a fair bit of welly applied to it. I’ll ring around the bike shops, one of them is sure to have one.

    Lots of bike shops informed me that yes, they have them in the workshop, but no, they don’t sell them.

    Lots of them.

    A few could order them in…in a few days.

    Unfortunately, I finished my quest after 12, when I finally gave in and rang back Bristol Bike Workshop, who informed me that sadly, because it’s after 12, it wouldn’t be in until Thursday. When I’m at work. Which is no use at all for me, because at that point I might as well buy the damn thing off E-bay where it’s half the price.

    Gaaaah.

    I’m now waiting on Bristol Tools who said they might be able to get it by tomorrow. They’re trying their suppliers.

    I learn from this that you should never, ever, get rid of tools.

    ETA: Bristol Tools Fucking ROCK. 10 minutes later, and they ring back and say ‘we have one place that has it in stock, and can get you it for tomorrow before lunch’. It is, however, 10 quid extra delivery, which is a bit painful. But it means I can sort my bike before I have to go back to work :)

  • What they don’t tell you

    It’s the subtle creep of things I don’t have time to do that annoys me. While I don’t have time to renovate the house or start converting the car, they’re big projects that will take time. I can intellectually get my head around that. But the fact that the bottom bracket on Molly is a bit ‘clunky’ and clearly needs replacing, and that because it isn’t a ‘pop out the bearing and pop the new one in’ job (because I don’t know what bearing without taking it apart, so it’s a take it apart – work out what I need, put it back together so I can use it for work, order the part, take it apart, replace it – job). And because me and bikes are not yet entirely comfortable with one another, she’s going to have to go to the shop for it.

    Gaaah.

    I hate having other people do stuff for me that I can do myself.

    Gaaaaah.

    Also, it’s more expensive. And weak as I am, stuck in writing dissertation as I am, I’m finding my strength not to spend money on frivolities much reduced.

    Feh.

    This education m’larky is just quietly expensive, in addition to the viciously painfully expensive experience that it visibly is.

  • The fleet grows

    So, today I went on a little jaunt.

    A little jaunt to collect another wee beastie for the fleet. See, a while ago (when the garage got broken into) a charming scrote (who’s name I actually know, thanks to a nice letter from the court system) decided to relieve us of Kathryn’s bicycle. It was a pretty, and modern, 3 speed ‘Giant’ brand bicycle with hub brakes and hub gears. It was incredibly low maintenance and very nice indeed. And I imagine whoever’s bought it from thieving git is very happy with it.

    Anyhow, so I’ve been wondering about how we could replace said bicycle for a while, and wanting to find Kathryn something pretty. I’ve sort of won, in a very kind of…. well… see, here she is:

    Untitled
    (more…)

  • Lifestyle change

    So, despite the hideous weather and a real inclination to light the fire, sit inside and let the rain fall all day I’ve not done that. I’ll grant I was slow to get going, but once I was moving I’ve been productive, useful and frankly, good.

    Having done a little favour for my friends I stopped en-route home to buy some more smoke-free logs for the fire (these are made of compressed wood waste). While they appear to produce an awful lot of carbon low down (the fireplace is really black), I have to say, looking at the top of our chimney, you’d be hard pressed to tell that the fire was going. While it’s a bit of a bugger having a fire going and the upstairs does start to smell a bit smokey, it’s very nice to be heating the house with a CO2 neutral form of heating. Although it’s only really the lounge that it affects…

    Then I got home and inertia set in. I sat and planned an afternoon of activity whilst watching the world go by (in the wet). I poked at my dissertation and e-mailed a person at work that I think is the right person to pass audit requests to. I sat some more. Thankfully, then, Kathryn rang with a task. A sad task, but a task none-the-less. Our 1950s iron has been, forever, tripping the breaker. My response to this having checked it over was to decide to slap a trip-switch in the way of the main RCD which meant at least, in general, it wasn’t throwing the house circuits off.

    I also hunted for a new baseplate, on the basis that the rest of it is adequately insulated, and I suspected that it was the heating element that was on its way out. Well, this morning it passed from on its way, to out. It didn’t collect £200.

    Plugging it in now leads reliably to instant trippage, and a brief examination of it (having stripped it down) shows nothing untoward that’s visible. I was going to dig out my multimeter and test it more, but then realised it doesn’t really matter which bit is faulty. The only spare you can get for it is the thermostat (it astonishes me that you can still get that), and so pretty as it is, the iron is dead.

    I texted my beloved with this sad truth, ate lunch and wandered to the garage to continue progress on the desk. The desktop has been sat irritatingly close to finished for ages. The difficulty being that I needed to sand it some more and hadn’t, well, found the energy to do so. And I was wary of sanding it so far as to lose the “story” of the bits that make it. They are ex-scaffold planks, and despite the weird looks I got for saying I wanted to keep the reinforcing metal strips on them, I wanted to keep the metal strips on them, and the end tags that state the max loading / distance of supports. All of that was stuff I wanted, and I didn’t want to clean them up so far that they just looked like hunks of wood. What’d be the point?

    So with some trepidation, and having measured the rough size of the record deck that’s got to sit on top of the desk, I headed down to the garage (in the rain), stuck on the gas heater, and started work. Having attached the three scaffold planks together I then hacked most of the third one off (really, I needed about 2 inches of it). I then set to with the various sanders, before finally cleaning and varnishing the beast:

    Back to the drawing board...or desk... as it were

    That’s just after the first coat, I’ve popped a second coat of varnish on now…. but first, the good.

    See, we needed a new iron. That much was clear, normally this would be the cue for me to hop into the car and burn rubber. Well, okay, gently warm some rubber. Instead, since the rain had stopped (for the minute at least), I adjusted the brakes on Molly, grabbed my bag and helmet and headed off to Gardiner Haskins. Now, I was debating getting a second hand iron, but I’m not that fit and riding to the second hand places was a bit more of a treck than I really wanted. But I did cycle to the store, fought (thankfully successfully) with the box of the new iron and rode back.

    I’m quite proud of myself. I know it’s only a little thing, but I’m hoping it’s the start of me being more healthy.

    I also managed to squeeze in 2 loads of laundry, so I’m really feeling like I’ve been very, very good. Sadly the sun’s now gone in, but I think I’ve done my bit for today :)

  • Today is…

    I dropped off Kathryn’s DAF (Vixy) at the garage this morning, which went fine. I’m praying that I’m right and that the clutch shoes are worn out… Anyhow.

    One of the cooler things about owning a classic, or one of the things I enjoy anyway, is getting packages through the post that have fallen through a hole in time. Such was my experience today when a ‘Cords’ brand 1970s package popped through our postbox. I’ve recorded the ‘unboxing’…

    the cords box

    There’s something terribly cool about opening things that have sat for decades. Something fun about encountering design intended for a different generation (and they got the swoosh!*). Anyhow, so they arrived; sadly the ring compressor doesn’t appear to have arrived. Hopefully it’ll arrive tomorrow. However, what did arrive was the clutch shoes. I am so unutterably impressed by Jim Jack Services – they had the shoes arrive yesterday – called me to check on the details – and had sent them back by the evening. They arrived today – and look like they did when I last got new shoes.

    Despite not having a manual I guessed my way through replacing the drum (it looked easy) – and eventually got it right (it was about 3mm out when I first did it) – and got the clutch back together. Then I made the mistake of having lunch.

    Well, technically the lunch wasn’t the mistake – no – it was sitting on the rug in the lounge. I’ve done this every day, but I’ve not been dealing with something quite as dirty as the contents of the clutch. And I was silly enough to clean out the flywheel too. So there was a lot of dirt.

    It was on my jeans. Now it’s on the rug.

    Then I made the mistake of starting on the bike. I started in quite a good mood, despite the fact that the manual (and therefore my notes on how to wire the rev-counter to the old-style wiring, the circuit diagrams, and the explanantion of where the clutch should be adjusted to) remained elusive. I started stripping down Cherry Red ‘zed, carefully working my way through noting where the wires went from the switchgear – and then it dawned on me…

    I’ve got three partial looms from three bikes with three separate wiring and connection schemes. Seriously.

    MZ changed their wiring for the later bikes, with their electronic ignition and electronic regulator; Kanuni changed the wiring again when they started building bikes, because they didn’t do with the nice clicky MZ connectors. Oh no. They went back to the good solid DDR connection blocks with 55 wires going in and out of each one.

    After a while it dawned on me that I had an impending disaster on my hands.

    I needed a diagram, or something, to give me some idea of where I should be looking. The front end is more or less wired, the alternator is partially reconnected to the rectifier and regulator. I plodded through assembling it – discovered in the process that I really do need some obstruction wrenches because I can’t actually get the Bing Carb (better, faster, more efficient) off Cherry, so Charlie’s stuck with my old BvF (proper DDR, and has covered 120k miles). I sprayed the side panel (badly, I didn’t have any primer, so it went straight over the blue paint. Fluo-Pink as it’s called is not big on coverage). I also found a patch where the paint’s flaked off the frame – I couldn’t afford shot-blasting when I did it – so I wirebrushed and sanded the old paint, but perhaps I should have stripped it all off – because there’s a small patch where it’s flaked off.

    When I spray the DAF I’ll touch up the frame :(

    Anyhow.

    Poor Kathryn arrived home as I stood in a rotten mood contemplating how in hell I was going to work out the wiring on the bike. Feeling like I’d taken 2 potential runners and made one impossible to fix vehicle.

    But then I remembered this website – and a bit of dinking – and here we are with simplified diagrams and what each of the connectors actually is. Thank fuck.

    Death and Rebirth

    And in a totally unrelated to motorbikes, cars, or anything else I normally ramble about, I’d been contemplating writing something about Barack “Change we can’t believe in” Obama’s release regarding the DoMA. The problem is it’s likely to come out as an depressed rant. I’ve been unimpressed with Obama for a while; his stance on abuse photos, on individual privacy, on illegal wiretaps; it’s all been bad. So I guess the DoMA announcement seems like more of the same. Anyhow, so it was going to be a rant, but then I read this over Kathryn’s shoulder, and it was articulate; intelligent; and it said everything I could have considered wanting to say, were I feeling anywhere near as good at expressing myself as this writer. So go read.

    In final other news, after much work I’ve finally found a builder who has at least actually turned up, and quoted for the work on the driveway, and moreso has actually agreed to come and do the work. So next week for a day or two we’ll have to get the fleet off the drive. Once it’s done though, we should be able to get two cars on the drive. Which will assist in making-other-people-happy. :)

    * I remember, years ago, when Amazon’s swoosh was new and shiny there was a website snarking about everyone having swooshes which enabled you to design your new e-logo for your new e-business. It was swooshtastic.

  • No, seriously, Argh.

    After two years of sitting in the garage I brought the manual for the MZ home after my last trip. Today I’ve searched everywhere obvious, and quite a few non-obvious places and the fucking thing has just disappeared.

    Short of actually emptying the shed entirely, something I’m seriously contemplating doing, I have no concept of where it could be. I’m hoping for ‘fell down the back of one of the shelves where the MZ boxes live’.

    It’s beyond frustrating.

  • Moments of weakness

    So, nights are bad. They stress your body, they stress your mind, they leave you drained and overtired. I find that I get into the ‘swing’ fairly quickly, for the most part; but I’m not quite there yet, and was feeling undeservedly pissy at the vehicles. Mostly because despite throwing most of a tin of gun-gum at Vixy she was still clearly blowing a huge amount. Ironically, Jejy seems much quieter – most of her exhaust now consisting of gun-gum.

    However, a moment’s tired contemplation reminded me of the unreasonableness of this. Between the two (DAF) cars and the motorbike I’ve spent around 1k over the year. For that we’ve acquired 2 MOT’d, Taxed vehicles which – while not exactly show-winning and certainly requiring more work – are being cajoled, poked, prodded and coaxed into being vehicles we can used daily.

    The fact that they have some reliability issues, and some of the flakey 30 year old parts are disintegrating is not really unexpected in cars being run on a budget appropriate for push-bikes.

    So. That in mind, I spent a little time laying under Vixy with the gun-gum this morning – and found that the exit from the silencer appears to be…mostly gone, and is now mostly gun-gum :-/

    Really I think I need two complete exhaust systems – but we’ll patch it up as long as we can, eh?

    As a side point, this made me want to build my classic EV again. I even poked at ebay.fr to see if there were any cheap left-hooker DAFs on there, but I think I really want ebay.nl. Hey, it was 3am, I can’t afford it, don’t have the time or space, but I can imagine eh? CVT EV DAF? Got to be done.