Originally Posted by Takara

Congratulations!

The great thing about touring and touring bikes is that the only important measure of success is how happy they make you. The bike may already be perfectly tour-worthy. The way to tell is to look in your rear-view mirror and see if you're smiling.

When the bike arrives, do what's necessary to evaluate whether you can fall in love with it -- that means getting it adjusted to fit your body and fixing anything broken enough to be an obstacle as you try to bond with it. If you don't know exactly what that entails, let a bike shop do this magic for you. A glance at the auction pictures indicates that you're only missing two necessary items: a rear rack and toe clips for your pedals. Get those. Then ride around for awhile -- gently, short trips now and again, over several weeks -- and try to establish some chemistry with the bike.

It may be love at first sight. Or you may find that it's all great except for the lousy seat, or your hands are getting sore and you want some fancier foam wrap on the handlebars, little things like that. Or you may find that the whole thing is generally discouraging. Anyway, you're trying to decide whether to invest in a relationship with this bike and the way to do that is to take it on a few dates.

If things aren't working out, get rid of the bike -- no amount of expensive parts-swapping is going to make you love it.

If things do seem to be working out after a month or so, the next step is to go back to the bike shop and let them rebuild the hubs, bottom bracket, and headset so that all the moving parts have new, clean lube. Buy the new seat or the handlebar tape or whatever it takes to get perfectly comfortable.

And then you're done -- it's a touring bike, and you're a bike tourist! Touring is not racing. Happiness, not speed, lightness, or gear performance, is the important thing. The challenge in touring is to be comfortable and content on your bike for ten or twelve hours in a day. That has everything to do with basic fit and adjustment and frame of mind . . . and almost nothing to do with the quality of components.

Upgrade a component only when there's something about it that is diminishing your happiness. But that's something you won't know about it until you and the bike are already in a good relationship and are discovering each other's ins and outs.