August 5, 2014
Building a wheel in Barnaul: With the most annoyingly unhelpful helpful man
I have been fortunate enough to have cycled into some of the world's greatest cities and yet I had never looked forward to any as much as this. Paris, New York, Venice, Barcelona, none could compare! For sheer anticipation and excitement about arriving into a place, Barnaul topped the lot! I should add however, before you all start googling 'cheap flights to Siberia', that the reason I was looking forward to visiting Barnaul had nothing at all to do with Barnaul and everything to do with the fact that the previous two days riding there had been such tedious monotony that they had me longing for the thrilling days of the Kazakh steppe. Beyond Rubtsovsk absolutely nothing happened, the road was long and straight and dull, there were no more towns on the way, just endless fields. Barnaul appealed therefore not because it was going to be something special, but because it was going to be something.
I cycled up the main street into the centre of Barnaul, a wide boulevard name Leninsky, that had a wide strip of grass in between the two lanes of traffic with a path and benches and things, that was a pleasure to cycle on. I soon passed a statue of that man Lenin, and then a very Soviet mural on a building with Lenin in the middle of it all. It was red of course. Some people really have trouble moving on don't they?
What I really needed was to find a bike shop of course, because of my flange, but I didn't know where one was, so I needed to ask the Internet. To do that I needed to find somewhere with wifi which was quite difficult, until I saw a cafe that was called 'Traveler's Coffee.' The name was in English and I thought if they didn't have wifi nowhere would. I locked my bike up and went inside where I was told that they did indeed have wifi. It was a real wannabe Starbucks, so it was, a true symbol of capitalism just across the street from Mr Lenin. I ordered an orange juice and took a seat. I flicked open the laptop, checked my emails, found an address for a bike shop, drank the orange juice and asked for the bill. It was three euros. Three euros for a glass of orange juice! Unbelievable! Well, that's where capitalism has brought us! Three euros! I tell you! Lenin must have been turning in his grave!
I cycled over to the bike shop where the guys that worked there were very helpful but spoke no English. They had the hub that I needed but my request for a mechanic to rebuild my wheel was met with a negative response. I really needed a professional for this task. Yeah, I'd done most of the front wheel in Bishkek but Nathan had got me started and done all the hard bits, and that was just changing the rim which meant moving the spokes across. To change the hub required dismantling the whole wheel and basically building it again from scratch. There was no way that I could be trusted to do it. But then I had one of those funny moments when I temporarily forgot about my own incompetence and declared that I was going to build the wheel myself.
I set myself up in the street outside the shop and started to dismantle the old wheel, which took quite a long time because of course I had to unscrew and remove each spoke in turn. The guys from the shop were very friendly and brought me out a stool to sit on and watched keenly as if they might be able to learn something and, to be fair, I was doing a great job of looking like I knew what I was doing, but then taking the wheel apart was the easy bit. I had no real idea of how to go about rebuilding it, but I just kind of assumed that it would come to me when the time came.
As I was half way through taking the spokes out a tall man appeared and introduced himself to me as Vladimir. He was also a cyclist and had himself once ridden from here to Mongolia and he was now very, very keen to help me. He couldn't speak English though, nor did he know how to build wheels, and his attempts at helping soon began to annoy. First he brought me an old wheel from somewhere and offered it to me as a gift. It was a thoughtful gesture, but the rim was crap, the hub was crap, and one of the spokes was broken. But Vladimir was insistent that I should stop trying to build a wheel with a good rim and a good hub and take this one instead. He even tried to take one of the spokes that I'd removed and use it to replace the broken one. "Leave my spokes alone!" I cried, "I need those!" Vladimir went and got a spoke from the bike shop instead. Then he needed something to screw it into of course, and he reached over to my pile of belongings again. "No Vladimir!" I once again screamed at the irritating man, "Do not pinch my nipples, you really are going too far now!"
A half hour later I had all of the spokes removed and was ready to start rebuilding the wheel. The reason why it had taken me half an hour was because Vladimir kept handing me his phone with an English speaking man at the end of it who was acting as a long distance translator, and this was wasting a lot of my time. "Vladimir wants to give you this wheel as a present, Vladimir wants to show you the way to Mongolia, Vladimir will not leave you alone, Vladimir likes to poke his nose in" and so on and so forth. It was clear that the pair of them were trying to help of course, but they weren't helping and I was growing ever more frustrated.
My growing frustration was also largely on account of the simple fact that I was sitting in a street in Russia with a completely disassembled rear wheel and absolutely no idea how to go about rebuilding it. I started putting spokes in randomly. There were only 36 holes on the hub, 36 holes on the rim, and 36 spokes to connect them after all, surely there was a chance I might get everything in the right place by mere fluke. My first attempt was, unsurprisingly, a failure. Vladimir was continuing his pursuit of the title of 'world's most annoyingly unhelpful helpful man' by grabbing spokes and putting them in randomly too. The English speaker was back on the phone and when he tried to tell me Vladimir was going to build my wheel for me I'd reached my boiling point: "Listen, I really appreciate all of your help and all of Vladimir's help, but what I really need is for you to leave me alone and for Vladimir to leave me alone. He clearly doesn't know what he's doing because he's just put a drive side spoke on the non-drive side and even I know enough not to do that. I have to concentrate on what I am doing and I don't have much time, and at the moment all of my time is being spent talking to you and talking to him so if you can please just tell Vladimir to leave me alone that would be great. Thank you." The message was relayed and the man picked up his wheel and stormed off. I assumed he left with the idea that I was an ungrateful twat but that didn't matter, the important thing was that he left.
Now I was alone with no one to help me. I had one rim, one hub, 36 spokes, 36 nipples, how hard could it be? The guys from the shop were still coming out to watch me, although any resemblance I had to a man that knew what he was doing had long gone. They had seemed to find my interactions with Vladimir amusing though. And then I had a moment of inspiration and asked one of them if the shop had wifi, which it did. I got out my laptop and went to youtube. No, I wasn't going to look up more videos of crazy Russian driving, I had the real thing now remember. No, I looked up a tutorial on how to build a wheel. Oh, how much easier this made things! I followed the process, step-by-step, and a wheel began to take shape. Before I knew it, I had built the thing! I trued it on the frame using my brake pads and got it pretty good. I'd done it! I put the tyre back on and loaded everything back on the bike. The guys from the shop were looking at me in awe now. I think they almost broke into a round of applause. I'd built my own wheel, all by myself, in the street, in Siberia! I felt on top of the world! Then I noticed my rim tape lying on the floor and had to take everything apart again.
I took advantage of the wifi to update my blog inside the shop and as I was doing so my old friend Vladimir reappeared, now dressed in full lycra and with his bike. He brought me a bag of nuts, a box of teabags and some juice as a present. He was a lovely man really. Then he went too far and brought me in a pair of lycra cycling shorts as another gift. Now I don't wear cycling shorts and there is a reason for this, that being the fact that my legs are very skinny and I look ridiculous in them. Some people look good in lycra and some don't, and I am in the second category. As a matter of fact, most people are. Including Vladimir. I wondered if he was giving me a brand new pair of these shorts or an old pair of his. He took them out of the bag and flicked it to the inside to show me the comfortable padding. I looked at the padding. Definitely not new. At this point I should mention in case anyone doesn't know, that you don't generally wear anything underneath cycling shorts. What Vladimir was essentially gifting me then, at least from a hygiene perspective, was a pair of his old underwear. I thought it rude to refuse another gift though, and they were safely sealed back in the plastic bag, so I took them. Then Vladimir wanted me to go and put them on in the changing room. 'Thank you Vladimir, but no. I could put them on now, but what I'll probably do instead is throw them away later.'
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Vladimir insisted on cycling with me out of town to show me the way of course, even though I knew the way. He definitely wins that annoying unhelpful helpful man prize. Finally I left him and was out into more forest on a good road and surprising even to me, but the wheel appeared to be holding up fine. I must admit I was quite proud of myself. Now my bike really had been almost all built by me. I'd done most of the front wheel, all of the back wheel, the bottom bracket, the drive train, the brakes, the cables, everything.
So I knew who to blame the next time something broke then!
Shimano.
03/08/14 - 116km
04/08/14 - 104km
05/08/14 - 70km
Today's ride: 290 km (180 miles)
Total: 24,225 km (15,044 miles)
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