Orbit Ladies bike rebuild...

Had one of my friends' bikes in for a rebuild. It's an early 1990's Orbit step-through frame in 531c tubing which we found a while ago on eBay for not a lot of cash, but she's decided to take it touring around Scotland this summer so it needed some better gearing. I stripped it down and while it was away being re-painted amassed all the parts required to upgrade it to a Shimano Tiagra 10x3 groupset and threadless stem conversion and also renew pretty much everything at the same time.

Here's what I started off with this morning:



Annoyingly the new stem hasn't arrived yet (it was a bit of a pain to find an 80 mm one that would clamp the 26mm bars for a decent price) so it's only about 2/3 built but I'm happy with it so far.





Should be done by early next week!

Nice frame, great picture!

A very nice repaint indeed, it's going to look lovely.

Depending on how much stuff she's taking you might need to lower the gearing a bit more. The stock 30T inner is on the large side with a road cassette if you have two panniers and big hills. This is a stock gripe on all reviews of touring bikes with off the shelf road groupsets. A 24T inner from an old MTB chainset costs a fiver and will make all the difference uphill.

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Thanks for the replies chaps - and I'll pass the advice about the small chain-ring onto its new owner, who is picking up the bike tomorrow. If need be, she can bring it back to me and get the smaller one fitted.

Here's the bike finished - I'm really happy with how it turned out and I think my friend will be too - she's not seen it yet!

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That looks great!