Hey folks! I've been away from riding for just over a decade due to health issues, but late last year I started getting itchy feet and wanting to ride again, albeit at a vastly reduced level that I used to ride! I'm on disability so my budget was very small and as I can't ride during cold and damp months it seemed the best angle to buy a cheap 2nd hand project that I could fix up over the winter.
After a bit of searching and the usual wild goose chases courtesy of marketplace, I grabbed a 2023 Carrera Sulcata for £80. This thing was in a really sorry state, guy I bought it from said it was bought as a bad choice commuter bike, ridden during a summer and then left in a garden over the winter where all the bearings went rusty. The original owner tried to do some work on it the next year and failed horribly, so it ends up on Marketplace. When i got it, the wheels barely turned freely, the headset bearings were also crusty, it had no pads in the rear brake and the front just howled like a Nazgul and didn't stop anything, the forks were also seized and the gears didn't shift. You would never think this bike was only a couple of years old, more like a decade! My only concern at the time was that it would be my first bike with a 27.5 wheel, but that seems to have worked in my favour as the frame size is a 16" medium, which would've been too small for me on old bike geo, but actually fits me really nicely with the a more modern geo and wheels.
This is how it started life.



Now my original plan was to just strip the bike and replace whatever needed it over the next 6 months or so, maybe some upgrades as well budget allowing. But the more I stared at it, the more I hated the colour, some sort of very cheap grey and orange powdercoat that was pretty scratched on one side where it was leant against a wall or something. Fortunately I do have some airbrush gear that I use to paint models or canvases, unfortunately I live in an apartment block and had to do primer and clearcoat on my balcony although I think i got lucky this time and actually got a reasonably good finish. I didn't want to go crazy on the colours, it's a general runabout bike that I need to lock up outside occasionally and South London isn't the place to leave something that looks too nice outside for too long! So i went with a pearlised silver fading into pearlised black with no decals and also mirror polished the rear caliper mount and dropouts, it's subtle but not tatty, I'm quite pleased with it anyway!

As for parts, I bought an MT200 rear brake to replace the ruined Tektro, the front brake just needed new pads and the rotor a good clean but I'll probably grab another MT200 to match at some point. Also converted to a 1x10 crank and a new BB, some pedals (that I'll be changing again after discovering they have no bearings in them!), a better headstem than the terrifying adjustable one the previous owner put on it, some 50mm riser bars, wheel/headset bearings and a pair of Continental Double Fighter 2.0 tyres to replace the ridiculous oversized truck tyres it had fitted as standard. So far I'm into it by about £250 and have a reasonably half decent runabout bike!
I do want to change some other stuff though, the forks really need to go, they're Suntour coil forks and are insanely heavy as well as really sloppy in every direction, I had coil forks in the 90's that were less terrifying than these things! I also want to change the wheels, they're not terrible, but they are heavy and just very nobrand budget bike quality.

Here's how it looks now!

IMO, those forks, which weigh six pounds or so, would be replaced by rigid ones if I didn't have enough for a good suspension fork. I gave our coop a brand new set which came on a nos frame set I used to build my wife an "e" bike. The wheels could be salvaged.

Even though that is the cheapest option I don't think I can be comfortable with rigids nowdays, I've broken my right wrist 3 times in the last 40 years and my right shoulder has taken a fair beating over that time too, so anything to take out the harshness of the road surface here is the only option. I can pick up a 2nd hand air fork for around £60-£80 if I put some money aside for a couple of months and it's not something I'm looking to do right away as I have other projects on the go that all require a budget too.
As for wheels, I've replaced the bearings and set up the cones properly, but I think the cones were cranked up too tight from the factory and the original owner just rode it that way not knowing any better and damaged the bearing races, no amount of adjusting stops them from feeling "rumbly" and they just don't roll as well as I'm used to. Ultimately these are nobrand budget wheels on a bike that was sub-£500 when new, so even though I could replace the hub and re-lace the wheel, I'm not sure it's actually worth it. Again, It's one of those things that I can deal with over time, as it stands i can't ride over the winter months anyway so it's something i can hold off until then.