Making sleeve from salvaged junker

It's amazing how I keep stumbling upon the raw materials for this project. Today my daughter's tiny pink bike was saved from destruction by my discovery of an ancient Murray road bike frame in a neighbor's trash pile.

From Recumbent Bike Project

I went all around it with my calipers and found that the seat tube ought to be the right size for the sleeve piece to join the bottom bracket piece to the headset piece in the first assembly. So I cut a length of about 12" from the seat tube and tried to slide it into the Raleigh tubing. No go. Very close but it didn't fit. I guess those hundredths of an inch on the caliper mattered after all. Hmmm. It occurred to me that the crusty old paint on the tube might be the problem, so I grabbed a piece of 50 grit sandpaper and started doing the shoe-shine motion on it. Didn't take long for gleaming silver steel to appear.

From Recumbent Bike Project

Not only was it beautiful under that paint, it FIT right into the Raleigh tubes! Fit like a glove. This was very satisfying.