Arlecchino's consolidated CP Thread: mostly steel & outdated.

How did you go about destickering them? Big fan of how they look other than the terrible name in massive letters.

If you look closely, you can see that the letters are painted on an additional very thin layer of rubber. I carefully peeled off the edge of said layer and then proceeded to peel off the rest by hand.

Thanks! that's my weekend plans sorted then :/

Good luck! Keep in mind that the faux gumwall underneath is just yellow colour so it‘s really important to peel rather than rub as that will damage the yellow colour layer.

The Bottecchia got some updates:

• new wheels with 240s hubs
  
• Ditched the tektro 720 cantis and replaced them with some low profile cantis with salmon pads
  
• swapped the tiagra cranks for some classic deore DX triple cranks. Ditched the granny ring and set them up as a 48/34 double with a shorter BB spindle.
  
• Put on a brand new brooks swift which I got for free from a friend who got it on a new bike and instantly replaced it with a horrible gel saddle cause he didn‘t want to deal with the maintenance and braking in of a brooks saddle. His loss, my gain :)
  

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And I took the Giant on a tour from Berlin to San Sebastián which was great. The bike set-up was pretty old-school though and not very insta friendly:

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Couple months ago I found a trek 970 single track for 30€. Needless to say I couldn‘t resist at this price. Stripped the frame and built it up with available spare parts into a fun and reasonably lightweight singlespeed.

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All 3 of these bikes are insanely good. :) Bottecchia is still one of my biggest favs from the forum.

The Bottecchia is great indeed. You're lucky to have found it.

But that's one heck of a tour, from Berlin to San Sebastian. Can we read/see more about it somewhere?

That‘s too kind :) glad you haven‘t forgotten about it. I‘ve had it for around 5 years now, I think.

I haven’t written and posted anything about it yet. The route was in large part a combination of different Eurovelo routes cause I wanted to cover some distance without having to deal with traffic too much. I started in Berlin and mostly rode the EV2/EV3 to Bonn. From there I took the EV15 and rode southwards along the rhine and crossed into Switzerland to visit a friend in Zurich. From there I rode on the EV 6 through France and followed the Loire all the way to the Atlantic. From Saint-Nazaire I followed the Atlantic Coast Route EV1 to San Sebastian, then turned inland into the Pyrenees towards Pamplona and then Back into France on the EV3 Pilgrim’s Route.

In total I had 35 days of riding and about 10 rest days. Total distance covered was roughly 3800km with daily kms ranging between 60 and a little over 200. The latter was not really sustainable though on a schwalbe marathon plus equipped 26er on a multi-week tour :D I camped in the wild for the large part with the occassional night on a camp site when I needed a warm shower. Here’s some more impressions:

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And some more:

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Yesterday I did a quick 260km run to the polish border and back to Berlin on the Bottecchia. It felt really nice but I reckon some slighlty flared randonneur drop bars with a little more reach like the nitto b135aa might be a worthy upgrade.

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Amazing!!! This makes me want to go bike touring again

I have some nitto rando bars going spare if you want them

So good!

Same here... would be nice to „continue“ the tour next year starting in Biarritz and crossing the iberian peninsula towards Morocco.

Cheers!

Pmed you

Wow! so much envy! amazing trip!!

Thanks 🙏 and/or sorry for causing envy ;)

That's a wonderfully evocative set of snaps!

Bump!

Haven’t really had any new projects lately. I bought a CAAD 7 frame only to realize that I don’t have enough space for another bike - so I quickly sold it again. Other than that, I found a full Mavic SSC groupset locally with some more suitable bits for the Mécacycle slow-burner project (mavic 440 brake calipers, 840 rear derailleur, headset, indexed DT shifters). And yesterday I finally bought a front wheel with a SON dyno hub for my Batavus winter road bike as the battery powered lights barely last for a 60km evening round in the dark...

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