Two-wheeler #4

All youse folks out there are riding your bikes a lot more than I am, 'cuz I'm scared to be out in the wind and dust which could bugger up my eyes as they're healing. But I may have found a bit of an outlet.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend dug a bike out of a storage closet at Stanford and gave it to me. It's an old English 3-speed of some kind. I was thinking of calling it Humphrey or Reginald or something equally hoity-toity English, but I'm actually just going to call it Slow.

Slow is a bit of a mongrel: he came with a black frame, a blue fork, and a red fender with a Triumph badge on it ("Nottingham, England"). The rear 3-speed internal hub is stamped with a "69", so it was built in 1969. However, the frame serial number on the seat lug is a six-digit number starting with 8, no letters. If Slow's frame is really from the Raleigh factory, that would put its date of manufacture sometime in 1925. Sadly, someone took off the headbadge, so it's hard to really ID the frame.

Slow's cables, brakes, grips, and tires were all in pretty poor shape, so I've replaced those--with no regard to using genuine stuff: the goal is rideability. All went well, except for the shifter cable which doesn't match up with a modern derailleur cable, so for now Slow is a single-speed. Slow also has significant mechanical losses in the headset, bottom bracket, and hubs, so Slow is, appropriately, slow. Slow and I did go on about a 12-mile jaunt up and down the Los Gatos creek trail today that took about 2 h. Some cx-like dismounts on the uphills were necessary; I think Slow is stuck in its 133% "speedy" gear. Need to work on getting that shifting working. For now, riding Slow slowly is good--gotta keep the sweat and dust outta my eyes.