There was a lot more than just the broken tube wrong with Albert Ross. The pedals were badly worn, one of them even locking up occasionally as I rode along, and from the grating feel of it I knew it would need more than a drop of oil and a little adjustment of the locking nut, but neither pedal would come free. After breaking two spanners I gave up. The thread had worn badly in each crank, and required a generous wrapping of threadtape around the extractor tool before they could be removed. The axle in the bottom bracket ran sloppily, and was impossible to adjust, or even dismantle. I broke two peg spanners trying to undo the adjustable cup on the lefthand side. I was able to undo the fixed cup easily, because it had worked loose several times in the past, and so I was at least able to withdraw the axle and examine the wear on the bearing surfaces.
The bike shop at Gillingham confirmed my suspicions that this was an obsolete part, and I bought a sealed unit made by Stronglight. All I needed to do now was get the removable cup out of the bottom bracket, which was finally accomplished by the brutal method of mig-welding a large nut onto it and then heaving at a socket with a piece of tube as an extension. I fitted the new sealed bottom bracket, put copper-slip onto the tapers, and refitted my Stronglight 99 cranks, complete with worn pedals. I had taken the chance to run heavy axle oil into them while the cranks were off and could be laid on the edge of the bench with the pedals hanging downwards.
It was time for a test ride. Over at Mere was a friend of mine whom I knew could silver-solder, and I thought of showing him the broken tube and asking him about the practicalities of repairing it. I felt certain that the break was too close to another brazing where a short piece of tube joined both saddle tubes together. If my suspicions were correct, the entire lefthand tube would need to be replaced, which is what I had been told was needed when a similar fault was cured in another Pedersen by Argos of Bristol. I rode happily along to Mere, with no more slop or creaking from the bottom bracket, and a tolerable amount of noise from the pedals.
My friend was not at his workshop, and a neighbouring firm thought he was on a short holiday, so I set off back home. As I rode down a sidestreet I glanced at the pedals, and saw that the bottom bracket was coming undone and was working out towards the chainwheels. I tightened it up as best I could and set off again. The grinding from the pedals had come back, and I wondered if it was that which had caused the righthand side of the bottom bracket to come loose. I had only managed half a mile before the bracket was loose again, and this time, I wasn’t able to tighten it up, because the lefthand side was working its way into the bottom bracket shell. Once more, I found myself walking home along the road from Mere, pushing a bicycle.
I could no longer ignore the problem with the pedals, or the worn thread in the righthand side of the bottom bracket shell, but couldn’t afford to have either problem addressed by a professional. So I did what I would have done if this had happened to me during my travels, I went scrounging around the dump. I found an old Raleigh Mirage, painted purple, with a nice looking crankset that didn’t seem to show any signs of wear. The rear dérailleur had snapped close to the parallelogram pivots, and the saddle covering was split at the back, but otherwise it was an excellent bike. I paid £5 for it.
The cranks came off the axle easily enough. I loosened each chainring bolt in turn and put copper-slip on the threads, counted the teeth on the rings, used Loctite to refit the bottom bracket, and fitted the crankset to the bike. The rings were 28-38-48, of which the lower seemed ideal, but I thought the middle and outer rings were higher than I would have liked. I took the bike out for a trial, using a loop of local roads that never went more than a mile from home. After several such circuits, and with no sign of the bottom bracket coming loose, I tried a longer ride, going out to the hills at East Knoyle, still not daring to try the (for me) fated ride to Mere.
Success, I thought, and decided the aching legs was simply due to the higher gears on both middle and upper chainwheel. I then set about searching the web to see what different size chainwheels I could find on ebay. And that was when I discovered that, not only were Shimano Biopace chainwheels almost obsolete, but almost universally despised by posters on the cycling forums.
Biopace, for those readers who aren’t cycling anoraks, were non-circular chainrings. There weren’t obviously oval or elliptical, but when glancing down at the chainrings whilst pedalling along, I had observed the slight in and out motion, perhaps just greater than an eighth of an inch, and had initially assumed that the teeth on the rings had worn unevenly.
I carried on using them, making an improvised repair to the broken saddle tube, and doing another long ride to the railway at Cranmore. I have no complaints, other than the number of teeth on the two top chainwheels. I would have preferred 36-42, which was my old Stronglight setup, but I didn’t get the aching knees that other people have complained about. The only thing I noticed was the need to ease up a little bit more when shifting the chain across them, and that the shift maybe took a little bit longer. I suppose this explains why the racing community never took to them, but I’m not in a hurry and can make allowance for it.
In a way, I also think that the Biopace rings belong on the Pedersen. Both of them were experiments in different thinking. I am going to have to tinker with the positioning of the rings, because I feel certain that the pedalling action of a Pedersen rider is significantly different to that of a diamond-framed rider. The Pedersen rider is more upright, the legs straighter, and the knees not coming as high relative to the chest. I had learned a long time ago that maximum pedalling effort when climbing hills was achieved not by hunching forwards over the handlebars, but by pushing away from the bars and pushing the legs forwards in a determined manner.
Because of the 5-bolt fixing, I can rotate the rings through four other positions from the intended alignment, with a spacing of 72 degrees between them. Now that Albert Ross is usable again, (and last weekend’s 50-mile trip with two stone of baggage has definitely proved it, not least by passing through Mere and beyond twice without incident), I can settle down to the interesting, and probably highly subjective, task of determining the optimum position of the non-round chainwheels .
