Bearing cup is finally loose!

After about a month of thumping on that poor hub every time I had a new idea, we finally got it unscrewed and the gears removed. Yay!

I say "we" because it took two of us again. I held the wheel while David wielded the lock ring wrench.

Yep, not the drift punch that all the manuals call for. The drift punch and earlier substitutes weren't transfering enough force to even turn the wheel, and it was almost impossible to get it into the groove without catching the head of the nearest spoke. The wrench allowed us to position the "push points" more precisely and not bounce them around with hammer blows. Actually, the ideal tool would have been a ring with teeth to fit into those grooves and a handle to smack with the hammer, possibly with a cup to screw onto the axle to hold it in place -- like the thing I think of as a "tin can tool" that holds the wrench in place on the bottom bracket, but with a slightly different shape. And maybe another clamp-y tool to keep the wheel from turning. Toolsmithing turned out to be unnecessary (and a good thing, too, since I have neither the tools nor the skill), since I had the use of a large man with strong hands and the right angle for the vise (it's a tad high for me).

And now I get retainer bearings. Except the official parts list says it's a 7 X 1/4" and the one I took out had eight bearings in it. So more research there: did the part change or did someone substitute what s/he had on hand as close enough?

But at least now I can take the hub with me to shop for an index chain without toting the whole wheel all over town.

Oh, and the guy at Deschutes (really should learn their names better, bad me) tells me that what I have is definitely a plain AW hub, not the AW Mark II that I thought it might be. The two little lines stamped on the hub shell are probably an eleven and mean it was made in November of 1964, or, when I was about a year and a half old.

So, here's what I have so far:

Freeing Oly's buses!

It's official: all Intercity Transit buses will be free next year. The newest ones are already free; they're not bothering to put fare boxes in them at all. S'posed to be a 5-year experiment, so we'll see how it goes.

I gather they'll be taking the fare boxes out of the older buses, too, as they get to them. In fact, (unofficial but from Someone Who Should Know) the tipping point in the whole argument, which has been in the air for awhile now, was that they can't get the current type of fare boxes anymore, or parts to fix them. Faced with spending millions to upgrade all the buses, they decided to dump the fares instead. Seems it was never that valuable a revenue source anyway.

The drivers are a bit concerned about problem passengers being able to just ride the buses all day, but it seems to me it'll also be easier to kick problems off the bus. Maybe that means just passing them around more, but they'd still be a briefer problem per bus, if you will.

Anyway, we'll find out. I of course hope it'll be wildly successful. It's not even really the money -- $2.50 for a day pass, $36 monthly isn't much of a budget-breaker. It's just a hassle to make sure you've got the right change and trying to guess how much you'll ride the bus next month. Free buses will make impulse trips and getting home in bad weather a lot easier.

So I'm encouraging everyone who supports this move to take the bus to downtown Olympia, where parking is such a problem, and go shopping. The buses will see more riders, and if the downtown businesses see an increase in sales, they'll know this is at least a partial solution to the infamous parking problem. I don't know, am I being too optimistic?

In any case it's a good excuse for a shopping spree, even if I'll only be buying postcards (check out Postcrossing for what I'll do with them). I do plan to go to Lily's to some point in the project, although I may not buy anything there. I love their stuff but I have to feel particularly flush to spend that kind of money (they're not that expensive, I just seldom buy new clothes). Maybe I'll go back in the summer when my power bill leaves me a little extra cash.

BTW, the bike racks on the new buses aren't as bad as they look. If you think ahead and open the hoop bit that goes over your front wheel before loading the bike (it goes all the way around and drops open), you don't even need to make the driver un-kneel the bus. It gives the impression that the bike could roll off backwards, but there's a brace behind the front wheel to prevent that. If you're used to the old racks, it takes a second look to notice it.

The importance of light

Found the %*#! ball cup and the slot to hammer on to unscrew it!

The instruction drawings and photos led me to expect the ring I was looking for to be right against the next layer in (think that's one of the dust caps), and possibly a step lower. Then, the actual ring was under a thick velvety coat of grime and looked like part of the flange; the seam where the pieces join was completely obscured and the slots were nearly invisible.

What the internet said:

What Glenn's Manual said:

What I actually had:

In better light:

Complicating the issue, my "shop" is actually one end of what's supposed to be my apartment's living room. I'll spare you the full rant about living room design; the bottom line is, most of my working light comes from a forehead-mounted flashlight thing. Once I took the wheel into my actual living room (meant to be the bedroom, with a nice ceiling light and south-facing window) to compare with the photo in the *manual, I could barely see the slots. Next step will definitely be to clean the outside of the hub so I can see what I'm doing.