Reassembling the Nouvo-Retro Trek

    It was now time to put the old dog back together.  The main reason for disassembling the bike was the failing bottom bracket.  The old loose bearing units are not "lifetime" units.  It lasted 26 years, I serviced it on an annual basis but it finally got to a point where it just refused to work.  The new unit is a Velo Orange cartridge unit and it went in so easily it's hard to believe.  I could get used these new fangled sealed bearing things.  After putting it in I resisted the urge to look for left over parts, but it did seem too easy.

I chose the Velo-Orange for one simple reason, they use oversized bearings.  I'm not enough of an engineer to know all the details, but I have enough common sense to know that larger bearings should mean something in the long run.  Right now the choice we have in bottom brackets amounts to Tange, Shimano and a few other "throw away" units, and then there is the totally bombproof "dare you to outlive me" Phil Wood unit.  So we don't have much choice, the VO unit provides one so I made it.
  The only unusual prep for the build up was removing the powdercoat from a couple of places that didn't get adequately masked.  People tell me this is common on bike frames so I didn't make a fuss over it.  One person suggested sanding cloth, like that used to clean sweat fittings on plumbing.  I started that then realized that a Dremel tool would be a lot more effective.

It cleaned up the headset bearing quite easily

and it took a little more  care to clean up the shifter bosses but still got it done in short order compared to hand sanding.
    The rest of the parts went on just as they should,

when you've been toying with a bike as long as I have this one, it goes together in a flash.
    I was back on the road and really pleased with the overall facelift.

the color and the addition of the fenders give it a real retro look while making it a lot more practical.

I haven't given up on installing the front part of the fender, but I just haven't found exactly the way to do it.
Actually the missing part provides no real protection. For some reason, you can put cheap plastic partial fenders on and not be offended, but it just rubs the eyes wrong for a highly polished hammered texture fender to be incomplete.  Maybe I could just get used to it and nickname him "Semi-Elegant."
    Of course at my local LBS I was told it "doesn't look that bad!"
Not that bad?
                       Semi-Elegant is
                                                   not that bad?