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@MrE
I should have been taking photos as I went along: too late for that, so a wordy start instead. “You’ve got enough left over bits to make a whole new bike” was MrsE’s accusation - close to the truth, and confirmed by a discrete inventory of parts acquired but not used and still too good to throw away. I’d also liked the look of various path racer builds but couldn’t justify cost or dedication to do it properly. Given our apparent lack of space, a cunning plan was needed, namely hiding spare parts in plain sight.
Parts to be ‘hidden’:
For a 1950s Phillips (now sporting a Trojan Mini Motor) I had a crankset, pedals, stem, north Road bars and grips.
From the ‘rebuilding my student bike’ efforts were 27 x 1 ¼ steel wheels and mismatched tyres, Raleigh, mid 1980s.
Brakes and levers (one anyway) remaining from when I restored a Mobylette AV42.
A saddle was contrived from bits of two damaged Brooks, apparently B17 Narrow from the 1950s, reassembled with oversize rivets to compensate for wear around the original rivet holes.
The freewheel was left over from a BMX based shopping bike, which was later converted to 2x5 speed. 16T is a bit high for my legs and the local hills, but to change it will mean spending money and that’s not the game. Yet.
I was ‘missing’ a frame, until persistence with e-bay found a Falcon in a sorry state, complete with bottom bracket and cottered spindle, much rust and a few other components. £20 later I had something with Falcon stickers and no sign of Ernie Clements, so I’m guessing mid to late ‘80s.
The frame and forks were stripped to bright metal with an angle grinder / wire brush, braze-ons removed, and primed with Kurust before brush painting with three coats of enamel. The painted parts were left to harden hanging in the loft, where temperatures exceed 40oC in summer. The original plan was to cut the paint back, but I’m leaving it to see how it wears before investing time in polishing.
Assembly went predictably: the Phillips stem would not give sufficient reach, so an alloy stem came out of the parts box, with beer can shims to make up the difference in bar diameter.
The pedals have rubber blocks, worn smooth top and bottom. Grinding the rivets out allowed the bearings to be greased and the blocks rotated before re-assembling with artisan bolts (the ground down rivet with a threaded extension brazed on) leaving each pedal serviceable and service-able.
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