atlas928

I've been lurking around the forum for a while and decided I wanted to restore an old road/touring bike (plus I can't afford a new one right now). I noticed my neighbor had several old bikes piled up behind his house - they must have been in the snow and rain for at least a few years. I went for a closer look and noticed this Raleigh and a couple of old women's Huffys. I asked him if I could buy the Raleigh from him and he told me just to take it because he was getting ready to haul them off anyway. The amazing thing was, the bike actually had almost no rust and once I got off the dirt it looked almost brand new. It's a Raleigh Capri, I believe it was one of their lower-end models from the 80s. I completely took it apart (except the bottom bracket, which I still need to do), cleaned and regreased everything, removed any rust and touched up the paint, polished the frame, and re-assembled. I have about $40 in new tires, tubes, seat, tape (BTW I used black hockey stick tape, it's really cheap and works pretty well if you like cloth tape), cables and some clamp-on down-tube Campy shifters to replace the stem shifters. It's pretty heavy, but rides like a dream. I also noticed that after riding index shifting on my MTB for all these years is that I like friction shifting - I've been looking on ebay for some higher-end Suntour derailleurs to replace the Suntour Honor derailleurs. Let me know what you think. I've been bitten by the bike bug - I'm now looking for a bike to turn into a single speed.

smurfy

Wow, awesome find! Doesn't look like you have to really do anything else to it (except ride it). Since you already have Campy shifters it would be cool to find some Campy deraillers for it, like Nuevo Record or something like that. Your bike looks like it's worth it. Bike collectors seem to go crazy over old Campy stuff, though. It's like crack cocaine of the bicycling world!

Do you know what kind of frame tubing it has? Does it have a seattube sticker?

kerk

I have a Capri in the garage that is in need of fixing up. It's pretty far down in the queue though. It has Suntour stem shifters, shimano derailleurs and bolt on steel rims. The frame is 410 steel tubes. It would probably be a decent commuter.