Working on Bikes

Have done a lot of work on our bikes recently.
Changed a gear cable, straightened my back wheel (twice), worked on the rear derailleur, fit 2 new rim brake pads to my bike and 4 new disc brake pads to Wifes bike, put new rear tyre and tube on my bike, cleaned and lubed the chains, chain wheels and derailleur jockey wheels and put a suspension seat post on my bike !!!!!!!!!

Also bought a new very good bike rack, that took a lot of work to get it all up and running.
It has lights on it that plug into the car. Has tail lights, brake lights and indicators !! Really good.
This one is rated for bikes up to 30 kgs. Most are for only up to 20 KGs.
Lovely Wife has an E-bike, mine has a front basket, rear carrier with box on it, set of panniers. Both weigh 23 kgs.
Made a ramp so I can push the bikes up a ramp onto the rack. Much easier than lifting 2 bikes up and down 4 times.

I've never worked on bikes so intensively.
They run well but am fatigued from them.  

Prior to my current purchase, I hadn't ridden a bicycle regularly since the 1970s.

My very-last bike had a three-speed internal-gear hub on it. It was a Shimano, but the system was copied off the old Sturmey-Archer gear hubs that Schwinn and some others used. Sturmey-Archer made their gearsets in England.

So...I had a three-speed internal gearset, rim brakes with side-pull cables, and the twist-around (not dropped) handlebars.

I don't even remember what happened to that bike. I think, after I had it with me at my job in New York State...I took it to my parents' place in Ohio, put it in the garden shed, and my old man sold it or threw it out. It was pretty beat.

But the point being, I knew NOTHING of the derailleur gearsets that are universal, now. Back then, if you REALLY got fancy, you had ten speeds - five rings on the hub, and two on the crank.

On my secondhand "mountain" bike I have eight rings on the hub, three on the crank, a chain that's narrow enough to make it workable (that alone, surprised me, since in my day, bicycle chains were a universal standard) and, as it turned out, the whole shifter setup was busted, damaged and jerry-rigged.

A mounting piece for the derailleur arm was missing, and before the owner sold it to the pawn shop, he just bolted the arm to the axle nut. It worked well enough to sell it to me, but not to use. I was able to get a replacement, but it was proprietary to the maker, Motobecane, and I had to wait two weeks.

At that point I turned it over to a bicycle mechanic. He told me the derailleur arm itself was worn/damaged and I'd need it replaced. For price and availability, he went down a level of quality (another thing that's new; Shimano has many levels of quality and different lengths of those arms, too. Back when I was young there was ONE system!) and it works, works okay...I'd say at 90 percent. It's not worth working for 100 percent...already I'm in for $400 on a used bike.

Disc brakes. Another surprise - how GOOD they work. There was NO SUCH THING when I was a kid. Center-pull rim brakes were the Big Deal. Coaster brakes were what most kids' bikes had. There used to be a two-speed hub with a coaster brake on it...you'd change gears by stepping on the brake in a jab.

So, I got the bike working okay...and seat and bars set (a T set of handlebars, now, and that's much more natural...amazing no one thought of it forty years ago) and the light weight (aluminum frame) I find I'm even able to ride up pedestrian road-crossing ramps and bridges. That surprised me.

No carrier, though. I have a pickup and I just lay it down in the back...trying to be careful.