Hauvel - Commuter build part 1

Long time since I posted here. I finally finished my semester’s studies and gave myself a break from studying and projects. Taking a break gave me a perspective on how I want to run this blog onwards. My introduction post I did almost completely with AI. Basically, I wrote stuff I wanted to tell and then asked an AI to make a blog post about it. Why I did this is because of how I sometimes have hard time to collect my thoughts on order that is nice to read and understand. I have decided I won’t use AI for the text anymore, its going to be unfiltered me, some won’t like the text I produce but some maybe will (hopefully). If I keep on using AI to make the text it won’t have any personality and I wont better myself at all in writing, after all these projects are about improving myself and sharing it. This is a topic I probably will discuss in future posts too but now let’s get into the actual post, commuter build.

I’ve been in a need of a new commuter bike for a while because of upgrading my current bike to the point of not wanting to lock up it anymore. So, I need something cheap and unattractive to bike thieves that I can leave locked up for a whole work or school day. The focus for this bike will be reliability, budget, and efficiency. This means, for example, that I’ll choose tires with somewhat low rolling resistance while still minimizing flats, and they’ll be relatively cheap. Its not going to be the “ultimate” commuter bike or something, ill be just sharing my thought processes behind why I chose or did something. I hope this will give readers new perspective how they can build or do something.  

The frame I chose for this I have owned for a while already, but I haven’t been able to figure out what I really want to do it yet. It is a track frame probably built in France. I don’t know the history behind the frame but there are road bikes with similar paint schemes but different name. I think commuter is perfect usage for it because its steel, geometry is nice (at least to look at) and it has kind of a ratty look already. Frame has some problems though: BB threads are quite tight, there’s something loose inside the top tube and the seat tube needs to be cleaned at least, hope fully reamed also. I will document the process of fixing these issues and show you in the next post.

I luckily already most of the parts that I want to build this bike with, just need to decide which parts will suit this bike best. You can expect an update on frame stuff late this week or early next week.