Last fall, I "rescued" a 1982 Univega Grand Rally that had been sitting behind a neighbor's storage shed for a few years. The frame looked good until I took off the clamp on shifters. Somebody had crudely cut off the shifter bosses that had been brazed onto the frame, leaving deep gouges and some holes in the frame tubing.
I was crushed, because I really like model of bike. It's an under-appreciated Japanese frame with functional but not overly expensive parts, and I really liked the ride of it when I was assembling them at Velo Sport in 1982. I was not sure what I was going to do with it with the frame damage, so I just hung it in the garage.
Fortunately, one of my wheel students, Hal Bielstein, is a frame builder and needed a pair of wheels I had in stock. Hal said the right way to fix the frame was to use some Cycle Designs Fillet Pro to fill the voids, then file and sand it down to be smooth.
Hal and I had also been talking about Peter Weigle's 650B conversions. I like the idea. A performance oriented frame with fat compliant tires set up for road riding. I was going to shoehorn some long-reach brakes on the bike, and make do with the brake bridge where it is, but Hal is going to do the job right.
When this bike is complete, it will become one of my permanent collection. I have bought and sold dozens of bikes over the years, and kept a few for a long time, but have now decided that instead of the "serial collecting" and the random piling up of nice bikes that were good deals, I will assemble a small collection of elegant machines and just keep them. The Univega will be one of those. I will write about the others anon.
No comments:
Post a Comment