Rhythm Thief
Legendary Member
- Location
- Ross on Wye
This was donated to my local charity shop. I regularly browse their bikes and offered a hundred quid for this before it went on display. It looked like a good bike for my wife (not that she'd expressed any desire at all for another bike, but there we are), and I thought all that it needed was a strip down and a good clean. Sadly, the seatpost was stuck: there was about a foot of seatpost chemically welded to the steel, and it wasn't shifting. I tried sawing it out with no luck and eventually hammered a wine cork into the bottom of the seatpost and filled it up with caustic, which dissolved the post over the course of about a week. Nasty stuff, caustic; you definitely don't want it in your eyes! There's still about half an inch of seatpost just above the bottle cage bosses, but I can live with that. Anyway, the rest of the rebuild was pretty straightforward: new tyres, new brake blocks, new headset and wheel bearings, some nice new mudguards and an ultrasonic bath for all the oily bits. It's come up pretty well, although the decals have suffered a bit from the caustic I used to dissolve the seatpost. Sadly, after all that effort my wife doesn't actually get on with it.
