Steve Malkin
Veteran
- Location
- Cheshire
Well it's certainly not a classic, and it hardly even qualifies as 'vintage' (1988 model) but I thought I'd tell the story and see if anyone else is similarly afflicted.
When I decided to get fitter and loose some weight a few years ago, I had an old Peugeot 10 speed bike that had been gently rusting away in the garden shed for the last 20 years, so I dug it out washed it and put on some new tyres and tubes from Halfords and wobbled off around the local park a few times.
It was pretty awful to be honest, the gears had a mind of their own, the chain skipped if you put too much pressure on the pedals and the cacophony of squeaks, rattles and groans (from both the bike and me!) was fairly deafening. At the time however I knew nothing about even the most basic bike maintenance, so short of spaying WD-40 over anything that moved I didn't know what to do.
SWMBO took pity on me and authorised the purchase of a new bike - Happy days!!
I bought a new Dawes Discovery 601 hybrid which was (and still is) lovely. The Peugeot was consigned back to the garden shed and forgotten about for another couple of years...
Owning the Dawes got me enthused about bikes and cycling and I gradually taught myself how to maintain it properly and built up a collection of tools and my confidence grew. Just before Christmas last year I decided that with my new found knowledge I might be able to fettle up that old peugeot and use it as a runaround when the weather was too bad to use the 'new' bike, so out of the shed it came and I stripped it down and started fettling....
The first time round I simply dismantled it, cleaned and polished everything, re-greased it and put it all back together again, the only new bits being a complete new set of inner and outer cables.
That got the bike running really quite nicely, and any sane person would probably have stopped at that point and been satisfied.
The bike was running much better than it had before, but there was still a tendency for the chain to skip in high gear when cranking hard, and the old Weinmann side pull brakes were next to useless compared to the hydraulic disks on the Dawes (probably not helped by fossilised 25 year old brake blocks)
So, a new set of Tektro R556 calipers went on (huge improvement, but still nothing like the bite of the dawes disks) and the drive train was pulled apart again and inspected to try and diagnose the skipping issue.
The skipping was eventually traced to a slightly bent rear axle, but whilst I had it all striped down I decided I would like to upgrade the old Sachs-Huret derailleurs with some nicer Shimano 'Golden Arrow' components I'd spied on EBay. Those looked so nice I then decided that a new chainset was called for and found a Shimano 105 item with biopace chainrings. Of course the new chainset needed a different axle length to keep the chainline correct, so the old cup and axle BB was replaced with a sealed unit cartridge. Then I decided the old spokes looked a bit grotty, so I thought I'd have a go at rebuilding the wheels with some nice new stainless steel ones... I wont go on, I think you get the idea.....
The long and short of it is that I've probably spent far more time and money on this old bike now than it would ever be worth if I sold it, but I really don't care!
My reasoning? - OK. so the spendometer is probably running at about £200 for all the stuff I've done, but look at what I've got for that:
I now have a bike that is running beautifully, no rattles, squeaks or buzzes, the only sound you can hear is the noise of the wind humming through the forks, I like that.
I have learned a tremendous amount in the process, every single nut and bolt on this bike has been dismantled and put back together several times over and I now understand how everything works in a way that you only get from actually doing it, never from reading books.
I would never have dared to do half of the things I have done on this bike with my 'new' bike for fear of wrecking something, but on an old bike the stakes are much lower so you feel free to 'have a go'
Last but not least, it's been great fun!
Here's a few pictures to show you how she looks now, I don't have any of her in 'shed' condition I'm afraid.
Daft as it may seem, I now find myself taking this old bike out in preference to the Dawes, I love the comfy ride that the steel frame gives (though it's nothing special - 'carbolite+' which I believe is the French for 'le gaspipe') and I actually prefer the look of the older bike, the new one has no chrome or polished alloy, it's all satin finish paint and plastic, far less satisfying to polish than the old pug.
Bottom line is that if I had to take one of the bikes out in foul weather now it would be the Dawes and not this one
So there you have it, the sorry tale of my fall into old bike addiction. Heaven knows how bad I'd be if I ever got my hands on a really nice old bike, but for the time being I'm quite happy with my old gaspipe Peugeot, I think it's luuurve...
Does anyone else have similar tales of lavishing too much care and attention on the kind of bikes other people turn their noses up at?
When I decided to get fitter and loose some weight a few years ago, I had an old Peugeot 10 speed bike that had been gently rusting away in the garden shed for the last 20 years, so I dug it out washed it and put on some new tyres and tubes from Halfords and wobbled off around the local park a few times.
It was pretty awful to be honest, the gears had a mind of their own, the chain skipped if you put too much pressure on the pedals and the cacophony of squeaks, rattles and groans (from both the bike and me!) was fairly deafening. At the time however I knew nothing about even the most basic bike maintenance, so short of spaying WD-40 over anything that moved I didn't know what to do.
SWMBO took pity on me and authorised the purchase of a new bike - Happy days!!
I bought a new Dawes Discovery 601 hybrid which was (and still is) lovely. The Peugeot was consigned back to the garden shed and forgotten about for another couple of years...
Owning the Dawes got me enthused about bikes and cycling and I gradually taught myself how to maintain it properly and built up a collection of tools and my confidence grew. Just before Christmas last year I decided that with my new found knowledge I might be able to fettle up that old peugeot and use it as a runaround when the weather was too bad to use the 'new' bike, so out of the shed it came and I stripped it down and started fettling....
The first time round I simply dismantled it, cleaned and polished everything, re-greased it and put it all back together again, the only new bits being a complete new set of inner and outer cables.
That got the bike running really quite nicely, and any sane person would probably have stopped at that point and been satisfied.
The bike was running much better than it had before, but there was still a tendency for the chain to skip in high gear when cranking hard, and the old Weinmann side pull brakes were next to useless compared to the hydraulic disks on the Dawes (probably not helped by fossilised 25 year old brake blocks)
So, a new set of Tektro R556 calipers went on (huge improvement, but still nothing like the bite of the dawes disks) and the drive train was pulled apart again and inspected to try and diagnose the skipping issue.
The skipping was eventually traced to a slightly bent rear axle, but whilst I had it all striped down I decided I would like to upgrade the old Sachs-Huret derailleurs with some nicer Shimano 'Golden Arrow' components I'd spied on EBay. Those looked so nice I then decided that a new chainset was called for and found a Shimano 105 item with biopace chainrings. Of course the new chainset needed a different axle length to keep the chainline correct, so the old cup and axle BB was replaced with a sealed unit cartridge. Then I decided the old spokes looked a bit grotty, so I thought I'd have a go at rebuilding the wheels with some nice new stainless steel ones... I wont go on, I think you get the idea.....
The long and short of it is that I've probably spent far more time and money on this old bike now than it would ever be worth if I sold it, but I really don't care!
My reasoning? - OK. so the spendometer is probably running at about £200 for all the stuff I've done, but look at what I've got for that:
I now have a bike that is running beautifully, no rattles, squeaks or buzzes, the only sound you can hear is the noise of the wind humming through the forks, I like that.
I have learned a tremendous amount in the process, every single nut and bolt on this bike has been dismantled and put back together several times over and I now understand how everything works in a way that you only get from actually doing it, never from reading books.
I would never have dared to do half of the things I have done on this bike with my 'new' bike for fear of wrecking something, but on an old bike the stakes are much lower so you feel free to 'have a go'
Last but not least, it's been great fun!
Here's a few pictures to show you how she looks now, I don't have any of her in 'shed' condition I'm afraid.
Daft as it may seem, I now find myself taking this old bike out in preference to the Dawes, I love the comfy ride that the steel frame gives (though it's nothing special - 'carbolite+' which I believe is the French for 'le gaspipe') and I actually prefer the look of the older bike, the new one has no chrome or polished alloy, it's all satin finish paint and plastic, far less satisfying to polish than the old pug.
Bottom line is that if I had to take one of the bikes out in foul weather now it would be the Dawes and not this one
So there you have it, the sorry tale of my fall into old bike addiction. Heaven knows how bad I'd be if I ever got my hands on a really nice old bike, but for the time being I'm quite happy with my old gaspipe Peugeot, I think it's luuurve...
Does anyone else have similar tales of lavishing too much care and attention on the kind of bikes other people turn their noses up at?
Might buy an old bike like this and take it in bits and just try teach my self how to repair it!
