What arrived: a frame inventory and a list of what is wrong
The bicycle came out of a relative’s shed on a Saturday afternoon in June, in the back of a borrowed estate car, with a cloud of dust and a smell of old rubber. This is the inventory I made that evening on the garage floor, before touching anything, so that there is a record of where this started.
The frame is lugged steel, a 58 cm seat tube measured center to top, 56 cm top tube, with a chromed fork and chromed rear triangle under the rust. The paint is a dark metallic blue where it survives, which is about two thirds of the main triangle, and bare brown steel at the chainstays and under the down tube cable guides. Decals are gone except for a ghost outline on the seat tube. There is no visible dent or ripple in any tube, and the fork blades are straight by eye and when checked with a string line from the dropouts to the head tube.
What is attached, and in what state:
- Wheels: 27 inch, 36 spokes each, steel rims with a brake track worn into a shallow groove; tires fused to the rims and cracked through
- Drivetrain: double crankset, 52 and 42 teeth, a six-speed freewheel from 14 to 28, chain rusted into a single rigid loop
- Brakes: side-pull calipers, both pivots seized, pads hardened into something like old plastic
- Bars and stem: alloy, scuffed but sound; the stem bolt is rounded off
- Seatpost: aluminum, seized completely in the seat tube
- Headset: turns, but with a notch at straight ahead where the bearings have brinelled the races
The order of work, as I see it tonight: free the seatpost before anything else, because if the frame is unusable there is no point in the rest. Then strip everything down to the bare frame and assess the paint. Then bearings, in order of difficulty: headset, bottom bracket, hubs. Then wheels, which may mean new rims. Then brakes, cables, bar tape, and a saddle. I am giving myself two years and I expect to need all of it. The frame weighed 2.4 kg on the kitchen scale with the fork still in it, which is about right for the tubing I think it is, and that number is the main reason I am bothering.