Well, the bike cave has been bursting at the seems and I've tried to move on a couple of bikes. The other day it was the Bridgestone Mile 112.
Then yesterday I went to see a very rough looking (in the ad) Davidson that was about an hour away. First surprise was that the seller had a matching set, same size. But they looked pretty bad in person and I almost walked. I looked them both over and picked the nicer of the two frames figuring I could just replace components. The chain was a mess, no front wheel (for either of them) the rear wouldn't shift at all, etc. But the seatpost and quill weren't frozen so I made a really low offer that I thought was fair based on how bad I thought they were. Now, a day later after spending several hours on it I wish I had grabbed both of them.
This is how it looked when I got it home:
Most of the paint defects were marks that cleaned off. Lots and lots of degreasing and grime removal showed a pretty nice frame and quite clean components. Flooding the frozen rear shifter with WD40 got it working just fine. I do need to replace the housings though, they are dried and cracking even though it's all working well.
I used an old Matrix rimmed front wheel I had around for now. The wheelset is pretty heavy. Once I decide were I'm taking this I'll put on some lighter modern wheels. I had several 8 speed chains on hand so that part was easy. Rest of the components were degreased, cleaned and then fed some triflow. Everything seems to be working well now. Brand new Open Corsa CX tires in 700 x 23 were put on. Man is that Matrix rim a pain in the butt to mount a tire on. It does look like there is room for my usual Conti GP 4000s II 700 x 25 tires.
I'll ride it some to get a feel for what it can do then decide if I'll leave it as is or maybe finally use the Record 10 speed groupset I've got on hand.
Anyway, here's some pices as it stands right now. It's 21 lbs and 7 ozs but still need some Look Keo pedals on it. I've got a Fizik Kurve on the way for it but will probably need to swap the seatpost.
