When I were a lad................

[Archie_tect]

Me too... anyone want to buy them?

 

[Davidc]

Sold my set. Made a loss.

For years I used a moped front light and a trailer back light with a higher than original power bulb and a lead acid Honda 50 battery to power them. OK for up to about 3 hours.

Otherwise it was dynamo lighting, but nowhere near as good as modern versions.

 

[fossyant]

God those ever-ready lights cost me as much to run as my paper round as a kid...terrible.

 

[gbb]

Similar to NTs..we took our bikes to the local blacksmiths (now how many young people have ever come into contact with a smithy) and got him to extend our forks, we then fitted Chopper style saddles, apehanger bars and ridiculously small front wheels.
Didnt look as good as NTs though...

 

[Davidc]

God those ever-ready lights cost me as much to run as my paper round as a kid...terrible.

Good pay rates for paper rounds in your area then?

 

[totallyfixed]

3 gears back then, no gears now, gently regressing. Progress eh?

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

Angel Delight for pudding.

Ooh yes, perfect after a Vesta Curry.

1969 would have been around the time that I first got into riding. Campag was still (just about) affordable, centre pull brakes were must have items (I liked them - where did they go?), and decent bikes had double clangers (none of that triple, double or compact nonsense) and crossbars instead of top tubes. As schoolkids, we'd cycle down to the coast on a weekend, buy some fish and chips and drink a bottle of pop before turning around and heading back to London. In jeans - none of that padded shorts stuff.

I reckon I'm still trying to get back to the simplicity of riding in those days. I don't miss cotter pins though. They were designed to torment me.

 

[Globalti]

My pal and I fished an old delivery bike frame out of the river and sawed off the basket bit. The RH crank had rubbed a hole clean through the chainstay so I took it to the village blacksmith, who brazed... yes, built up about a square inch of braze and filled the hole. We fitted a rear wheel with a Sturmey Archer hub and a front wheel off my brother's small bike, rod brakes actuated by cable, apehanger bars and a home-made chopper seat. Then we fitted a big chrome roadster light on the front running off a dynamo. Kewl, it was. Sadly when we moved up to Newcastle it got stolen from the cellar of our house while we were having Sunday dinner in the room above, along with my regular roadster and my sister's roadster. They were recovered on the Town Moor with the brakes cut but I never saw the chopper again.

As a footnote, when we moved from Oxfordshire up to Newcastle in the early seventies my Mum asked for a glass of lager in a pub and the barman replied "Sorry Pet, only bitta, we don't get many ladies in here!" We lived about three miles from school up the A1 and on the first day at our new school it was only natural for me and my sister to cycle. I can remember the shock of the girls in her class that she had turned up on a bicycle and of course she never cycled to school again.

 

[kettle]

I cycled the machine on my profile photo

 

[Fnaar]

I occasionally fiddled with my Chopper when I was younger...

 

[Archie_tect]

My dad's a bit deaf, I got a step-through shopper.

 

[MontyVeda]

This was all fields.

this was all ice!