Inaugural ride
 

The inaugural ride of the De Bernardi! Thanks everybody for walking me through this project. I hope it's not too much of an abomination that I put mustache bars instead of drop bars on it (or the mish-mash of new and vintage parts). The wackiest is the mismatched Veloce/Potenza brakes. I'm really digging it though! It rides so smooth and fast. The coolest part is indexing actually works, which totally proves what Doc/ rccardr and others have said about Shimano's ratios being unchanged, aside from the Dura Ace 740x and I think a couple others. I was planning to just do friction, but I got a Shimano Sora 8-speed indexed lever on a whim, so it's got the new lever, a new Shimano HyperGlide 8-speed cassette, and the '86 RD-6208 derailleur, and it's as crisp as potato chips. I never would've expected that.
The Paul Component brakes were a last-minute splurge to deal with brake sponginess. Not sure if it was those, or the Jagwire compressionless brake housing, or maybe both together, but the braking is rock-solid now.
What a delight overall. Very happy with it. Thanks again to rccardr for the really beautiful frame and all the help.

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Very sanitary!

An ultra lightweight, fast, upright-bar city bicycle with class. The world needs more of this.

Nice work on the build. Have you found the wider bars and long stem to work well with the front end geometry, or does it still turn in like a crit bike?

-Kurt

Hey thanks! Sorry I'm not familiar with the term "crit bike"--does it mean like a oval track bike? Do they have a tendency to turn tightly?
It's a good question about the handlebars with the long stem. I rather blindly chose the longest stem just because I figured I would need the length to offset the sweep back of the mustache bars.
I haven't ridden drop bars since my teen years. That was all I rode on my first Schwinn "ten speed" back in the 80s, then rode a mountain bike flatbar for about 12 years on my commuter bike until I started experiencing wrist pain. A web search in the early 2000s suggested I try mustache bars and it truly eliminated the pain, so it's been my default bar since then. I'm definitely not wedded to them, though, and I'm tempted to try putting a dropbar on here try see how it feels. It would be neat to ride one again after all this time. That will probably be my next project in a year or two on this.
As far as turning, I haven't used it on any windy downhills so it's hard to say. So far it's just been beach bike path, which is fairly straight. It would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison. It does make me wonder if it would feel different/better--maybe a frame like this is optimized for narrower bars?