Last Steps Before Paint

I did a bit more filing in the shop on Friday, and cut a drain hole in the BB. My attempt to put a serial number onto the underside of the BB was not particularly successful. Since we don't have numbers, I managed to write a very sloppy, uneven "AH TWO," and then added "SEP IO," using the letters "I" and "O" to indicate 2010. I had planned to write "Jocelyn Lovell Bike," but neither my skills nor space permitted.

I also did some "correcting" of my lug filing. I think I went a bit crazy with Niles's lug filing, but I'm beginning to worry I've not gone nuts enough on JL's lugs. They seem a bit lumpy, and tend to taper toward the edge. I think I'll go in and just clean up a few little spots, and then bring the frame to Noah at Velocolour on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Since then I've been finalizing my decal sizes and shapes. On Niles I used different head tube and seat tube decal shapes (indeed, I used a headbadge on Niles), but for this bike I'll just use a simplified shape, adding a slanting line (to suggest an A and an H) to the nautical symbol indicating "A Gale From the North" as used in the British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis's 1914 small magazine, BLAST. Here is my decal, next to the original.

(Speaking of Wyndham Lewis, I have an article about him in the current issue of The Walrus, Canada's answer to the New Yorker and Harper's. Buy a copy!)

I'm going to keep my downtube decal excatly the same. I'll put the logo on the head tube, seat tube, and on the painted pump also. I've experimented with scaling the logo to the tube it sits on, but it seems to look best if all the decals are the same size—except on the 7/8" pump tube, which does need a 10% smaller decal.

Other things: I brought my crankset and BB in to the shop on Friday to test that the clearance would be okay. I also "converted" the Nuovo Record strada cranks to pista by sawing off the tabs for the inner chainring. Unfortunately, after doing all this, I realized that the lovely old 48T chainring I'd purchased on eBay as a 1/8" ring, is actually 3/32".

I have a nice 1/8" cog for the back, and don't really want to switch to 3/32". So I thought about using this Stronglight/TA track setup. Then I thought about using the Dura Ace track setup currently on Niles.

It's a bit "modern"-looking, but it's still nice. I'll probably use it. And hey, according to this picture, Jocelyn Lovell used (two!) Dura Ace track cranks:

I had been planning on using these Campagnolo Triomphe brake levers—

—but now that I'm not planning on using the Campagnolo cranks, I think I'll use my Shimano 105 BL-1050 non-aero levers instead:

The question, now, is how many brake levers to use, and what to do with the second one if I do use it. I came across this incredible picture of Mike Barry on his son's blog:

That's Mike going hard in a 1950s time trial in Britain. He's on a bike almost exactly like the one I just made: one brake, rear-facing track ends, etc. He's only got one brake lever (on the right side!). I'm definitely tempted to use this bike for a road time trial or two next year (imagine going up against awful modern time trial bikes!). But I also want to use the bike for a hill-climbing training ride I do fairly often. This photo from the British Hill Climb Championships shows someone on a fixed gear bike with two levers, though the blade is taken off one of them:

But I often find that bladeless levers both look odd and feel odd when you're pulling on them out of the saddle—I like to wrap my fingers around the blade. So what I think I'll do is find a way of fixing the blade in place—so that it won't rattle when going over bumps—rather than removing it. Olivier and I took the first steps toward making something like this today:

On the left is the housing stop that sits in the BL-1050 brakes. On the right is a highly technical illustration of something that would sit in the same place—but instead of acting as a housing stop, would just pinch the brake cable and prevent the blade from moving. (It also fairly closely resembles my logo...)

That's it for now. I'll bring it in for paint soon!