How It All Started

I bought the bike on eBay on 24 October 2023. At this point it was still very much the bike I had bought, and I had no idea just how much work would end up going into it. Here is the starting specs when i first collected the bike:

The Scary Fork Discovery

I took the bike to Handcrafted Wheels to get it looked over.

That was when we discovered the front forks were seriously unsafe. They had been widened using pieces of copper pipe, and each side should have been held together with four bolts.

Instead, one bolt was missing and another was rounded off with damaged threads. The forks were not something I was prepared to trust, so they had to go.

Making It Safe

The unsafe forks were replaced with a fork I already had from another bike.

The original handlebars also had to be replaced because they were part of the old fork setup.

The tyres were another immediate problem. The old ones had dry-rotted, so they were replaced before the bike could become something I actually wanted to ride.