bike wank, part 3

[kirkcudbright]

1987 Raleigh Technium. Premium lugged steel, designed in England, manufactured in Kent, Washington, on March 28, 1987, according to Sheldon Brown. I bought this off a guy in the Want Advertiser sometime in the late '90's. (Hmm, that would actually put it before the Gary Fisher in the sequence. Oh well.)

Anyway, I bought it off this guy in the Want Advertiser, but I really shouldn't have bought this particular bike. It had what we call a theft-deterrrent paint job - spray-can yellow, not well masked, so I found bits of paint on non-frame parts of the bike. I also found evidence of a previous amateur red paint when I stripped it down to repaint it. Lord only knows what color it was originally. I tried to paint it with a black krinkle paint, but I didn't like how it came out, so I stripped it down again, and re-repainted it with a green/purple color-shifting paint, although it looks mostly black here. (I blogged it here, almost 2 years ago).

The funky handlebar is a Nitto Moustache Handlebar, from Rivendell. I like it, because it's weird and funky, and it's comfortable. Hidden behind the handlebars on the stem is a dingy-bell. Again, because it amuses me to have a racing bike with a dingy-bell.

This one is definitely designed for racing - you can see it in the head tube angle and the shallow rake of the fork. Or maybe you can't see it, but you can see how close the front wheel is to the down tube. That's supposed to make the bike handle more aggressively or something. I recently replaced the freewheel with one that has a decent climbing gear, because I occasionally ride in New England, where it's hilly.

This is also the bike I took to Britain for the amutee tour of Europe (blog starts here). Ultimately, it turned out to be the wrong bike for the job, because we routinely ran into stiffer (albeit shorter) climbs than I encountered crossing the Rockies.

It's not the bike I'm taking back to Britain, but it definitely has a place in the stable. It's the one I've put the most work into, and put the most modifications on, so it's the one I'm most invested in. So far, I've replaced the handlebars, saddle, freewheel, and shifters. I've also been thinking about changing the double crankset to a triple, which would mean replacing the bottom bracket and front derailleur as well. And maybe getting it professionaly painted.

If I had to have just one bike, this might lose out to the Bianchi (tomorrow's feature) on the grounds of sheer practicality, but it would make me sad. It's old and crufty, but so am I.