Umpteenth Life for a Fuji

Today I dropped Ava's Fuji frameset off at the powdercoater. A new finish is the next step, you see, in its journey from serving countless children before it came into our hands, to serving Juliana, to serving Ava. Tomorrow it will be blasted clean of paint, degreased and powdercoated with a raspberryish pink finish. But first, I had a few things done!

I took the bike over to Belmont WheelWorks about six weeks ago, and left it in the most capable hands of Peter Mooney. Peter added braze-ons for a water bottle cage on the down tube, and a set of downtube shifter bosses just upstream of the bottle cage fittings. And there was one more change -- he brazed the flat side of a Pletscher CS rack clamp to the seatstays, right at the point the rack I modified to fit the Fuji bolts up. So in essence, when Ava and I build the bike up this winter, we won't need to clamp anything around the freshly refinished frame tubes -- clever, eh? Yeah, I thought so too!

The brazing work was beautiful, though I neglected to snap a photo of it. Oh, well...

So what else? Well, he straightened out the rear dropouts, which had been spread at some point to accept a 126mm rear hub. Oh, and he clued me in as to why I've been unable to close the rear QR lever without adding another spacer -- the rear axle is too long and needs to be ground or filed down. Easy fix!

I have many of the parts ready for the build, too. I need 130mm BCD chainrings, in maybe a 38 and a 46. Plus a headset. And cables and a few other incidentals, but really very little. And as this bike comes together, the trailer bike is due to be decommissioned and sent to its next home up in Canada. I need to talk to my friend Dan to see if he's ready to put his oldest on it, and I hope they have as much fun with it as we have!

I'll post a pic when the frame comes back. It should be done tomorrow, but I doubt I'll be able to get over there this week -- maybe next.

All for now,

J