IsleRide

Sounds like the bike is in good hands!

dddd

"Can anyone shed any light on the brake levers? I've never seen that particular MAFAC model."

The levers look like the same ones on millions of other Peugeots. Mafac alloy with half-hoods, still in very usable condition.

I lubed and wrenched on the bike for a couple of hours last night. All went well, so I will proceed to cable and wheel replacement.
The bottom bracket turns smooth now after lubing, and I haven't even had to adjust it.

Captain Blight

Well, the flared lower half on them is very different to all the ones I've seen. They all have closed backsides and taper to a point at the bottom. I'm sure any MAFAC half-hood would fit, but the levers themselves are quite different.

qd-s

How did you lube BB without disassembling it which implies (re)adjusting?
Is there a lubrication/grease nipple on or below BB shell?

Picchio Special

Missed most of this thread, but that's the PX to have. The only French racing bike on my wish list - the components are special and put it over the top. I think that era of Simplex rear derailleurs are the prettiest ever made. Right before Simplex jumped off the Delrin cliff.

LeicaLad 

Time for a few new photos to show her off once cleaned up, eh?

repechage

Meguiers paint cleaner, not rubbing compound. You would just destroy the transfers, And stay clear of those too. Problem for Joe is its too big.
Too bad some previous owner decided that the tubulars were too much effort.
Much better deal than the guys on the Los Angeles CL attempting to sell Peugeot UO8's for silly high dollars, maybe they all need to make the next rent payment and a hoping...

dddd

I lubed the bottom bracket by simply laying the bike on it's side and dripping in some Phil Oil using an extension tube on the squeeze bottle. Ditto for the other side, but it takes a while (in cold weather) for a good amount to penetrate fully to the bearings. I had to add 20% mineral spirits to make it flow. I will repeat the process after riding it for a while, so as to flush away any rust/detritus, and fully rebuild it later on. I didn't have to adjust it at all, still tight and now fairly smooth!

A closer look at the decals shows some scaling in places, so I will have to avoid those areas to keep any from flaking off. Less-weathered Peugeots seem to tolerate aggressive rubbing I've found. The orange lug paint is intact and they will glow!
One of the chainring bolts is bonded to the nut and needs proper tightening. I'll have to modify a screwdriver to fit the antique nuts in order to prevent the nut rotating, after the penetrant has had plenty of time to soak in. Very fortunate the bolt heads are all in good shape.

All the derailer and brake springs are still firm. The levers are the earlier model, common in the day but probably worth good money now, since the bike was never tipped over. The weathering kind of hid the fact that this bike was little-used. I was quite surprised that the original alloy seatpost wasn't stuck and that the kickstand hadn't been overly tightened onto the chainstays, whew.

I'll probably just swap wheels from my '52 Christophe for now, since they're ready to go and have the proper hubs with credible rims and QR's.

neurocop

[QUOTE=dddd;13485322]I lubed the bottom bracket by simply laying the bike on it's side and dripping in some Phil Oil using an extension tube on the squeeze bottle. Ditto for the other side, but it takes a while (in cold weather) for a good amount to penetrate fully to the bearings. I had to add 20% mineral spirits to make it flow. I will repeat the process after riding it for a while, so as to flush away any rust/detritus, and fully rebuild it later on. I didn't have to adjust it at all, still tight and now fairly smooth! ...

This is not the way to service the BB. You should remove the cranks and remove the adjustable (non-drive side) cup and the axle. You don't have to remove the fixed cup. Clean out all the hardened grease and dirt from the cups and axle, and check the bearing surfaces for wear. Then pack with new grease and replace the 1/4" ball bearings (they're cheap enough), and reassemble the whole thing.

Doing it they way you describe may make the axle spin more freely, but you've still got grit and old grease in the BB, which will lead to accelerated wear.

dddd

Who's to say? It's my bike, my choice ;->
It's fine for now.
Should I worry about some grain of sand scratching my doubtless-already-rusted bearing cups? I've ridden thousands of miles on bikes serviced this way, and not one of them really protested. Successive lubings displaces rust and grit well enough.
I'll sometimes (worst case, rusted bike) start by lubing with WD40, then blasting a jet of water through those gaps whilst turning the cranks, after which I'll apply the heavy oil which displaces the heck out of any lingering water. These PX's actually have a drain bolt on the bottom!
If it doesn't "hold" it's adjustment for a good # of miles, then I may indulge in the luxury of new bearings, but would tend to want to keep the cups original.
One catalog I looked at shows the SC57 crank setup using the rare, roller bearing bb with both radial and axial roller bearings on each side! I once sold a chewed-up example of that bb on fleabay, and it fetched $124 from Japan.
So you're right, I guess now I'll have to tear into it some day to see what I've got. Then it'll get greased proper, but there are gonna be no replacement bearings available for the roller bb.

The whole idea behind the quick'n dirty tune-up is to get the bike on the road for evaluation. Then I can decide how much effort I want to put into the project. A lot of my better builds started out that way, then got put into top form and used for competition. I have sometimes, but rarely, regretted the rough initial work practices, whether it was frame alignment or rough cleaning and wrenching. A Viscount Aerospace that I was working on had the decal graphics wipe clean off (!) after only a brief wipe with an aerosol bike polish, but a hammered-out Cheltenham-Pedersen I roughed into shape went on to win races and appear in magazines.

marley mission

dddd - i am half w ya on this - sometimes an old bike just needs to be ridden - and the overhauling - well - maybe it comes - maybe it doesnt - what i have learned is that many times i end up trading or flipping the bike anyway -and if you think buyers care if you 'overhauled it' - they don't - at least not in $ signs

the other half of me says hey - if i'm gonna spend any time on the BB at all - might as well do it the right way and disassemble and repack

but often with old bikes - if the crankset turns smooth and there is no play in it - it'll be put on the 'to do' list for awhile...while i ride it

dddd

I agree 100% about buyer's appreciation when it's a stranger from Craig's land.

I think I actually acquired this quick-and-dirty habit from coming across "too many" cotter-cranked bikes. I am loathe to remove crank arms when it requires running a drill bit thru the cotter in order to get it free.
Not THAT big a deal really, but the process eats nice, sharp drill bits, requires new, proper cotters of the right size and then you often have to file the cotters down to a good fit and then "hammer-torque-hammer-torque" them into place about 35 times. THEN you realize that the two crankarms aren't parallel if the two cotters happen to not be pointed 180-degrees apart.

SteveSGP

After all the nastiness I've found in a lot of bottom brackets I won't ride a bike until I've taken the bottom bracket apart, cleaned and greased it. No exceptions.

pitbull007

Are the cranks stronglight?? if so you might need a special crank puller for them I believe.

neurocop

+1! Especially on French bikes with their proprietary sized and hard to find replacement parts. If it's worth restoring, it's worth doing it right. I just got a nice '72 PX-10 from Flea-bay that was all-original and "well-maintained," which is to say that the frame was perfect and the (blue) paint had only a few wear marks. The bike had been driven perhaps a couple of hundred miles and then laid up to rest. It even had the original Peugeot tubulars, with little tread wear...they held air and I rode them a bit, but replaced them since they had cracks in the rubber...so I put on new Vittoria's.

The bottom line...I took down all the bearings (headset, BB, front and rear hubs) and what I found was alarming...all of the bearings were full of 30+ year old hardened grease and crud. The bearing surfaces were otherwise pristine and cleaned up nicely. I'm sure that if I didn't disassemble, clean up the mess, and lube everything properly that I would have ruined the bike by riding it.

BTW, the cranks on my other (green) '72 (or '68?) are probably SL 63's.

dddd

Once there's oil in there, and no perhaps-dragging bearing cage to get "run over" by the rotating balls, the plastiky crud won't prevent the balls from rolling and won't stay stuck to the rolling contact surfaces.

Mud-wasp nests can be very gritty, and rust pits are problematic, but that is done damage.

The rust itself isn't that hard (not hard enough to scratch or deform the hardened metal races.

The stuff that gets crunched into a slurry with the oil will be displaced by a second application of oil.

Worst I've found is a cracked ball.
Second-worst was a bearing cage that was deformed to the point of being rolled over by the balls (a Huffy I think).
Stronglight ball-bearing headsets and bb's don't have any bearing cages.

In the extreme-pressure but rolling (not rubbing) environment of a bb, oil lubricates as well as grease. Rolling-element bearings don't rely on oil films to do anything but prevent corrosion and galling and circulate debris away from the contact areas. Grease will of course stick around much longer and provides a mechanical barrier of sorts to dirt/water intrusion.

New balls would of course improve smoothness of a rusted bottom bracket.

juls

One of those juy rdr's just sold on flea bay for over 1700 smakers! How about a recent picture?

rootboy 

This is it. Some folks just won't accept good advice Neurocop, and the new owner of this fine bike seems to believe his method is just fine. It's not, it's a halfway measure to be honest, but that hardly seems to matter at this point. If there wasn't a fairly rare bottom bracket at stake, I wouldn't care.

Dawes-man

I think they're just standard Mafac levers from the late 50s, early 60s, like this:
[IMG]
IMG_2234 by Dawes-man, on Flickr[/IMG]

Disclaimer: the bar tape was the ONLY stuff the little shop in rural Devon had.

Dawes-man

I don't know. I think dddd's approach is interesting. I imagine that freeing up the balls as he suggests and riding the machine you would quickly know if something was amiss and a strip-and-search was warranted. Hearing grinding or feeling the vibration and then ignoring it would be very foolhardy but I don't think dddd's advocating that.

Personally, I always take things apart but I am also aware that I'm doing it in order to see how it works rather than because it's really needed.

Bimdapogs

https://www.ebay.com/itm/SIMPLEX-RECO...item3a6ee413e6

Doesn't look to be the same as the OP's. But $1725 for that? [heart-attack smilie]

MarkusForest

New tires, maybe cables, other than that, dont change a thing!

rootboy 

True enough Dawes-Man. My post was perhaps a bit dogmatic and pedantic. Lord knows I've been known to ignore advice myself and no one likes dogmatic advice.
It wasn't so much the technique I question, which has a certain traditional validity to it what with the old oil port BB shells, ...as it was the steadfast stand that the technique was A-Ok because it always worked before given the hassle of tearing down cottered BB's, etc. Not to mention the claims about flushing grit and whatnot out of the bearings, which may be true to a certain extent, but which sounded like half measures to me.

RosyRambler

I get the feeling that dddd knows what he speaks of.

Good luck with the bike and have fun with it!

Michael Angelo 

That's a keeper for sure.