Chapter 7: I’M GOING TO BUILD WHAT NOW?

See, even once I’d made the decision on what type of bike to get (see here) the choices available remained quite extensive.  The terminology alone is enough to make your brain bleed. What for example does it mean when a bike is described as having a ‘slack head angle’? Is 120mm of travel a good thing or a bad thing? Is it necessarily good for a bike to have 87 different gears and am I less of a man if I have any gears at all?

Should I give a shit, or just Google ‘What is the best bicycle for a 45 year old man desperately trying regain a modicum of fitness before his body completely collapses between $2000 and $3000’ and buy whatever turns up as result no 1......Ok. I just did that and it turns out it was completely useless to me. I only got 13 results and none of them mentioned a bicycle at all. One of them even seemed to be in another language. Possibly Finnish. Arse.

Happily for me, the restrictions I placed on myself in order to ensure I don’t just buy a new shiny thing that gets parked somewhere and never used (see here) meant I had some time to spend on research. So research I did. I was able to discover for example that ‘slack head angle’ referred to the angle that the forks and head tube have in relation to the rest of the frame being less steep than on a bike with a ‘steep head angle’. If you want to go down hills very fast you want a slack head angle because it allows for greater control at speed and so on and so on. Makes it harder to go up a hill apparently. I quite like going down hills but have a philosophical issue with the idea of putting a bicycle in a car or a chairlift (of which there are precisely none in my local area) to get to top of them so this presents an issue for me personally.

See. Educational as.

It also turns out that more gears is not necessarily a good thing. My current bike has 21 gears but it seems that running a drive train with only 20 or even 10 gears can be just as effective when you look at the tooth spread available to you on modern and OH GEE is that the sound of left clicking mouses as my 15 strong readership abandons ship on account of not understanding what the hell I am talking about?

In short – there are lots of things to be taken into account and the more I read the less able I was to find an off the shelf bike that ticked all the boxes (can NOT believe I just wrote 'ticked all the boxes'. Matt'll be referring to Matt in the third person next.....dammit). 
So why not, (I thought at work one night at 3am in a building full of mentally ill people) build the thing myself?

Because I totally kick arse at making Lego.

And have you seen the new front door on our house.

This is an absolutely f**king BRILLIANT idea.

NEXT: Quick. Put down a deposit before you change your mind....