Raleigh Winner Singlespeed Handlebars

The drop bars were not fun on this bike. When it comes to drop bars my current thinking is --Velodrome : Yes. Fancypants racing bike : Maybe (I have no real experience). but this bike : No. 

So the initial plan was to do what countless other builders of fixies and SS's have done and turn those drops upside down, chop the ends off and create a set of bullhorn bars with the original brake levers mounted on the end of the horns. It was all going swimmingly until my brother suggested I see what the set of bars from a Raleigh Stowaway would be like upside down in the style of a Pashley Guv'nor (but with slightly less elegance and a bit more bodginess)
Hmmmm, not a bad idea said I. 

I took a couple of photos of the drops upside down with the levers roughly mounted so that, in Bullseye fashion, I had a photo of what I could have had, then got started on fitting a moustache to this bike.

My thumb is at the point where I was thinking of doing the cut:

You can see here roughly what the outcome would have been. There are plenty of tutorials about doing this, such as this one.

The original Raleigh drop bars are aluminium with a 1 inch stem mount. Whereas for a 'Raleigh only knows why' reason the Twenty/Stowaways come with chromed steel bars that are slightly less than an inch in diameter at the mounting point. They overcame this by welding a shim into the stem on the Twenty and the Stowaway. So to fit them to the stem on this bike required a new homemade shim. This was made out of a piece of plate steel (actually a Corus rainscreen cladding sample).

This is the homemade shim just before the bars where slid fully in, once in you can't see it.

The brake levers are ones I bought on impulse as part of a larger order from SJS cycles a while ago. They cost a whopping £1.99 and purely by chance they match the bend of these bars perfectly.

Note the very short cable run this setup allows on the front brake. It also shortened the rear by about 6 inches too.

The red bar tape was recycled for grips and the chrome plastic end plugs modified with a pair of scissors to help them fit into the thinner gauge tubing of the steel bars. The final result is a bit Caff Racer.

This is now is much more to my liking. The effect on the steering is pretty profound as these bars place your hands a good few inches further apart that the drops allowed. And finally....this bike is veeery fast. It weighs bugger all and is so easy to get up to a high speed cruise. It's given me a new understanding on having only one gear, in a metaphysical la-di-da kind of way you don't have just one gear - you have a very short range of infinitely variable gears, because you are varying the gearing with your legs and not the mechanics of a deraileur or a hub. It's certainly not a practical everyday bike, but is now a great option for a sunny day and a fast ride.

As a Brucie bonus, the old single pivot brakes on this bike are now exceptionally good. Something I never thought possible. The combination of bmx levers, v-brake pads, super short cable run on the front & 4 hands instead of 2 when setting them up results in a fairly decent set of brakes.

The final result with mandatory Charge Spoon saddle fitted.

Raleigh Winner fixed/singlespeed

This is the bike that got me started. About 3 years ago, abondoned in a Halifax a Raleigh winner, 21 inch 1980's  racing bike was rescued from the big scrapheap in the sky. The wheels were knackered but nearly everything else was in reasonable condition. It was a simple 5 speed with a friction shifter mounted on the downtube. I've not got pictures of the original bike because this precedes the discovery of blogging, but I looked almost exactly like the photo below. Try to imagine it with bent, rusted wheels, no bar tape, threadbare cabling and a shreaded saddle.

This was about the time I was first attempting to commute on my Trek Navigator hybrid and moderately failing at it. The most noticeable thing back then was being overtaken by blokes on road bikes who zoomed off into the sunset, leaving me to wonder if a road bike was the way to go for tackling a 30mile daily round trip. In the middle of wondering this I diverged and got a Brompton which solved all my woes and meant the reason for rescuing this Raleigh became a bit null and void.

When thinking of what to do with it, I came across the FixedGearGallery and was hooked.....they are all so very clean and pretty. I could just create something sleek and simple as a project and forget about whether it would actually get used for anything or not. So I set about stripping the bike down into its constituant parts and attempting to prep the frame for repainting. (This is easier said than done when you haven't yet discovered angle grinders and cup brushes). The idea was very simple. Clean/refurbish almost every existing part and fit a brand new wheelset with a flip-flop hub. The wheelset was £75 off ebay, so including new tyres, tubes, brake pads and paint/laquer it cost roughly £120 to build over a period of a few weeks, but could easily have been done in a weekend with a bit of effort.

I did carefully remove and keep the headbadge.......then lost it somewhere.

£120, coincidentally is about how much this bike would have cost in the early 80's when it was new. The Winner was a lower end Raleigh race model, but low-end presumably had a slightly different meaning back then and even as early as 15 years ago when I got my low-end Raleigh MTB. Nowadays, buying the cheapest on the market will no doubt mean a horrific monstrosity weighing in at more than my Nexus (that takes some doing), with forks on backwards, & parts already rusting before it's loaded into the shipping container in China. But previously low end didn't mean crap, it just meant not as posh as the higher end stuff. The components where all still good quality kit and the frames were still hand crafted by the same blokes who, I suppose, might also lug together a bike costing 5 times the price.
 

Fixed gear however is hopelessy impractical for me and would be downright bloody dangerous at times around Manchester's drivers. So it has remained a pretty garage ornament for the most of its existence. I had been planning for quite a while to build a new rear wheel using a 3 speed hub for this bike, but last week I dusted it off and fitted a BMX 18 tooth freewheel orginally from the B'twin Vitamin. This increased it's useability massively, but I still didn't get on with the drop bars very well. Like the fixed cog, a very low thin set of drops just destroys my confidence on the road, knowing that unpredictable drivers are lurking behind every corner. So the next post will be about how I solved the handlebar issue on this bike and finally made it into something that gets a bit of use on sunny days.