It was with great sadness that I put my old Cannondale frame in the trash the other day. It and I had a long history.
I acquired it for $75 in 1992 from a friend in the bike club that had done the Cannondale trade-in of an old frame for a new one, and the bike store just gave him the old one. It was my first aluminum bike, much lighter and stiffer than my steel ones. I immediately could climb in one gear higher than before. I was a happy man.
It was my main road bike until around 2000 when I bought Cannondale #2, an R2000 with STI shifter, lots of speeds, what club members would consider a real bike. Cannondale #1 was relegated to winter and rainy day riding.
It mostly languished on the bike rack for many years, and then I got the bright idea that it would make a good commuting bike. It was in fact a way better bike than any of my other commuter bikes, so this seemed like a great idea.
I rode it for a couple of weeks when I remembered why it had been relegated to the bike rack. Most of my bike’s headsets have a bad case of indexed steering, i.e., the bearing are pretty much ground in place so you have to overcome a steep threshold to direct the bike anywhere but straight ahead. This one was much worse, you had your choice of tight headset, where it took two strong men to turn it to either side, or loose, which was fine until you had to use the brakes, when awful noises and a tremendous shudder ensued.
So, something needed to be done about the headset. As it turned out, I had a couple of brand new headsets sitting on a shelf, so I figured I’d just replace it and life would be good again. Not so. Turns out the stem was pretty irrevocably welded to the steerer tube, and no amount of force would break it loose. So, I contented myself with unscrewing the headset far enough to see the remains of the headset bearings. The cage that held them seemed to have a few vacancies. Since I couldn’t take the cage out the normal way I basically rent it asunder. So now I was left with the remains of the old ball bearings in the cage. Turns out I had a few loose ball bearings from the days before bearing cages were invented (around when the wheel was invented). So I crammed them all back in with a bunch of grease and hoped for the best. The best wasn’t very good, since the same problems were present only now possibly a little worse.
Time to bring in the big guns, I thought. Take it to the bike store. They really aren’t too happy to see me coming since it usually involves some basket case that I couldn’t fix, hence dumped on them. They gave it a valiant effort, soaked it in penetrating fluids for a whole day, but even they couldn’t break it loose.
I was beginning to despair, when I happened upon the specialist on pathological bike problems, Eric Ferioli. He recommended hack sawing the top of the stem off, and then trying to hack saw the bloody stump out of the steerer tube. I managed to hack saw the stem in half but extracting the rest from the steerer tube proved impossible. My hack saw blade was of the same vintage as most of my other equipment, and was missing many teeth, so it probably would have taken me a month to saw through the stem stub and even then prospects were not good.
Then I strapped the fork to a bench vise, slathered all sort of loosening fluids on, got out a huge water pump pliers and tried again to part stem and fork, but neither heaven nor earth would make the stem budge.
Before finally giving up, I had the bright idea that maybe I could replace the fork. I certainly didn’t want to buy a new fork, which would cost far more than the bike was worth, and the prospects of finding a used one with the right stack height, etc, were dim. So, I figured it was time for a DNR order.
But all was not lost, as I decided to put it in the organ donor program. Sure the frame was shot, but there were a lot of good components that could be harvested to give new life to my other bikes, which mostly were outfitted with Trashmo Gruppo parts. My commuting bike was the happy recipient of the wheels, which it was in dire need of since the old ones had about 1/4” play in the bearings. I picked the frame clean, except for the seatpost, which like the stem was irrevocably mated to the frame, and, with a tear in my eye, consigned the old frame to the trash.
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