sjcprojects
Orange 🍊 Fan
The other week I picked up this 'Bob Read Cycles' (which was a Doncaster bike shop) stickered bike. I was unable to resist seeing as 1) It cost £20 and 2) It's very shiny. I started a thread to try and find out more about it, and it seems that based on the 'M' engraved on the seat stay caps, it might have been branded as the Belgian brand Minerva, though the serial number T8020908 points to more of an Asian origin for the actual point of manufacture. Anyway, it's from early 80s and is definitely a mass-produced frame of middling quality. It does have proper forged dropouts, but they are not branded, and moreover it is not a light frame. With the headset cups in it comes to a hefty 2.78kg (a 531 frame of similar size would be 2kg at most, in my experience).
Therefore, this may turn out to be a bit of a lipstick on a pig type situation, but curiosity got the better of me so I wanted to build it up as a restomod and as it happened most of a 10 speed SRAM Rival groupset turned up on here cheap, so I took the chance to also have my first SRAM-based build.
It had been sat in the same shed for about 40 years, but it was thankfully a pretty dry shed from what I can tell, so the rust on the chrome was pretty superficial.
It all polished up nicely with GT85+fine wire wool. I had to mask off the large decals to avoid damaging those. I removed the smaller decals as they were quite faded and after-all this is not a full restoration job. Thankfully I could keep the black Stronglight headset. This one is a lot like an A9 in terms of having the same needle bearings and other parts, but the top part has no separate lock nut and is entirely plastic. I've not seen one of these before, and even Velobase doesn't seem to list it. Just like the A9, it's a nice bit of kit, and of course very light (as well as being black, importantly).
The frame lends itself to a restomod build, as it could already fit a 10 speed hub at the rear, to my surprise, and it has been drilled for modern brakes (despite having nutted brakes on it, oddly - perhaps because those were the only black ones they could find).
I need to get a 26.2mm black seatpost, and I'm not totally sure about the somewhat ugly quill stem, but this is how it's looking at the moment. I did a respray of the cranks as they were quite rough looking, and I have taken the stickers off the rims (which itself was not easy as they were very stubborn to remove). Some parts are just what I had already and are in keeping with the black theme, such as the wheels, bars, stem, bottle cage and saddle.
I'm actually quite tempted to remove the frame decals because I don't really love the red colour, if they were black that would be much better. I wouldn't normally take the name off a bike, and this is literally the only 'Bob Read Cycles' example I've seen, so I'm not sure what's right in this case. Any thoughts welcome on that subject. I'll wait until it's all built up anyway before doing anything like that. Well, and also whether it rides okay or does turn out to indeed be the proverbial pig – in which case it might be destined to just live as a shiny frameset in my cellar...
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