My only unsupported tour was at the age of 16 on my Peugeot UO8. I went out for two nights with all my Boy Scout camping gear... Loaded in my Boy Scout backpack and carried on my back! I barely struggled through about 40 miles of torture with that 30-pound pack on my back.
The psychic scars have now healed sufficiently, 49 years later, that I want to try it again without the backpack. I bought used racks and panniers over the last few months and thought that I would just clamp them onto my Panasonic DX-3000: But then fate and the N+1 urge intervened in the form of a cheap Craigslist bike with rack braze-ons and cantilever brakes; a mystery bike with an awful rattlecan paint job and an accumulated 30 years of hard living.
But what kind of bike is it?
The chrome chain stay, Suntour dropouts, chrome seat stay caps, and the curved fender bridge looked an awful lot to me like pictures I found of the Centurion Pro Tour. But the clincher was the Suntour "symmetric" aero shifters mounted on this square shifter boss.
If I am interpreting the serial number correctly this bike was built in 1984.
I stripped the spray paint to reveal a fully chromed frame, polished only at the dropouts, drive-side chain stay, and seat stay caps. I'm tempted to build up the frame without paint but I need to source a few parts so I probably have time to paint before assembly. In stripping the paint I found the wiring holes that were characteristic of this bike which was available with a bottom bracket mounted generator.
Unfortunately the original triple chainring crankset had been replaced with a double and the original derailleurs replaced with a pair of nice Shimano 105's that will not handle the wide gear range and triple chainrings that I want to put on this bike. So first order of business is to find a crankset. (See my post in the "ISO and for trade thread")
The "symmetric" shifters are new to me an have their own mysteries.
When I pull back on the right shifter the left shifter slides forward a couple millimeters, acting as a trimming device I assume. I would love to know more about this. But the biggest mystery for me is "Why did Centurion think that a touring bike needed aero shifters?"
Brent