Yay! Done, functionally. I have aesthetic work to do on the frame, but Ghostal is ready to roll tomorrow, barring rain!

So, I got this project to about 99% complete, and got stalled. I had a few issues. One, I had problems with my expansion ring holding the headset together.
Another, I had seemed to be burdened with a dull pipe cutter.

On the latter issue, I just wasn’t committing to the process enough. I spun the pipe cutter like 3,333 revolutions, but it appeared to stall out a few mm into the steerer. Just when I was preparing to buy a beefier cutter, I went back and examined the groove with better lighting (the shop isn’t built yet, so the lighting is dungeon quality) and it looked up IN there. So I gave it another few minutes and PING! The top of the steerer sheared right off. Excellent!

On the former, I didn’t yet understand why, but the expansion ring in my top cap assembly just didn’t take. I worked on it for quite awhile. Unfortunately, I made the dubious decision to try and extract it by using pliers to lift the offending bolt section back out of the steerer, where small burs of flash from the cutting had trapped it. The took gouged both the top cap AND the stem ever slightly. But what the hell, this bike wouldn’t stay pristine for long reGARTless. I went to my local shop and tried to get another expansion ring, and they only had a proprietary FSA one that wouldn’t work for me. However, they illuminated me to what was up. I love talking to knowledgeable shop service mechs, because you learn stuff you just don’t find in the literature (and excepting Lung’s wisdom and guidance, I’m a book-trained bike guy)… turns out he tole me that the ID (inner diam.) of each manufacturer’s fork design is a bit different, based on steel gauge and other design factors. So even though I was using the 1 1/8" (OD) bolt assembly, it was not able to expand to the inner wall of the tube. I went back, took a few more measurements, and then the simplicity of the solution hit me, laughably: I was using an expansion ring system in order to make it simpler. This was no longer simple. And my man Lung had left me his star nut installer tool. So I just grabbed my star nut, transferred the top cap back to it’s original assembly, and installed it in a pinch!

I looked at the bike this morning and lamented that my original photography hope was to use fresh blacktop. Unfortunately, in these times what are so difficult, no one’s doing that kind of infrastructure work. And then it hit me. I was standing outside of my house sipping rapidly cooling coffee in 26 degree air (a cold snap, at least for us in California) and looking out over a relative winter wonderland of frosted flora. PERFECT! Thus, we have these photos.

As you can see, Ghostal is NOT a ghost bike. It’s a life bike. The lantern hung off the saddle is really only for Mass and other events, but the embolic intent is that the lantern symbolizes life in traditional chinese culture. So there you go. Nice soft honey on the saddle, lots of chrome… this is a white bike. It’s ghost-AL… but not an ironic statement. It’s a reminder of how I don’t prefer to end up an integrated headset, so to speak, in the grill of a Yukon.

Some more pics:

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1. Bike Build Process Log: Ghostal – Stoppers and Starters
2. Bike Build Process Log: Ghostal – The Last Rites
3. Bike Build Process Log: Ghostal by the Horns