L'Eroica Dreams

When my friends and I started riding bicycles together as adults, we became almost as interested in maintaining our bikes as riding them. We strove to keep races and cones polished to a mirror finish. We exalted in clean chains and shiny seat stems. We labored to be sure that hubs rotated effortlessly, maintaining the delicate balance between loose cones and frictionless tolerances.

Campagnolo Nuovo Record Pedal

We would overhaul our bicycles for nearly any reason. Just completed a long ride? Better check the bottom bracket. Returned home in a sudden downpour? Break down the hubs and repack the bearings. We learned these simple mechanical adjustments and procedures through some guidance from others and trial and error. There was one task, though, that we would delay until the inevitable long ride in pouring rain occurred, and often not then: overhauling pedals.

Our bicycling experiences, on the road and with wrenches, occurred in that time when all bearings were loose and most problems could be cured with a few wrenches. The late ’70’s witnessed the rise of sealed and cartridge bearings, but certainly not under the Campagnolo banner, the place where we were hanging out. Even knockoffs of Campy components stayed true to the free bearing pledge.

That’s fine and it makes for easy maintenance until you get to the pedals. The pedals required a deftness with assembly and tuning that defied the simplicity we experienced with hubs or bottom brackets. One pedal would have 20-24 loose, small ball bearings and sometimes not equally distributed from the crank arm side to the outside. Achieving a smooth, near-frictionless spin on the pedal seemed to take forever.
So, we figured we’d let the pedals go until they had been beaten by all of the elements to the point of no return. That may have been why, when I first assembled the Moseman, it did not have Campy pedals. Why put all that money into something I planned to ignore?

The Moseman today is a hybrid or a Frankenstein. Speedplay X-1 or some other fast sounding product name adorn the crank arms. For L’Eroica, those must be set aside and my choice was to find a good, though not perfect, set of Campy pedals. After several eBay searches and purchases, I found them. I settled on Nuovo Record just because they had a certain style that I liked. And, I believed I could make them turn just like Super Record pedals because of all of those years working on my own bicycles.

If the Flickr Photostream could talk, it would tell you that the time between the first few shots of the assembly until the last shots of the finished goods was about three (3) hours. I don’t think I can expect any offers from any racing teams taking that much time to put 48 bearings back in place. During the process, I managed to spill half the bearings, crawling on my hands and knees to recover the one last bearing that would make the set. And, just like a beginner, I managed to put the left spindle in the right hand cage and vice versa, requiring a complete disassembly and reassembly. But, they are done and soon, the Moseman will sport an age-appropriate set of pedals.