Stella SX 73 - Winter project

jamesdak

Old School Hero
I picked this hot mess of a bike up as a winter project. Getting close to finishing it up finally, it's been an adventure.

Bike didn't look to be all that bad when I got it but had obviously sat for a very long time. All the grease was dried up in everything and took some serious solvents to clean up. Despite that all the bearing surfaces and such looked great once cleaned up. Weirdest issue were the locknuts on the wheels hubs. They were literally crumbling to pieces. Other tricking part was the headset was missing a toothed spacer. That took some hunting but I finally found one. Had to make a hard decision on the chain rings and finally decided to go with some smaller aftermarket ones from Velo Orange. Pretty much all the other parts were kept and looked great after a service and some hand polishing. I suck at wheel truing and such though so they are about to go down to the bike shop for a spoke replacement and truing. Once they are done I'll put on the new cables and housings and it will be done. Decided to go with some grey cable housing that should blend into the bike well.

Here's how it looked when I got it.

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And how it sits now serviced up with new chain rings, bars, stem, tires, seatpost, and saddle.

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Some of the parts:

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All the parts are now cleaned up and polished and lubed as needed. New chain is waiting too. I want to make sure there's no major issues with the wheels that I might have missed. If they can't be trued (doubtful) I'll probably just convert this to 700c.

The original Ideale saddle looks rideable but the sides have flared pretty bad so I swapped it out.
 
Some other notes, the insides of the frame was pretty much pristine. I was surprised at how clean it was as I serviced all the bearing areas.

The crank arms are french threaded but I have some decent French pedals for it.

Paint is so, so but I'm not really worried about that. Hit it with some polish and the shine is really good. Chrome is surprisingly good to for the age.

The threads on the drive side were buggered by someone years ago so I could not get the proper crank puller to fit on that side. Had to carefully resort to a 3 jaw gear puller. Got the crank off just fine with that and didn't damage the back of it. The non-drive crankarm was not damage and came right off with a puller.

For now I did put some modern NOS brake pads on. A couple of the old pad holders were damaged. One thing I learned on both my old Peugeot and my english 3 speed is that you really need to optimize the brakes, LOL!

Curious to see how the old Huret parts work. It was easy to find the right shifter cables that take a disc shaped end versus a more normal barrel.
 
This is pretty much how I finished up with it. I always attended this to be a donation bike to the local collective so it's been turned over to them to make some money off of. Spent more than I planned to on it but hopefully it'll be back out on the road a loved soon.

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