Slowly Slowly

So this is taking a bit longer than I'd expected. It was a little tricky getting the components I wanted at a price I liked. But now that I have all the bits, my current challenge is to somehow turn this pile of metal into a couple of wheels... cross ya spokes!

Next Project Please

Zoe bought me this for my birthday. The frame is in excellent nick. It's gonna be hot so stay tuned.

Singlespeed for Zoe

I bought this bike for Zoe on eBay. I'd never heard of Norta. Still haven't really. But it's a nice, light steel frame, so I'm guessing it Cro-Moly. They were made in Belgium in the 80s, but not any more. When she was still in Heidelberg, she was riding it around as a singlespeed, but I was too lazy to swap the cluster for a single sprocket. But now that she's in London, she wants to take the bike there, and there's no way she could ride it around like that in Hackney. All the cool kids would laugh at her! So I made the conversion, and put my hacksaw to good use again on the drop bars. I think the result is pretty hot.

My First Fixie

This is the story of my first fixie. It was a relatively slow process that included a few stages spanning a few months. I picked up the Motobecane bike from a second hand bike dealer here in Heidelberg. This is pretty much how it looked when I bought it...
Look at all those unnecessary cables and gears. Well, I got rid of all that crap and then it looked like this for a while, running as a very crude single speed with the cluster still on the back...

And a very nice singlespeed it was. I particularly liked the Ultegra crankset and vintage track pedals I picked up from eBay. And I love Conti tyres (hand made in Germany, of course). But I'm getting distracted. Eventually, I bought the track sprocket and re-dished the wheel myself (quite proud of that little acheivement). Then I shortened the handle bars with my trusty hacksaw, and voila! My first fixie.

Hmmm....Where to start?

So basically, Facebook gives me the shits. I use it and I will continue to use it, but I want a less irritating forum to share my experiences. I'd been thinking about starting one of these for a while and when I started working on the blog for the wedding out of necessity, I realised how easy using these things is, so I ran out of excuses.

The name? Well I like spoonerisms (Pick cheese is one of my favourites - Thanks, Woz!), and I guess the idea of this blog is to document anything that makes me happy. So there it is.

Naturally, I don't expect I'll be terribly diligent with this. But at the very least, it'll give me somewhere to post the fruits of my main hobby these days: Bicycles.