new ride for the missus

080619

After I started riding this bike, I wanted my dearest wife to have an improved bike experience as well, so I started trying to scope out some appropriately sized roadbikes for her. I found a nice Trek 360 from circa 1988 or so a few days later for $100 and we snatched it up. The 360 is a sort of entry-level road bike, 4130 tubing, nice Dia-compe brakes and shifters (indexed shifting on the downtube). S is not a big fan of road bike-y handlebars so the first order of business was sorting out something a bit more cruiser style there. We found some bars by Nitto that I think go under the name of promenade. Here is one place you can find them:

Nitto Promenade Handlebars

We put some "Oury" grips and some Tektro cross levers on it for the rest of that setup. I was able to re-use the cabling by just cutting the ends cleanly and working slowly to restring them. We also swapped out the seat for a sort of modern fairly cushy guy, can't remember that name right now.

Next up was wheels. This thing had some 36-spoke steel rims with Malliard hubs. A pretty heavy wheel overall. I wanted to try and take a stab at wheel building, so I figured this might be a good time to give it a try. I enlisted my pal Chris, who built my wheels to help me again. He took the old ones apart and figured out the right spokes to mate to some new silver Velocity Deep-Vs. I went into the shop after hours one evening and we built the wheels up side by side. He did the rear wheel to make sure the dishing was right, etc. but I did a pretty decent job on the front wheel. Finished these new beauties off with some Zaffiro Pro tires in blue.

I think I actually managed to not have any pics of this bike. Really a shame, because it was a real looker. S rode it for a few weeks but then decided it was too small, which it indeed was. Once you put on handlebars that push the grip position back about 4 inches, it became really apparent.

On the Trek tip, there is a lot of GREAT info if you are trying to hook up with an older Trek road bike and need more info at the wonderful vintage trek website. They have a nice timeline with lots of good info about what tubing got used on what when and that sort of thing along with a pretty full selection of brochures covering a couple of decades.

I am currently converting this bike back to sellable condition. I got a Fuji Royale 2 for her next try last week. It's a full 1"+ bigger, so it seems like a good fit. It came with 27" wheels, but putting the 700c wheels from the Trek on it worked out just fine. Putting the 27" wheels from the Fuji on the Trek wasn't such a snap though, as the 360 came with 700c wheels original. So, I'm going to have to wait until some profoundly back-ordered spokes I ordered come in to rebuild a set of pretty okay aluminum 700c rims to stick on this thing and make it back into a (nicer than when I got it) sellable bike. I'll post some pics when I have it nice and pretty.