Worked on the Sekai ATB over the weekend, thought I'd talk a little about what I did:
Disassembled the Bottom Bracket and Headset and repacked the bearings with grease. Not a complicated job, took me about 35 minutes or so. On the headset there was no lube on the ball bearings. The BB wasn't much better.
Here's the tip, don't buy bicycle grease, go to an automotive parts store and buy a tub of what they have there, it's cheaper and works well:
While I'm talking about grease and bottom brackets, I always wear latex gloves when doing this sort of stuff. Makes clean up a lot quicker.
Next, often old seat tubes are not very clean ---- dirt mixes with grease and sits in there and makes a weird paste that can sometimes make it difficult to get the correct size seat post in the tube. Other times, that greasey dirt will scratch up your new or old seat post. To help with this, I have made this seat tube "reamer". It's a piece of wooden dowel that I can chuck into my drill, the working end has a slit that's about three inches long, a zip tie at the bottom insures that the slit doesn't keep splitting. I fold a piece of aggressive sandpaper, put on another zip tie and go to town:
I hold the drill with my right hand, I put a leather glove on my left and loosely hold the wooden shaft and sand the inside of the seat tube. Doing this on the Sekai produced a ton of rust colored dust but also got it super smooth.
The rust dust reminded me that some JP Weigle's frame saver would be a good next step:
I bought this can like years ago when I built up that Colnago Cyclocross bike, remember that? Let the frame saver dry for a few hours then lubed up the old seatpost and it slid super smooth into the seat tube.
Anyway, here's where things are now, just waiting for my big parts order from Niagara:
I had the Velo Orange saddle sitting in a drawer, that I was going to use on another project but never did.
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