Maintenance time

After a couple of weeks of cold weather, I've decided to call it a season, and catch up on some much needed cleaning and maintenance. Tonight, I installed two new front chainrings that just arrived. I always knew that just changing my 52-42-30 to a 52-42-24 wasn't going to be good enough. So I bought a 48 and 38, for a new combination of 48-38-24. That should give me better shifting to/from the low ring, and a lower range of gears overall, more suited to touring and hills. That much was easy.

Now comes the cleaning. I did the chain first, before removing the crank and swapping the rings, so that's done. I need to clean the bottom bracket area before I reinstall the crank, so will probably go over the whole frame at that point. Then it's the wheels, so they'll be clean when I disassemble and lube the hubs. I probably have close to 2500 miles on the bike now, and this is the first real interior maintenance I'll be doing.

Once it's all back together, I'll need to adjust the derailleurs and indexing given the new gearing, and be sure everything works. And it wouldn't hurt to adjust the brakes either. Finally, I need to retape the handlebars once again. The double-sided carpet tape spiralled underneath seems to be the trick to keeping it from sliding around and unraveling, so I'll give that a try again.

Then there's the old bike. It's time to try again to get the cranks off so I can give the bottom bracket an overhaul, the first in probably 15 years or more. If I'm going to rely on it for occasional commuting, this needs to be done, along with those hubs as well.

Plenty to do in this relatively snowless winter, along with regular riding on the trainer.