Breadlocks

Ohhh man!!! This is my favorite frame of my past!!! 59cm(I always thought it was a weird frame size, but it fit me like a glove! Anything above that or below that just isn't where it's at for me. I have been e-baying for about a decade looking for another! Great find! Great restoration! You still riding this lovely machine?

Smokinapankake

Unfortunately, no. And I kick myself every time I revisit this thread for selling it on. My reasons at the time, silly as they may seem to me now, was that it was that infernal Suntour stuff. And, incredibly, that it was so original. Here's my thinking:
It's very original and beautiful, so it would be a shame to break it up and swap in components that were more amenable to future proofing.
To do that, I would have had to rebuild the whole thing from the frame up.
The other big issue was the wheels. They were nice but again, it falls back on that blasted Suntour freehub design. Replacement cassettes are now unobtanium, and to get really slick shifting I would have had to replace at least the drivetrain with Shimano (my preferred) stuff. So new wheels also. And now its no longer OEM "pure" idealogically.

It all seems so trifling and silly now in retrospect. I should have held on to it and modified it like I was Victor Frankenstein. Here I go off in the corner to kick myself again. Maybe in the nuts this time so next time I'll remember...

Breadlocks

I mean seriously, I saw this picture sifting thru pictures on google hoping to find a link to an e-bay auction. I lost mine to the streets. On a Happy Thursday social ride at night in New Orleans one summer, I was ride ranging, and was racing up to the next intersection and saw a manhole coming up. At the last second, I saw that the asphalt and the manhole cover were about and inch in height difference. I swerved around it with my front wheel going about 10mph, but my back wheel clipped it. About a mile further on the ride I thought I had a flat tire from it, or crank the rim hard and my wheel fell out of true. There wasn't a flat, but when I grabbed my saddle, lifted and gave the rear wheel a firm spin, I saw the wobble, but when I went to flip the bike and try and work out the bend, I found that my chain stay on the drive train snapped at the weld where it meets the dropout... I held onto it forever, thinking someone might be able to weld it back to new, but abandoned the quest after multiple people told me how hard it would be to actually do the job, plus the geometry, if not precise would end up just causing issues everywhere else. I remember I kept if for another couple years hoping to mount it one day. I literally miss it soooo much. I came in third in an alley cat race which I should have come in 2nd but when I saw my opponents coming from a different street heading to the skate park where the new Orleans alley cat ended, I popped the median, and lost my footing and came down asscrack on the top bar and foot peddled into the park. That was such a good bike. I gave her a name, but my memory is a little spotty.

Smokinapankake

Ah that’s too bad. It was a lovely frame but I wasn’t super invested in it. If I had spent more time with it I might feel differently. I mostly kick myself because it was in such good shape and I got such an amazing good deal on it...