French Threads

so there's a bike on the bay. kinda crazy looking purple french number. and am kind of tempted.

but all french threads... how easy/difficult would it be to get replacement parts as and when. i recall Hippy warning people away from a French threaded raleigh the other day.

is it tres difficult to get parts? anyone?

http://sheldonbrown.com/harris/french-cranks.html#bottom

Phil have mounting brackets for Frenchies.. not sure about headset threading.. I just tend to avoid anything French threaded.
http://sheldonbrown.com/harris/bottombrackets.html#phil

cheers hippy, a quick search on ebay only pulled up an old stronglight bb. i think the rarity of such things means the sensible thing is to swerve french threads.

i do hate being sensible though

I'm Captain Sensible. Sorry about that.

Yeah, I'd avoid French threaded stuff unless you have a ready source of parts. BBs can be bodged together, but headsets and stems can be a real pain to find.

i used to have 2 dead french bikes with BBs and head sets but i got rid of them...

Yeah steer clear of french threads, its not worth it!

c'est trés trés trés difficile...

I think it's possible to re cut the threads to british standard but it the cost involved that would be a problem. I know somebody did to an old peugeot. They also had to do some serious work to the seatpost because of the odd size.

You can definitely convert French to Italian threading, to quote Leonard Zinn:

"Italian thread is 36mm X 24tpi (36mm diameter, 24 threads per inch), and since 36mm is a millimeter larger than your 35mm French shell, you could tap it out to that size and put a 1mm spacer on either side to deal with the 70mm shell width for which Italian bottom brackets are designed. "

Sheldon has a good article on French bikes:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/velos.html

Anything is possible.. it'd just have to be a fscking great bike to bother with all the French thread fixes necessary. There aren't that many I'd bother with.

Bloody french.

nimhbus Bloody french.

you know the bloody french have this expression for the ladies' monthly - "the english are coming"?

makes sense.

well with less than 7 hours to go noone has bid on the lecoulant yet
this rosbif is still kind of tempted despite the frenchness of it all.
and yes, i know purple is just plain wrong