what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

variations on the theme

lefty loosey

right turn Clyde

removers / installers  &&&

get a grip

12 Comments

got this old bike at a yard sale but I couldn't get the fucking freewheel off so I asked around and ended up buying this special tool. Used it once then scrapped the whole goddamn project and donated all of it to a small nonprofit community bike shop in a trader joes bag zip tied to the handlebars.

in the 90s Ellen Forney had a remover/installer illustration on a poster and in Stranger ads and allover Capitol Hill. It occurs to me this is now just a well organized sweet drawer full of remover/installers. When I track down that poster I'll show it to you.

That sounds a lot like my first messenger bike. Thought it was a dream until I found out all the 700c tires I bought wouldn't fit on the damn 27" wheels.

Did you try to build up your bike around that problem? Like buy some 700c wheels and then realize your brakes were all geeked, try to fix that by getting some long arm levers to reach the rim?

I did. But first I had some sweet new hubs built up around those rims, then found out I couldn't transfer my corncob freewheel onto the freehub. Hahaha, fool me once!

Hopefully you went to the qbp catalog™ and ordered some tools that wouldn't help you out if you were 5 miles up a shits creek with no paddles to fix it.

How'd you know?! Once I got the wheels kinda working, I discovered everything was french threaded! Agaw!! Fooled me twice

it's kinda fun when you're ready for it or have some vision of the chain of events that are about to unfold when you tip that first domino. but it kinda sucks when you poke a crooked stick into a hornet's nest of you-can't-get-there-from-here shit balls or jump down the rabbit hole of incompatibility spending 17 hours and some special hardware on a bike that's worth 20 bucks. motobecane is french for "don't bother" and peugeot means "are you fucking kidding me" ask me about drilling out for recessed brake bolts on the new long reach dual pivots to compensate for the 27 to 700 conversion or the 3-way shell game of BB spindles, cranks and front derailleurs.

In choreography, as I was taught, the choreographer is looking for repetition of theme with variation. That said my uncle has a frame he gave to me but now wants to trade it for another because the bottom bracket is French threaded and 45 years later its a pain in the ass to work around.

every which way but loose. I'm not sure Ellen Forney did those remover/installers but I really like her art and I really liked those posters and it's all blended together into one big memory smoothy. repetition of theme with variation is the story of my life in less than 12 chapters.

the remover installer was a Shawn Wolfe product with nothing to do with Ellen Forney and probably wasn't even in the 90s. one big memory blur of the past. ---http://beachpackagingdesign.com/boxvox/removerinstaller

Those remover installer things look like fun. I'll take two.

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