Like water off a duck's bike

It's been a hectic 2 months recently, so not much time to messabout with bikes. Made up for it this week by finishing and photographing the Raleigh Misty ready to put on eBay (post to follow soon), and fiiiiinally getting round to waxing/waterproofing Joonya up good. I'd sanded and polished the frame a week or two ago, but only got round to putting the Ankor-Wax on yesterday. 

I didn't take a picture of the wax on the frame unbuffed, but suffice to say it comes out of the can looking like liquid toffee, and stinks of solvent. I poured some (too much) into a bowl, then used a rag to slather the frame. Out of the can it was the consistency of ketchup, so it was easy to get into all the little edges of the lugs etc. 
After leaving it about half an hour, the wax had dried to the consistency of butter, and the excess could be wiped away without fear of getting rid of everything. Half an hour after that I buffed it up with an old dish towel. It was tacky and picked up a lot of the fluff from the towel, but after a good buff it was back to being all shiny and nice, with the slightly rubbery texture of the wax coat.

With this being a surprisingly easy job, I decided to have a go at fitting the headset. The cups went in fine with a couple of careful taps of a wooden mallet. The crown race was an absolute dick though, and took a lot of whacking with a pipe, and filing of the fork to get it on. Filing the fork is always sketchy; if you're not even all the way round, the race won't sit level on the fork. Anyway, it's on and level now, so we're good. 

Ritchey headset cups

 So with the headset in, I mocked up the stem and handlebars (no real reason, except I was getting a bit excited).

There's nothing like white bedding to catch all the dirt from a bike build

 The stem is a Cinelli Frog. Obviously there's not much design variation when talking quill stems, so when I saw the Frog I had to have it. It looks so hench! The clamp plate was originally silver, and the stem had a rubbish silver frog down the side, so I painted over it all (needs another coat though), to keep all the components a pretty solid black. The middle section of the handlebars (Cinelli Ergo 66's) will also need painting black, although I don't need to go mad as handlebar tape will cover most of it.

Cinelli stem and handlebars. Incredibly light compared to my old steel bars!

So with the headset in and the stem and handlebars on, I decided to try fit the bottom bracket. Bit of a silly idea as the BB shell needed a good clean-out, but like I said; I was getting a bit excited. 

Then BAM! ... That bit where you ended up reeling off every swearword you can think of. 

The bottom bracket I'd decided on was a Shimano one, meant for Hollowtech II cranks (like I said before, I wanted to do up Joonya with all black, modern components). The thing with the Hollowtech set up is, instead of having a standard square taper axle running on some bearings and cups, the axle is directly connected (and comes with) the crankset, and slots into the "adapters" (sealed bearing cups). To keep this all nice and tidy, the bottom bracket has a PVC "inner cover" that runs the width of the BB shell. 

So anyway, the good people of 1970's Viscount didn't know all this then, and left the excess of the downtube running into the BB shell. "As long as it doesn't interfere with the axle, what harm can it do?" they probably said. Over a pint that probably cost a shilling. Probably. 

Forgive the dirt; excess sand from the blasting keeps appearing from the tubes and has mixed with the wax. All clean now though. The downtube is running off and down to the right

 The downtube (and to a lesser extent the chainstay tubes) encroached way too far into the BB shell for modern-day Shimano's liking, leaving a large obstruction in the way of the inner cover of the bottom bracket.

The blimmin' downtube interfering with my blimmin' bottom bracket's bliimin' inner cover

 Measured up, the inside diameter of the BB shell is about 34mm, and the max diameter of the bottom bracket inner cover is about 32mm, which leaves 1mm clearance. The downtube intruded into the shell a fair couple of mm. At first my idea was to file the tube down flush, but I was very worried I was going to damage the threads on the shell with the file, and mess up the whole thing. It was a legitimate worry given my track record with ham-fistedly fixing things that end up more broken than they started, so I took the night to calm down and think of more swearwords. 

With one last "Shitty bastard!" expelled into the morning air, I Googled "downtube bottom bracket interference" and found others had had a similar problem (modern square taper bottom brackets are sealed, and thus take up the same amount of room in the shell as the Hollowtech one). One guy had a good experience with a Dremel, which seemed feasible and much less likely to damage the precious threads.

So a Dremel it was, and with a teeny tiny grinding wheel I set to work.

Ground down flush, then cleaned up with a small nylon wire brush attachment on the Dremel. The downtube is at the bottom

Time consuming, but relatively painless. I ground the downtube down, flush with the inner edge of the shell, then used a small emery paper cylinder on the Dremel to smooth it all out nice. I also ground down the intruding edges of the chainstay tubing, which was mostly excess brazing. I cleaned out the threads and greased it up.

The right side of the bottom bracket installed, with the inner cover showing

With the excess steel out of the way, the bottom bracket went in wonderfully. Aside from having to buy yet another proprietary fitting tool to fit it, all is well for now.

Looooooovely

I've also fitted the new/old (new to me, old to eBay) downtube shifters (Shimano Unishift), and the brakes: The brakes are Tektro R559's and although pricier than I would have liked, they're some of the only side-pull calipers I could find that would reach 700c wheels from a frame built for 27" wheels (the reach is 55-73mm). 
The only other alternative I could find was using BMX brakes, which tend to have a longer reach (almost too long), although they generally seem flimsier and look a lot more 'bare bones' than the sleeker appeal of modern roadie calipers (Read: Aesthetics).

So all in all I'm pretty bloody excited. There's still quite a lot to buy and fit to Joonya, so it'll probably be months until the next progression. The Tour De France is soon though, which usually means extended online sales for cycling shops. For now, I'm still riding around on my "Interim Ali Brifter Shitbox" which will get its own post soon; despite my scowling, it's done me well over the past months.