My conversion of my previously-converted fixed-gear Look to a road bike is well underway. In fact, thanks to some late night enthusiasms, it’s almost done!

I’ve never built up a road bike before. I’ve done simple maintenance, but frankly, the majority of my road bike riding time I was focused on riding, letting the LBS do the annual tuning, and that was that. As you have seen, I most recently have been riding a KG 381 Jalabert-Edition Look road bike, circa 2003, but got a second frame, the KG 381 Team, a spare from the 2003 season. I converted the latter into a big gear fixed-gear bike, which was awesome. But now I’ve decided to condense a bit. I’m attempting to strip the Dura Ace groupo off of the Ja-Ja build-up and put it on the Team bike, then sell off the former. I love them both, but purgery compels me.

I assembled everything additional I would need, which frankly isn’t much. The one stand-out change was new tyres. The Ja-Ja Look was running bright red tyres, which was cool and all, but the Team bike is a low-key affair. It isn’t murdered out, per se, like Lung’s Tumbler, but it’s mellow. If his bike is the absence of light in the shape of a fixie, mine’s the shadow. From the light that isn’t there. Or something. Anyway, since the Conti Gator Hardshells did so well down to LA, I went for them again here.

I was going pretty slow and being methodical, not only not being particularly familiar with the componentry and their adjustment from the mechanic side, but also because it was late, I had to be quiet, and really, you don’t want to eff up Dura Ace parts by being overzealous. I actually had very few issues. My biggest stalls were pulling the self-extracting cranks and then the BB behind them, and ultimately there was nothing wrong, I’m just gunshy about putting muscle into it, given the propensity of stripped-threads and tweaked parts being a part of muscly-mechanic behavior when you don’t know what to expect and how it should behave. Ultimately no problems. Everything was stripped, degreased, regreased, and reassembled. By the time I was done for the night I had the entire groupo swapped, front and rear brakes strung and set, rear derailleur strung and set, and the bars taken care of. All that remained was stuff that I needed to research or replace.

For one thing, the Ja-Ja had a braze-on front derailleur hanger, and the team bike doesn’t, so I needed to source a derailleur frame clamp. I picked one up yesterday in the city on a ride-around with Lung, but it was the wrong size (of course, the one time I don’t get more than one just to be safe) but I ordered a shim, so that’s fine. I wanted to use a fresh chain, had to pick that up and did. I don’t think I swapped the previous chain in 4 years of riding (shudder) though two of them were almost exclusively dedicated to fixed-gear stuff so it didn’t see many miles.

I’m almost there! Yesterday afternoon I swapped out the tyres, set the wheels, readjusted the brakes, adjusted the wild cable housings in front (I’m so used to Campy from my Bianchis that with Shimano my instinct is to let them fly out, even though they usually get wrapped tight to the bars) and a few other things, and I’m pretty close to completion. I’m going to re-use some bar tape from another ride, swap another saddle on here, and then I can start trying to fine tune the shifting system.

Kind of exciting, working on a road bike for the first time. No major explosions in the pipeline yet!

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