Wiggins Rouen 540 rebuild project

Just finished building up a tiny Wiggins road bike that I found in a charity shop, for my 7 year old son. Picked the bike up for £120, but it needed new levers, saddle, and bartape (incomprehensibly for a junior bike, the original tape is white!). The new 1x8 levers from Microshift are slightly improved over the originals, as they now have a gear adjuster in the shifter rather than using an inline adjuster. They work well with the Claris rear derailleur. The saddle is a HUP Gravel, junior sized but feeling quite high spec, doesn't look quite as nice as the stylish original Wiggins saddle but it is a step up in quality. Also found really nice woven bartape (cork-backed for comfort) in matching colours from BLB. Overall, the cost of restoring it was comparable to the retail price of the bike, new - although the finished build is different to the original spec and improved in some areas, and they don't seem to be available new, any more. There are certainly fancier road and gravel bikes for kids (the new disc brake Isla Roadlocravel bikes are superb) and great second hand deals on Isla and Frog bikes, but the Rouen is about the smallest frame to take 540C/24" wheels, and switching to a different 20" wheel frame that he'd quickly grow out of, seemed pointless.

I flipped the stem to make the reach a bit easier, and added BLB interrupter brakes, both of which were to make the transition to a road bike a bit more manageable after years riding a Frog hybrid rented from Wheelie Tots, and after a rough assembly I took it to my mate Diego at London Bike Studio to learn how to set up and adjust the gears, and to wrap the bartape properly - when I last tried to do figure of 8 wraps I was using the Brooks synthetic leather tape, and I actually nearly ended up crying (at 3am, in my kitchen, surrounded by spirals of incompliant tapes). The BLB woven tape also has a bad reputation on this front, but it is nowhere near as difficult as the Brooks tape. Diego at LBS also had some coloured gear and brake outers that worked well with the colour scheme and just elevated the finished build a little.

One thing I would note is that while the bars are a fairly standard 25.4mm clamp diameter, the steerer is almost incomprehensibly the old 1 inch threadless standard - despite the head tube looking like it would fit 1 1/8 and the headset thus being a weird thing that bridges the two. This means that if you wanted to shorten the stem a bit there is basically no option to do so, unless there are stem shims for this sort of thing, which I've never encountered.

He rode it to school this morning, absolutely thrilled with it!

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My son's got the smaller version (Chartres I think), and is also very happy with it. Having looked at alternatives, the Wiggins kids bikes seem to come at very decent prices second hand, and seem pretty good (from what I can tell) compared to the more expensive brands.

I think new they were priced very competitively with other 'serious' kids' bikes like Isla Bikes and Frog, or Hoy. But yeah, they do seem to be cheap on the second hand market, possibly because nice as they are (I think they're nice enough, given how quickly kids will grow out of them, but they're not super-fancy), they get assembled by Halfords...they had somehow fucked up the star-fangled nut on the one I got...

Up until now we have stuck with second hand Frog bikes, or leased Frogs from Wheelie Tots. They're excellent bikes, perhaps not quite as high end as Isla Bikes.

All that said you can currently get some steep discounts on new Isla Bikes, particularly their road/cross/gravel models. I can't spend 800 quid on a kids' bike, but £399 is in the realms of possibility.

https://www.islabikes.co.uk/collections/childrens-road-bikes

Great build, I’m looking for similar for my son as he’s starting doing a few tris and duathlons. Agreed that the wiggins bikes seem to come up cheap, as do Dawes kids cross bikes near us but those Isla bikes are tempting at half price!