For those of you into stats and stuff there is a very interesting breakdown of the split times at the last downhill world cup over at Dirt. I found this insight intriguing as it shows where Gee Atherton actually lost the race and where Sam Smith was able to come past. Smith’s consistency is what gave him the win and it makes for a wide open race for the World Champs.
All of this is really just preamble for the real concern in my cycling life.
The seized and broken seatpost is still stuck as I write this.
My mechanical means of moving it have so far failed. I attacked the seatpost from the inside with a hacksaw blade and used molegrips to try and roll it off the frame. This hasn’t resulted in much progress at all. After several hours I have perhaps a section a few mm across that has moved a few mm off the frame. There just isn’t enough to grip to get real leverage and the progress is slow and frustrating.
Rather than giving up I have now elected to move onto chemical means, which seem brutal, but likely to result in the seat tube being empty, eventually. The internet talks of two options, either ammonia to dissolve the aluminium oxide or sodium hydroxide to eat away the aluminium itself.
Ammonia poses a problem as it’s hard to get hold of and there’s a chance that my internet searches for a product commonly used in bombs have triggered some kind of red light at some government office anyway. The other option is more dramatic, but more easy to get hold of the equipment, as caustic soda is readily on sale. In preparation I have stripped the frame down and begun to protect the frame with old inner tubes (I knew it was worth keeping them).
So now I have to work out if the balcony is an appropriate place to use (if it’s aluminium there could be spectacularly bad results) and get the protective gear and chemicals. In some ways I’m a little excited, which stops me worrying so much about the potential death of the frame.
I’m expecting something like this:
A
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