(electronic swishing)
- Right, here we are,
episode two of Garbage To Gravel ish,
although it's more of an adventure bike
I'm going to be creating because
I'm going to be using that old Saracen mountain bike frame
that was in the bottom of my shed,
and putting some new,
and some not quite so new components onto it,
and turn it into a bike
suitable for all day riding.
Let's have a look then
at exactly what components I chose,
thanks to a little bit of help from you guys too.
(calm instrumental music)
So these bargain wheels,
I've already put some tyres and tubes in them,
and luckily I've got some Continental tyres laying around.
I've got a few different tread styles too,
because the folks over at GMBN,
they don't tend to use 26 inch tyres that much.
So, well all the more lucky for me,
I guess you could say.
So, I will be able to change them,
as and when the terrain requires that,
but the rims on these wheels
are a pair of Mach 1 ER10.
Now, Mach 1 is a French brand.
I'm pretty sure it's evolved from another brand,
but I can't exactly remember
who they turned into Mach 1 from.
So I'm pretty sure it was another brand before
and they had a rebrand.
Anyway, someone will let me know
down in the comment section below.
These rims are laced up
into a pair of Shimano Deore LX hubs.
They are a fair few years old,
but importantly, they're brand new.
They've never seen any road action,
or off-road action for that matter.
The rear wheel has got 36 spokes and holes,
and the front got 32.
Quite a common practise back in the day there
to have a few less on the front,
where you don't necessarily require such strength.
Now, the drive side spokes have got Sapim spokes.
And the non-drive side, they are, in fact, unbranded,
as are the front wheels.
But it's good to have a brand like Sapim on there
because their spokes have been going
for many, many years now.
The rear wheel has an over-locknut distance
of 135 millimetres.
And luckily for me, it fits inside of that frame.
I don't have to go about cold setting
any dropouts there to try and get it to fit inside of it.
And importantly, I can fit a cassette onto this freehub,
which is going to be used on the bike.
I'm not going to give it away just yet
exactly how many speeds I'm going to turn the bike into,
but it was a deciding factor of why I went for these wheels.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Right then, stopping those wheels is going to be, actually,
I'm going to mix and match a pair of Cantilever brakes on this.
Again, like I said, people were saying,
why don't you put this brakes on it,
put some V brakes on it, and everything like that.
V brakes are incredibly powerful.
Sometimes, in fact, too powerful for a frame.
I wouldn't be the first person out there,
if I was to put a pair of very strong V brakes onto a bike,
pull those levers,
and then they're going to snap a boss of a frame.
That's not going to happen in my case.
I'm going to stick with that standard Cantilever on the front.
And for the rear, well actually,
I'm going to hand this one over to Doddy from GMBN,
because he was so excited when he saw
what I brought in from my stash of bits at home.
- Cheers John, yeah,
kind of strange finding myself in the GCN set,
but quite nice, all the same.
So this is your Saracen right,
so this is a 26 inch wheel bike,
bit of a relic (mumbles), kind of like you I guess, John.
But interestingly it's got old-school Cantilever brakes on.
So as far as I know you're turning this
into some sort of adventure bike packing rig,
so you're not going to put discs on it
which would be my first choice.
My second choice would have been V brakes,
but as you pointed out, probably a little bit flexing
and may well break,
plus the compatibility with drop bars
and mmm not real ideal.
So you get down to Cantis.
In my eyes, there's only real one choice,
a set of the old-school
self-energizing Cantilever brakes,
something like a pair of these
I reckon might be up your street.
So the thing that's quite cool
about self-energizing Cantilever brakes
is they revolve around a helix design,
which essentially means you get a mechanical advantage.
The more you brake, the more assistance it gives you.
Now on early mountain bikes,
it's a little too powerful to run on the front end,
but on the back end of the bike,
you're going to get additional braking power,
which can't be a bad thing when you're running
with a heavily laden bike like John will be.
So it's essentially a helix design on here,
so as the brake pad contacts the rim,
you're actually using that force
to pull the Canti in even more so.
It's really quite a cool system,
although apparently they work quite grabby
if you run them on the front end.
But I reckon even if Canties doesn't necessarily
want them on the front end of his bike,
they may well be good up front too
because you're going to be running panniers
and all sorts of other stuff on there.
Check 'em out!
(electronic instrumental music)
- Of course we are going to need some standard cables
for those Cantilever brakes
so I never thought I would ever have to use
these straddle wires again.
They've been in the bottom of a bag
at my house for many many years.
I had to get some dust and cobwebs off of them
but they're in pretty good nick still.
So they'll be providing the stopping power
along with of course the standard bonding cable,
no hydraulics on this bike.
I'm not going to treat the rider to that sort of luxury.
And here we are, a cable hanger as well too
that that cable is going to go in down from the brake lever
and then of course that will be providing a bit of leverage
to be able to pull on those Cantilevers.
So I did actually rob another part
off of another old frame in the shed,
and it is this cable hanger.
So this is going to sit in between the locking nut
and adjusting nut of the headset
in order to actually give that front brake cable
a little bit of tension.
Now the reason that one behind me didn't have one of these
is because loads of mountain bikes back in the day
had a really cool bit of tech, I thought anyway,
and it was an internal bit of routing.
So on this stem here,
you can see this was where the front brake cable entered,
and then the outer cable butts up against it
internally before it would then drop
out of this little bit here,
and meet the actual cable hanger here,
and let the brake do its business.
Of course, we do need to have some tension there,
otherwise the brakes just simply won't work.
Hence why I've gone for this.
I just hope there's enough thread
on that fork for it to be able to fit,
otherwise I'm going to have to file it down quite a bit.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Right what about the handlebars then?
Yeah I'm going drop handlebars.
Of course, we have to, don't we?
This is GCN Tech after all,
and GCN and GCN Tech is all about drop handlebarred bikes.
But not always, sometimes we do stuff with flat bars too.
But yeah I've managed to find
just this old pair of Zipp bars,
this pair of service course ones in a 42 width,
they were lurking around in the workshop,
and they're going to be absolutely fine,
may have a little look around too,
see if we've got anything with slightly flared drops
or anything like that, because I understand
that's the fashionable thing these days,
but I'm not that fashionable.
And then I've also got this very light,
this is an old alloy, sorry,
an old Kalloy Uno stem.
Very lightweight bit of kit,
used to have this on one of our old bikes,
got titanium bulbs in there too,
it is a very flat-looking stem,
but the good thing about this is,
if you look at it it's an ahead set stem,
whereas that one there, that's an old quill stem.
So what have I got here?
I've got a quill to ahead adaptor.
Just check that out.
So that can easily go down inside of the actual
fork steerer tube, and then this can clamp on top of it,
and the good thing here is I can just raise
and lower the handlebars as required.
Of course, it's easy then too
to actually change a stem
because if we were using an old quill style stem
with a closed front face to it,
we'd have to unwrap the vase, remove the brake levers,
each and every time you want to change your stem length.
And because I'm not going to know how this thing handles,
in theory this is ideal,
it means I can swap stem lengths really really easily.
These things are a lifesaver.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Providing the gear changes as well as the braking
is going to be these Shimano Tiagra 10-speed levers.
Now they are compatible with every single
rear derailleur out there,
it is quite a specialist bit of kit, believe it or not,
according to the Shimano service instructions.
But I've gone for these because they're pretty robust
and well they're going to work
exactly for what I've got in mind
because I'm going to be pairing them up
with this Shimano GRX 10-speed rear derailleur.
So you remember this is the kind of gravel type
groupset that they released this year.
And I'm going to be fitting it,
because it's got this sort of funny clutch mechanism,
so I've locked it in there,
you can see that lower arm will not move.
When I release it, it will.
That means the chain is going to keep a good amount of tension
over rough ground, and also it's got that
cool shadow style mounting on there too,
so you can get that in just a little bit more
on the rear derailleur hanger too.
I'm looking forward actually to setting this up,
so I've never set up the GRX system.
Then we've got ourselves an 11-34 cassette here,
so this is kind of a 105 grade if you like.
And that luckily fits on the freehub body of these wheels.
I am going to have to get a very small thin washer
which fits in just behind the actual sprocket cluster
and the end of the freehub body,
'cause it just takes up a little bit of slack.
And then that's going to be good to go.
(upbeat instrumental music)
So I guess by now it seems like I'm a bit of a hoarder.
I mean yeah the rear derailleur and also that cassette
I did actually go out and buy,
but the other bits and pieces are just things
which I've managed to accumulate over the years somehow.
I've got a bit of a habit of going on to Cycle Jumbles,
which are a thing, they're kind of a big sale
where people take along all their old rubbish
and I go along and buy it I guess and take it home.
Either way, all that story out of the way,
my girlfriend absolutely hates it
when I go to these things.
Years ago, I managed to get this chain set.
So it's a really basic looking bit of kit, square taper.
I thought to myself, one day you'll use this for something.
And one day, I have!
So I'm going to fit it onto that original square taper
bottom bracket on that bike,
I think that the actual cranks are going to sit out
a little bit too wide, but it should be okay,
because I'm only going to fit one chain ring on this bike,
'cause you all remember just now
I didn't show you a front derailleur did I?
That's right, I'm going one-by,
the person who's not deadly set up against it,
but I'm not a huge fan of it really.
I'm going to do it just for the simplicity,
and also cost too.
And I don't think I have a suitable front derailleur
laying around either.
So here we are, a really basic square taper crank set,
never been used, don't know what the person
who I bought it from ever intended for it,
but the cool thing about it,
it looks like one of those really fancy compact ones
because you've got a hidden away mounting here
on the rear side of the drive side crank, I like that.
Fitted into that, I'm going to use this
Race Face single ring, so it's narrow wide chain ring,
there's 38 teeth on there,
so I'm going to be running it with an 11-34 cassette,
so I'm going to have 38 paired up with that.
I think that's going to look all right.
So it means I can also play around with it
and put it on either side
till I get that chain line a little bit better
because who knows what it'll be like,
that frame's an old bit of kit after all.
And not forgetting the fact that I'm going to need
some special chain ring bulbs too
because remember if you're using just one chain ring
there's not quite as much material,
so these ones here, picked these up many moons ago as well.
When I thought anodizing bits was quite cool,
and luckily about 15 years later,
it's come back in and it's in fashion!
So even matches the t-shirt there.
So they're going to work absolutely fine
holding that in place.
And of course, there is five by the way,
in case you thought I lost one.
And then also a chain there,
and I've also got some cables kicking around somewhere too.
Or at least I hope I have.
The only thing I think I've forgotten about so far
is the handlebar tape.
And I'm definitely going to need some of that,
so let me know if you've got any ideas
what I should go for.
I don't want anything too fancy
because I've got a feeling that it's going to get
pretty muddy pretty quickly.
I'll tell you what actually,
if anyone has got some handlebar tape
that they would like to be with a chance
to go in on this bike on that build, let me know.
Our address is easy enough to find,
so it's easy enough to send in,
mark it for my attention.
If not, leave a comment down below
and I'll try my best to reply
so we can get some in, and who knows,
maybe I'll have enough that I can do a lucky dip
and pick out a random one
and that'll get fitted on to the bike,
whether it matches or not, who knows.
Now also, next week I'm going to be building this bike up,
so do you want to see a full-length
50 minute epic of me doing it,
just like I did with that fixie conversion.
The editor, I think he absolutely loved that,
he listened to me talking for 50 minutes in a row.
Get involved if you'd like to see that.
And also, remember to like and share this video
with your friends too,
give me a big old thumbs up.
Now for two more great videos,
the retro fixie build, click just down here,
and the original cheap bike to super bike,
click just down here.
For part one, well, how could you ever have missed that?
There's a link to that in the description too.