Saturday I spent a little while in the garage, tinkering with the bike I have the longest, thorniest history with. My father bought me this 1976 Puch Royal X new from a long-gone shop in Atlanta back in March, 1978. Before it ever left the shop it had changes made to the gearing as well as different pedals and saddle. Later I had a tubular wheelset made for it, rode it all over my part of Georgia and bit of Alabama, too, and then foolishly sold it to purchase an amazing 1960s blackface Fender Vibroluxe Reverb Amp. A couple of months later I went to buy it back from the friend I had sold it to, only to learn it had been stolen. I searched for years for one like it, but never found another white 23-in example for sale - until this one surfaced in Stone Mountain in 2019 on FB Marketplace. I made a deal, had it shipped, and when unpacking it saw scars on the head badge that I remembered from the mid-80s and realized it was my original one.
Aaaaanyway, I checked the rear inner tube and concluded it was good enough, swapped out the KKT pedals with the bent axle for a set of MKS Sylvan Track pedals I had used for years (and it occurs to me that when I got the bike new I had Berthet 23 platforms installed, and this set of MKS track pedals replaced my last set of Berthets, so that fits), and tweaked the saddle position.
I got out late Sunday afternoon, thinking I would ride to Hodges and loop around to return, but - no. There was an insane amount of traffic on Dixie Drive, so much so that I swung left onto Flatwood to escape. There I encountered another local cyclist - turns out we had been following each other on Strava but had never met - and from there I pushed on. I stopped for a photo when I was about to cross over into neighboring Abbeville County -
- and then rolled on down to Klugh Road. Along the way there were several short stops to adjust things - the saddle needed to come forward on the rails, the rear wheel needed to be precisely centered, stuff like that. The bike initially felt a bit off - I'm not accustomed to 38 cm handlebars now, and currently this is my only bike with 27 x 1 1/4-in wheels. I got to relearn the fine art of running SunTour Power Ratchets controlling a Cyclone rear derailleur over the narrow SunTour Ultra Winner 6-speed freewheel. But as the ride progressed, Dragonfly (the bike's nickname way back when) made the transformation from unfamiliar bike to just a bike to be ridden to being MY bike, my old bike I had climbed Tightsqueeze Gap with back in the late '70s.
All those years of history, and I don't think I had ridden the old Puch down a dirt road since 1978 or thereabouts, so I turned onto Johns Creek Road to see how it went. It went pretty well, actually.
I stopped again when I came back into Greenwood County for one more glamour shot -
- and then home to errands followed by supper.
I still have a strange relationship with this bike. It's well made, it handles nicely, and I'm comfortable on it, but I think for the most part it will be reserved for laid-back rides, typically over nicer roads on sunny days. Dragonfly probably deserves to be semi-retired, not quite a wall-hanger queen, but not in active heavy rotation, either. Still, it's nice to ride this bike every so often to remember how it was when I was younger.