A bike for the ages

A friend brought me her 1980s road bike to refurbish so that she can try using it again. It wasn't kept in the absolute best of conditions, but it's in very usable shape to recover with minimal work.

The tires are gone. There are probably ancient mummy wrappings in better shape than the dry-rotted remnants of the Continental 700X25s that were on the Ambrosio rims. The rim tape crumbled and fell away as I removed the tires and tubes. She wants plumper tires anyway. The frame and fork look like they will accommodate 700X28. It's not much, but every little bit helps. I'm running 28s on my similarly configured road bike.

Everything else looks just about ready to ride as-is. This is a testament to the builder, who adjusted the hubs securely and greased things properly. Nothing on this bike is rusted in place. At some point someone raised the stem above the max. That will have to come down. If the rider wants the front end higher I'll have to figure out what to do about the stitched and shrunk full-leather bar wrap. It's classy, but it's the only part I really don't like, because it inhibits repositioning of the brake levers or changing out the stem. I may be able to get it off intact by taking the brake levers off of the clamps and soaking the leather to soften it. This is time sensitive because the leather will shrink again when it dries, and may deform with repeated soaking and drying.

The bike also came from the period just before the widespread use of aero brake levers. While this is good because there are no brake cables under that sexy leather bar wrap, it means that she can't incorporate interrupter levers into the braking system if she has a hankering to make the riding position more functional from the bar tops. I'll need to lay out all of her options before we make an investment, because she might be hoping to make this thing more dirtworthy than it can be.

The gearing is pretty steep for around here. Maybe when we were all young and spry a 52-42 crank with a 13-22 six-speed freewheel would have seemed ample, but the hot punks of today are all running lower lows, even if they're running ridiculously higher highs. If the Gipiemme rear derailleur handles a similar range to the Campagnolo that it evokes, the biggest thing that officially fits in there is a 26.

It will probably shift a 28 with the wheel pulled back in those accommodating medium-long horizontal dropouts.

We'll have to remove the threaded adjusters, but that was usually a good idea anyway. They were always vulnerable to bending.

If the BCD on the crank is Campy 144, she's stuck with the rings she has. We were never going to get old! The thing is, the Japanese standard settled on 130, allowing for the 39s that became standard for quite a while before the advent of compact doubles with a 34 inner ring on a 110mm BCD. Those of us who chose Japanese components for budgetary reasons often lucked into the 130 BCD cranks that let us make an orderly retreat from massively macho 43 and 42 inner rings to 39 and even 38. Spin fast! Don't let anyone get a good look!

There are two ways to make your bike equipment hard for others to scrutinize in a ride group: go past everyone as a blur of speed or be a speck in the distance, far off the back. OTB is a lot easier to maintain.

The simplicity and workmanship are beautiful to contemplate. Try not to think about how thoroughly those concepts have been discarded by the industry and the novelty-obsessed consumers that they have nurtured. Tech-dependent riders are the goose that lays golden egg after golden egg for a voracious industry. Bikes stopped being about freedom when index shifting became a "necessity." It's been downhill with long-travel suspension from there.

Frame details like this were standard on higher end production hand-built frames at the time. A little filing, some cutouts, a bit of contrasting paint trim added to the tasteful flash of bikes that were proud to evoke the craftsmanship of an elder day rather than dress themselves up for the space age while still propelled by the same old primate, pushing pedals.

I don't miss downtube shifters, but I recommended them when I was racing. The cable run was the shortest, giving the quickest response. Everyone had to take their hands off the bars to shift, so there was no disadvantage to it, or at least the disadvantage was universal. Some riders were better at shifting than others, just as some people are better musicians. It's a similar challenge: get to the right place at the right time, whether it's a shift from the 13 to the 17 or a quick move on a fretless fingerboard.

Early indexing introduced "fretted" shifting, providing noticeable stops, each representing a gear, even if it wasn't the gear you had intended. When it was a progressive lever, lever position provided additional help to your muscle memory, whether shifting with or without a click. Brifters and other return-to-center shifting systems make the rider completely dependent on the precision of the machinery.

Idiosyncrasies like these weird pedals can be easily replaced when these wear out, unless the industry has finally changed pedal threads by then. They'll come up with some reason that the old stuff was never any good and why did you like it anyway?

Distinctive as these are, they were designed to take the standard slotted cleat of the time, or a flat shoe. They demonstrate the sort of harmless, cosmetic complexity the industry engaged in, to make their stuff distinctive without making life difficult for riders. People who got into riding after the very early 1990s will have no memory of that. You can't miss what you never knew. But you could imagine it and demand it now. What a concept!