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@trigs
Raleigh Chopper MK2 - my first unfinished project
Roll back about 20 years, I was an idiot pre-teen (standard) who was lucky enough to have parents keen to pull my face out of the Game Boy for ten minutes now and then. For my engineer stepdad, that took the form of introducing me to the mechanical bullshit he got up to back when he was my age. He used to tell me stories about him sending it down the local tip on his Raleigh Chopper, about how he snapped the frame and how his dad got the local blacksmith (!) to rebraze the joint so he could do it all again.
He eventually moved onto a 10 speed road bike and then drifted into driving shitbox cars around the rural Essex lanes as was a rite of passage for a man of his age, but the Chopper antics stuck with him. So one day he turned up at home with this lightly used mark 2 Chopper, and the plan was for us to work on it together.
That never happened, as I moved onto my own 10 speed road bike antics and caused all sorts of fun problems as I rolled into my teens. The mechanical interest my stepdad sowed never went away, and I’ve since become a reasonably component bike mechanic, but the Chopper was left languishing in dry storage for a couple decades.
Now I’m in my thirties and a bit less of an idiot, I’ve decided it’s finally time to bring it back to life. I don’t have a kid who could have a dumb time riding it, and it’ll never be a good bike, but I want to finish the project… now I just need to find the money!
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