Winter Bike

As the evenings draw down and the days shorten, thoughts turn to unearthing the winter bike. We have not had much of a summer here, generally very wet. The trees started losing their leaves at the end of July, to the point, a maple in the garden is nearly in winter mode apart from the seeds still on the tree.

I suppose it is a left over of my cycling apprenticeship of decades ago, where you had a heavier winter, or hack bike, equipped with mudguards, on which to maintain fitness, keeping your prize machine in good trim for the following racing season. The other reason was using your heavier hack bike would give you an advantage when you changed to your lighter race bike at the start of the new race season.

I started off my cycling career a Hi-Ten Raleigh sports bike and covered thousands of miles on this humble machine. My winter bike was purchased secondhand in the 1980s as a complete bike. Bike was stripped and frame painted by hand. It was a cheap sports bike, confirmed when I stripped the frame to reveal seamed frame tubes. It has had a number of repaints since and still going strong. The bike originally was fitted with a double chainset and Suntour derailleur gears. I had the frame professionally re-enamelled by Bob Jackson years ago, taking advantage of their £50 re-enamelling offer. I chose to have the frame painted black with a maroon headtube, reminiscent of the 1930s BSA Sports.

Around 2009 I rebuilt the bike as a fixed gear machine. It rode well enough in this trim except for the fact my arthritic knees protested at the fixed gear. I liked the fact there was no derailleur gears and freewheel block to attract road dirt and the workings affected by winter road salt. I needed a freewheel to ease the workload on my knees and would like a few gears, but keeping the simple drive train. The solution suggested itself when I rescued a 1960s Sturmey-Archer AW3 wheel dumped in a local bog. The challenge was, could I strip it down and get it going again? I managed to achieve the first and following a thorough clean achieved the second, however the left hand ball cup was badly worn. The hub was the Mk3 with the pressed in ball cup and the bottom gear would never work. I aimed to have a middle gear of around 60 inches, with a top gear under 80 inches. Sturmey-Archer 3 speed hubs tended to be fitted to bikes with too high a gear in my opinion. I ended up fitting a 22T sprocket to my hub gear.

I also took the opportunity when converting the bike to hub gear operation, to build a new front wheel too, incorporating a Novatec hub dynamo. These were getting long in the tooth when I bought mine and could be bought cheaply on ebay. The downside of the hub was the resistance in the dynamo when riding with lights off. It is not actually such a drawback riding with the lights permanently on as the short days and overcast weather mean you are more easily noticed by motor vehicles. Whether they actually make room for you on the road is another matter…..

I used Busch and Muller LED lights on the bike and routed the twin wire cables on the outside of the plastic mudguards. I used pieces of plastic tube glued to the mudguard with epoxy to retain the wires. The tubing came from used liquid soap bottles, being the bottom part of the soap dispenser assembly. Not very elegant, but it works and is in keeping with my bargain basement ethos for my winter bike. I still have the adapted Ever Ready plastic rear light fitted to my old 1970s Carradice Nelson longflap saddlebag. The light was fitted to a custom made aluminium bracket which fits into the offside side pocket of the saddlebag. I always found it useful to have a rear light on the offside of the bike as well as the central rear light. No excuse for a motor vehicle not to give you enough room when passing.

The parts fitted to my bike have all been cascaded down from other bikes over the years, except the wheels and mudguards. The seatpost is an old alloy SR Laprade fluted model. The headset is an old 'Red S' sold by Freewheel in their mail order catalogue. It was actually a Stronglight A9 needle bearing alloy and plastic copy. The cranks are odd cranks, the right being an SR Custom fitted with a single chain ring and the left a Stronglight. They are the same length though! Bars were a modern replacement 44cm for the old narrow SR bars. The stem is 3T. The saddle is an old Cinelli off my MKM racing bike and is now worth too much to leave it on my bike. I have an old Brooks B17 to replace it with. The Cinelli will be re-used in a restoration.

I always like the idea of the old Sturmey-Archer 3 speed quadrant lever mounted on the top tube of bikes in the 1930s. I couldn't get any modern lever to fit onto the top tube of my bike. Instead I used a lever designed for use on 22mm handlebars on the handlebar stem of my bike, with a cable stop on the top tube and the cable routed via a pulley wheel down the seat stay to the dropout. An old fashioned idea, which works well and looks neat on the bike. I will rebuild the back wheel with a new Sturmey-Archer 3 speed hub gear in the next few weeks, so the bike will be ready for when BST ends.

1925 Raleigh Roadster

It is one of the dilemmas that any collector or restorer of old bicycles faces at some stage, to restore or not? I received a 1925 Raleigh bike for some repairs last year. The bicycle had great sentimental value to the owner. It had belonged to his uncle from new and had been his uncle's main form of transport for most of his working life. The bicycle had been ridden at least 44 miles return journey, daily to work, carrying his tools and his 'piece'. The wheels had been renewed in the 1950s judging from the date code on the Sturmey Archer hubs. This would equate to a major overhaul of the bike and probable conversion to a three speed gear, from single speed, after roughly 25 years of use.  The rear wheel was a quality Raleigh product, 40 hole stainless steel Westwood rim, laced with stainless steel spokes into a Sturmey Archer AW hub. The front wheel was a very rusty chrome Westwood rim, laced with equally rusty spokes into a Sturmey Archer GH6 dynohub. 

My concern was to try and keep as much of the bike original as possible, but it was obvious that the hubs were in need of some attention. The bike was covered in a black oily filth which had protected the chrome plating on the hubs. Once the rear AW hub was opened, it was one of the dirtiest I have ever had to strip.

The component parts all had to be thoroughly cleaned to be able to assess the extent of the wear. What was obvious, following cleaning, that the cones were badly worn, along with the driver and ball ring. The springs all needed replacing as well. The axle threads were also very worn, but as the bike was only to be used occasionally, I decided to keep the axle as the sun pinion teeth were good. New parts were fitted and the hub internals re-assembled and lubricated. Once the completed internals were refitted into the hub shell, it was obvious the new parts had not removed all the play from the bearings. The left hand K517 ball cup was obviously very worn and tired from the heavy mileage it had endured. To top it all, the threads stripped on the axle when putting the wheel back into the frame. I wanted to keep the back wheel, so the AW was stripped down again. The left hand ball cup was removed after some reluctance.

A suitable spanner was used with an 'enforcer bar' to increase the leverage, so as to overcome the reluctance of the ball cup to screw out. A new old stock K517 ball cup was fitted after the hub shell threads had been thoroughly cleaned then greased. The hub gear internals were then stripped down again and a new axle fitted and the unit rebuilt. This was then inserted into the hub and quickly and easily adjusted. The indicator rod was then refitted, before the wheel was put back in the frame. The gear cable was then refitted to the indicator rod and adjusted so all the gears worked. I next started on the front wheel. The rim and spokes were both badly corroded. In addition the rim had a number of flats. I stripped the dynohub down to check the hub shell ball cups but these were worn out too. 

It was a case of find a replacement hubshell, fit new cones and refit the dynohub internals into the replacement hub shell. Once this was done, I built the hub into a new 32 hole 28 inch Westwood rim.

It was also necessary to fit a new front tyre. The new wheel was then refitted to the frame. I also fitted a new front mudguard at the request of the owner.

The bike was taken for a run to see that the gears worked properly. The headset and bottom bracket were both worn, with some play in the bearings, but this didn't have any adverse effect of the handling of the bike. Although very heavy by modern standards, the bike was actually very nice to ride unlike a modern heavy steel mountain bike. The bicycle felt lively and responsive to the pedalling input once the initial momentum had been gained. I can see how people toured on these roadster bikes 80 to 90 years ago. Although, not considered by some veteran bicycle aesthetics as being worth bothering with, who disparagingly refer to these machines as 'nondescript', due to the fact they were mass produced in a factory. These machines may have a low monetary value and lack the perceived cachet, or one upmanship of a rare brand or hand crafted bespoke frame, which some of these self appointed guardians, of taste and historical worth, espouse.  However, these humble machines do relate, very much, to social history. As the ordinary working man's transport before mass car ownership, they represented a considerable investment by the owner and were usually bought through the cycle manufacturer's hire purchase scheme, via their cycle agent. Their survival after decades of storage is an indication of the value in which they were held by their original owners. Where the history of a particular machine and it's owner is known, this can often open a historical window into the working and recreational life of the former owner.  As this machine predates the opening of the Raleigh factory in Dublin in the late 1930s, after which Raleigh increasingly had the lion's share of the Irish bicycle market,  the owner obviously made a conscious decision to purchase his Raleigh in a more varied and competitive bicycle market. It is now getting more unusual to find pre WW2 machines, as many older machines were scrapped as part of the wartime metal salvage campaign.  It was good to return an old veteran back into a rideable machine again.