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Articles about Bicycle Tinkering for Do-It-Yourselfers
by Sheldon "Wrench" Brown

To invent, you need a good imagination
and a pile of junk. --Thomas Edison

Convert an old clunker to taste the fixed-gear experience.

Would you like to upgrade the gear system of a beloved older bike? Re-spacing the rear triangle can make this possible, and you can do it yourself!

Nottingham-built Raleigh bikes used a number of unique, proprietary threadings and dimensions, making it difficult, but not impossible, to upgrade them with modern parts. This article covers the pitfalls and strategies for dealing with them.

It is theoretically possible to convert a Sturmey-Archer AW three-speed hub into a two-speed fixed gear.

The Raleigh Twenty has a stiffer frame than most similar-looking folders of its era, and has good riding characteristics. With upgraded parts, they can perform pretty well for not too much money.

This article describes one way of building a tandem by grafting two solos together. The resulting tandem will not have the ride quality nor the reliability of a multi-thousand-dollar tandem from a tandem specialist builder. It will, however, be superior to many "serious" tandems of the 1970's and earlier.

If you like strange bikes, you would like my Fixed/free mountain bike. It has a truly weird drive train!

It has a "flip-flop" (reversible) hub, which is threaded for a freewheel on one side, and a fixed sprocket on the other. It has a 2-speed freewheel, so, depending on how you look at it, it is a 1-speed, a 2-speed or a 3-speed...

Being a firm believer that nothing exceeds like excess, I turned my O.T.B. into a bit of a project bike. When Specialized introduced the Saturne X-22 rim, the first really light, narrow 559 mm (26" mtb size) (unless you count the handmade cut-down Bontragers) I bought a pair of them, a pair of Panaracer 26x 1.5 radial tires, and built her up as a 63 speed machine using a Sturmey-Archer AW 3-speed hub, with a 7 sprocket cluster and triple chainwheel (3 X 7 X 3 = 63!)

I own far too many bikes, none of which is even vaguely stock. I love them all, and can't bear to part with them.

A not-very-elegant, but cheap and effective way to improve the braking on bicycles which require long-reach caliper brakes.

This article describes one way to make a jig to hold cantilever bosses in place while brazing them on to a frame.

In the 1980s, I wrote a regular monthly column in Bicycling magazine, on maintenance and repair, particularly focussed on the selection and use of tools. While some of this material is rather dated, much of it isn't. Since some of these articles deal with topics that are not covered in such depth elsewhere in this site, I'm putting them online.