AngeLog

Bridgestone + Nitto + Brooks + more

Firstly, if anyone is restoring one of these bikes from scratch you might want to check out the old catalogues on the Sheldon Brown site.

While at Citizen Chain I collected a few random pieces for the bike. The Brooks standard B17 saddle (honey and men’s…. couldn’t see that I needed a specific women’s one), the MKS GR-9 platform pedals and MKS toe clips with brown leather trim.

So that still left a surprising number of parts to order online from Australia. With the generous help of Nick and Naomi I ordered the majority of the parts from Wiggle, Chain Reaction Cycles, Rivendell and Velo Orange.

The parts that didn’t fit…

Shimano BR-550 cantilever brakes. The original bike had cantis so I thought these would work. Turns out none of the newly made cantis will fit old bikes.

The beautiful Dia Compe brake levers from Velo Orange. The change in brakes meant that I had to change the brake levers too.

VO headset. I can’t remember why, but there was something non-standard about what the frame required. The frame is particularly short at the front so it may have been to do with the thread length.

The bits that did work…

The Nitto Randonneur drop bars, bought from Nick as they weren’t the right size for him.

The Nitto tall stem (26/70mm). A hard one to track down but worth it so that I didn’t go from a standard hybrid height to a super-low drop bar height. Also needed a shim to make the stem fit the 25.4mm bars.

The seat post is new-old-stock of the original Kalloy brand and was found on eBay. It’s 27mm rather than the more standard 26.2mm.

Dura Ace 9-speed bar end shifters. These are so nice to use. Indexed to click on the right but not for the three on the left.

Stronglight crankset (Impact Triple chainset 28/38/48 170mm). I was deciding between a double and triple. I rarely use the three cogs in my city commuting but I figured there was no harm in having the triple for the occasional country ride I might do. I was also looking at Sugino cranksets but this one is now discontinued so I got it for the super-cheap price of $45.

I ended up going for v-brakes when the cantilevers weren’t going to work. That meant the Cane Creek brake levers were my only option. At first this was a little disappointing, but now I appreciate that I have top quality brakes which stop really well. They give the bike a sportier look than I was originally going for with the brown but it works nicely.

The brakes I have are Avid Single Digit SL V Brakes with Kool Stop salmon pads.

SRAM 9-speed cassette. Went for the 9-speed to fit the bar end shifters. 11-32 was the spec… for reasons I can’t remember.

Jack Brown (green) tyres. These feel amazing. Well, it’s probably the combination of rims and hubs too, but they bounce so nicely.

Mavic Open Sport Pros spoked at Cheeky Monkey in Newtown (the people who also assembled the bike).

Ultegra front and rear hubs 32 hole

Tiagra front derailleur.

Shimano rear derailleur.

SRAM 9 chain.

Chromoplastic fenders. Despite being plastic, these look great. They also have the advantage of being lighter, cheaper and quieter than the very nice looking Honjos.

After all that I also bought a New York Kryptonite lock but it’s heavier than I anticipated so I only use it when leaving the bike in dodgy areas.

Bridgestone RB-T build

Last November when we were in the states I had a plan to bring home a bike. This grand idea came to me last October when I saw a nice bike at the traffic lights on Broadway and Jones St in Sydney after following her from my work. A few corners later we were still neck and neck and so got talking about the subject of her nice bike. Turns out the bike was bought from Citizen Chain in San Francisco, the city I was flying to only a few weeks later. Recounting this story to Sasha in the shop he told me how the bike was snapped up the day after it went into the window display so there was hardly time to show off his work.

I didn’t find my perfect bike that day but I instead found a frame – a Bridgestone RB-T. At the time I wasn’t aware of its historical significance, but I liked the look of it, how it could work for me and it was my size so I bought it. “Much easier to take a frame to Australia than a bike,” as a visitor hanging out in the shop told me.

Since then I’ve been learning what all the parts are called and what bits would be best for me, all thanks to the generous help of some clued in friends. I’m only just at the stage of understanding how all the parts work together so I definitely won’t be building it myself, no, that task will be left to Cheeky Transport in Newtown.

So here’s a photo of the frame, and next will be a list of all the parts followed by the built bike itself. Exciting stuff… for bike nerds at least.

The worm’s election

Fresh from watching that silly television debate which was really just campaigning disguised as journalism, I decided to have a look at the ABC election site. It’s full of all the interesting facts that you can also read the Australian Electoral Commission site, but with some extra comments and details. It notes that my safe Labor seat of Throsby had the Liberals polling at 70% in one voting centre. That voting centre happened to be Marshall Mount where I happen to know at least one family. I don’t image there’d be many more than twenty families in the small farming area so it’s a good thing that 70% doesn’t damage the seat one bit.

Nicole’s birthday

Happy birthday to Nicole. Now a couple of days past. We went to her birthday drinks at the Random Bar on Saturday night and were most amused to find that World Championship poker was being played on the television. Is this a sport?

Oh, and there was also an excellent dinner cooked by Linton and Emily earlier that evening. AND an excellent dinner the evening before at Malaya followed by, you guessed it, excellent cocktails at Loft. Can you believe this place has a guy with an earpiece monitoring the cushy lounge reserving situation? Now that’s pretentious.

Welcome to AngeLog

Welcome to AngeLog, Angela’s weblog. This post is by Peteypie, having set it up for my lovely girlfriend Ange while she’s away for another three weeks.
Hopefully you’ll be able to read of Ange’s continuing exploits overseas – my own “tour diary” starts here and continues for 6 entries, ending when I arrived back home yesterday.