DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP, COMMODORE HAZARD

 So as explained previously, this time last year I was picking up two tired old bikes to mess with. One of these was the Halfords Commodore. 

COMMODOOOORRE!!

 It cost me £16, and if I wasn't such a pansy, I could've probably ridden it away (albeit on flat tyres). That's a bargain for any bike, but just look at it! Golden foil decals, steel lugged frame, solid no-nonsense Sturmey Archer gears ... it's worth £16 just for the sexy brass coloured mudguards! Proper regal looking. No wonder it's called the Commodore. 

This Downton Abbey looking bastard is Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry of the US Navy: His middle name's Hazard, he's a direct descendant of William Wallace, and his flagship was the USS Lawrence, who's battle flag simply read "DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP". If Halfords had a Commodore in mind when designing this bike, I'm banking on it being this guy

 The parts on the bike are all pretty standard looking, although clearly this was never meant to be a performance bike, and to it's credit everything was in working order (aside from the gear hub, which was disconnected and thus resting in its highest gear).  
The brakes are of a flimsy side-pull variety I've seen before on old 3-speed town bikes, and the wheels are 26 x 1 1/4 steel. 

Steel rims make for poor braking, and RUBBISH skids

 If you've ever tried braking on steel rims, you'll know it's not exactly responsive compared to alloy rims. Granted, for a slow-moving town bike you can get used to planning ahead and increasing your stopping distance on the road, but the first time you try brake in the wet, or try an emergency stop, you really question why you've been given brake levers at all.

 So, the first thing I did was get online and figure out how to alleviate the situation. I first bought some 'leather faced' pads (standard rubber blocks with a strip of leather running through the middle) that were specifically made for steel rimmed wheels, but I found these to be as crappy and ineffective as the previous blocks. I then ended up getting some Kool-Stop Eagle II dual compound blocks, as I heard the salmon was pretty effective on steel, and they do the job a lot better. Still not enough braking power to lock the wheel, but a definite improvement and a safer bet when stopping at traffic lights.

 If this bike was being renovated for myself, I'd have had the rims changed over to alloy just for peace of mind (plus a considerable weight saving), but like I mentioned before I was trying to keep the refurb costs to a minimum.  

Not a bad condition considering the age

 The rest of the bike looked in pretty good nick, with only minor surface rust on chromed bits, and no real pitting that didn't come out with some wire wool and WD-40. The mudguards did pit and mark however, and even though they eventually polished up pretty great, they are discoloured in places. The pedals span freely, and although a bit grimy, the chain was in good condition.

 The tyres however, were cracked and needed replacing. For the record, trying to get tyres to fit 26 x 1 1/4 (597) wheels is a ball-ache; the size seems to be a standard for thin city-style 26" steel rims, which is irritatingly similar to the standard for the more common thin city-style 26" alloy rims, which is 26 x 1 3/8 (590). That last number in brackets is the
"The European Tyre and Rim Technical Organisation" (ERTRO) number for the wheel, and measures the diameter of the rim where the tyre's 'bead' sits. 
This means the difference between both thin city-style 26" rims is 7mm in diameter, which is just enough to mean the tyres will look about the right size, until you actually go to fit them (cue the flashback of me trying and failing to wrestle a pair of 590 tyres that I already had onto these rims).
Anyhow, the only 597 tyre I can find is the Raleigh Sport, should you ever need to know.

 I'd already made the decision to replace the teeny tiny stem with something more stretched out and comfortable, so on to stripping the bike down so it can be cleared of surface rust, cleaned, and regreased. 
Harry - a mate of mine who's also interested in bicycle messinaboutin' - came down to lend a hand in a weekend of bike breakdown fun. Because I picked up this bike and the previously mentioned Raleigh at the same time, I stripped down the rusted shitheap/spider-egg-graveyard mixte while he stripped down the Commodore. I feel he got the better end of the deal here.

Here's Harry, the smug bastard. He'd practically finished by the time I'd got my pannier rack off

 Harry stripped everything from the bike, except the forks/headset and the bottom bracket/crankset, and did a bloody good job wire-wooling surface rust off the chrome parts. Then it came to removing the cottered cranks. 

 Cottered cranks are, put simply, bloody stupid. I'm sure more a skilled person than I can swiftly punch out the cotter pins and be on their way, but make no mistake; cottered cranks are bloody stupid.

 Basically the cranks are held to the bottom bracket spindle by a wedge shaped pin (the cotter pin), which is tightened/wedged in place by way of a nut on the threaded end of the cotter pin. To remove the cranks however, you've got to 'unwedge' the cotter pin, which basically means twatting the threaded end of the pin with a hammer until it gives up and falls out. 

 The thing is, cotter pins are stubborn little bastards, and if you've read my previous posts on the Meathead debacle, you'll know that giving me a hammer and saying "have at it" isn't a sensible idea. If the pin isn't hit squarely, the threaded end can bend and deform and you'll have a hard time getting the pin out. In fact, even if the pin is hit squarely (but too hard), the threaded end can mushroom and deform, and you'll have a hard time getting the pin out, or at least you'll have a hard time ever using the pin again.

 We'd tried this cotter pin removal technique at Harry's a week or two before as we stripped down his bronze/orange Hercules 3-speed. We'd failed as we'd been too timid with the hammer and punch. Neither of us wanted to properly have at such a nice frame, however with the Commodore only costing £16, we figured there was less to lose.

 Surprisingly, I managed to hammer the non drive-side pin out in one or two swift knocks, which may have given me and Harry false hope that I was in fact the man for the job, and that the whole Meathead debacle was actually just some bad luck. 

 I quickly put that theory to bed, as I immediately bent the drive side pin... 

 In my defense, with the chainwheel being so close to the pin, it's hard to hit it square on wihtout fear of accidentally clipping the chainwheel's teeth. Either way, the pin was way too bent to remove. So out came the Dremel, and we cut and ground the threaded end off of the pin, so at least it might be a little easier to remove.

By this time, I'd resigned myself from any intricate destruction, so Harry went to work with the Dremel, while I held the beer bike

 After a bit of work with the Dremel, we still couldn't get the pin out, so we managed to nimbly unscrew the bottom bracket cups and remove the whole thing crank and all, so at least if the worst came to the worst, I could just replace the bottom bracket and crankset with another (preferably cotterless!).

 Putting it to one side for the meantime, we spent the next day stripping down, cleaning, greasing and oiling up the Sturmey Archer gear hub. A fun little exercise which actually wasn't as hard as we thought it was going to be, and definitely worth it just so we now know what a working hub should look like, given their popularity in the old town bikes we might come across.

 About a week later, I successfully removed the cotter pin from the drive-side crank (hoorah); I'll go into how in a later post.

 After that, I cleaned and regreased all the bearings in the bike (headset, front wheel, bottom bracket), and replaced the cotter pins with new ones. These new pins had to be filed down to fit because cottered cranks are bloody stupid apparently the cotter pin 'wedge' dimensions were never standardised, so it was all proprietary depending on the crank manufacturer.  

 After replacing the tyres, brake blocks and cables, I used the 70mm stem from the Raleigh Misty, and bought some Humpert Toulouse handlebars and some Ritchey TrueGrips, for a more swept back, porteur look that goes with the classiness of the gold and brass shiny bits. 

 And here he is: Commodore Hazard
 

COMMODOOORRRRRRE! Amazing what a bit of sunshine can do...

Foil's a bit tattered in places, but still nice and shiny

Original SA shifter (with the cracked plastic face plate removed), and original brake levers

  

The brakes and mudguards cleaned and polished up nicely, albeit with some pitting

Gear cable had to be replaced, as did the little adjuster barrel; strangely the original didn't allow cable adjustment

 Well there it is, the Commodore. I can attest that although it's too small a frame for me, it is a fun, cruisery ride, as I rode about 12 miles on it from London Waterloo to Stamford Hill and back last summer. The handlebars are wide and far back, and the big sprung saddle had me bouncing around like I was in The Wild One. 

 I did put it on Ebay last August but it never sold; I'm fairly sure this was down to the high starting price, which was in itself down to the Carradice saddlebag I'd attached to the back that hiked up my price. I've waited till after winter to relist this and the refurbed Raleigh Misty, so hopefully I'll be rid of them in the next few months, and can be back down to John at the GBP for some more tasty money pits vessels...