What’s in the stand today…

This old Ritchey came in for some work. It didn’t really need anything at first glance, but the owner wanted to ditch the newish brake pads and I suggested replacing the straddle cables with something more vintage looking if he was going for maintaining the vintage look. I installed a set of original Shimano canti brake pads in the rear and, as I only had one pair of them, a set of NOS Aztec pads from the mid-80’s up front.

As I was working on it, I also noticed that the shift cable casings were the new “compressionless” type and were making that scratchy/grindy sound inside the ferrules so I replaced them with shift casing found on bikes from the early ’80s – what is called brake casing today.

When I tried to adjust the front derailleur, it pretty much fell apart. One of the link arms had been broken for quite some time judging by the break area. As chance would have it, I had an exact match for the old Shimano Stag’s Head derailleur so the bike was able to maintain it’s air of vintage authenticity.

What a cool old bike. And, it’s 25″ frame fits me perfectly…and it wheelies really good. Hey, I have to test ride repairs!