I had another fun night of bike building at the P2P garage last night. John was off on his monthly job related pilgrimage to Redmond, but Liza (with Maddie in tow of course), Ken and Mike were there holding down the fort when I rolled in. Ben was also there this time around and later Beth showed up toward the end as well. I think I'm doing pretty well on the name and face learning front at this point (and it helps that there are handy blog posts with pictures to reference), last week was kind of a blur.
As far as the bike building goes, I made solid progress on my Norco snow bike project. The main focus yesterday was on pulling the cranks, chainring and bottom bracket from a pretty beaten up Gary Fisher (it always amazes me how many mistreated bikes there are out there). Pulling the cranks was new to me, but with guidance from Liza and Ken I was able to get everything disassembled. The bracket itself sounded gravelly and was quite dirty once I got it out. I was initially a little skeptical, but once I took the bearings out and wiped everything down it cleaned up quite nicely. I repacked the bearings with fresh grease and installed everything into the Norco pretty quickly.
I fiddled around with the stem and handlebars on the Gary Fisher for a while before deciding that they were not right for the Norco. I think I got overly focused on the SRAM twist shifter hand brakes that were in surprisingly good shape and identical to the ones on my Trek. Totally unnecessary for a single speed project like the Norco though. At least I figured out how you install brake cables (from brake lever to brake) while I was messing around with the handlebars, that had been slightly mysterious to me until I began poking around.
It looks like they're going to meet at the garage again tomorrow so hopefully I'll be able to ride over and see about taking care of the stem and handlebars. With just a little more work I should be able to get the Norco ridable by sometime next week.