I am not a bike mechanic. I have done most of the maintenance on our bikes for the past couple of years, but I’ve never put a bike together from a pile of parts. I thought that with the help of the all-mighty and all-knowing Internet, I would breeze through building a bike in no time at all.
Almost true, but not exactly.
It took me a while to decide on which parts to hang on the Cross-Check frame. My Kuota Kalibur Tri bike runs with Shimano Ultegra 10sp and my Serrotta Legend Ti rolls Campy Record, also 10sp. I really wanted something different for this bike, so I decided on a single speed and/or fixed setup.
I had a bunch of parts that I was hoping to move over from Ivonne’s trashed Softide. Some nice Dura-Ace cranks, a Mavic bottom bracket and a 105 brake set with calipers and levers. It soon was very obvious that ‘cross bikes don’t do calipers, so no go there. The Mavic bottom bracket is a special one that is used for stripped threads. If you don’t have stripped threads, it requires some major machining of the bikes bottom bracket that I was unwilling to do, and the cranks, well, the cranks would be usable, I suppose, but I ended up getting a crank & bottom bracket set, so those didn’t make it either.
That leaves a set of 105 brake levers that I could re-use. I also had a new set of drop bars that I had been saving for who-knows-what that came in handy for this.
Read on for the list of major parts I’ve put on…