rhm

Those levers aren't right. Looks like they were made for straight bars or something. The correct levers will look like this:

obrentharris 

Perfect!
PM on its way.
Brent

merziac

[/QUOTE]

That is a well done from scratch out of standard hex stock example.

JBCIII

Hi guys, new to the forum here but my interest in and new acquisition of an Allegro have prompted to join the conversation.
obrentharris—that bike is A bueauty, congratulations!! All of your knowledge on these older bikes is awesome. I’m primarily an 80’s-90’s steel lover but I have a soft spot for the Allegro.
At 12 yes old I started riding a hand me down Allegro, that came from my uncle, to dad, then me.
My uncle was a local racer in So-cal L.A. area in the 60’s.
Anyway, the ol’ Allegro was my first road bike and cast a lifelong passion for bicycles that is now pretty well set.
Yesterday I acquired, what appears to be, an all original Allegro Special.
Some details: S#154188, Gran Sport ft & rr drlrs, seat post is shimmed steel with original Brooks seat, Campy high flange hubs with 58 on rr cone, 59 on front, Weinmann 999 center pulls & levers, Philipe stem & bars, steel no name headset, Weinmann tubulars. Stronglight mod 57cranks. Oh, and all the cable ends with set screws are there. Lol....which is probably foreshadowing some handwringing on my part.
This bike is pretty crusty. It will be fun to juice up and get running.
One quick question—does the drive side cup come out of the frame? I don’t remember ever taking it out on mine those many years ago.
I look forward to your comments, opinions & advice.
Thanks J

JBCIII

Yeah....I tried to add a photo😕

obrentharris 

Congratulations on what sounds like a really nice bike, very similar to mine. Yes the fixed cup comes out. On mine I believe it was French threaded, right hand thread. I assume that yours has the original Stronglight bottom bracket. According to my second edition Sutherland's manual a French threaded fixed cup will have one ring cast into the face and 8 sides. A Swiss cup will have no rings and eight sides.

Please post a photo when you can. You will be able to post photos when you have 10 posts. This is an anti-spam measure.
Brent

obrentharris 

That worked great!
My large OD pipe was the body of a grease gun. Instead of the rubber mallet I used a length of copper pipe slid over the end of the lever. That allowed me a bit of control over where the new bend would go.




Much Better.




Brent

JBCIII

Well done. Looking at those levers in your before photo’s—could they have been originally fitted with the additional lever that provided braking from the tops of the handlebars? Perhaps removed at some point and fitted with single lever pivot studs? Might explain how far out they settled.

JBCIII

obrentharris thanks for the bottom bracket info.
i presume the Stronglight 57 cranks require a French threaded tool to remove. I’ll have to get one.

obrentharris 

I didn't think of that. That would certainly explain it.
Yes, you will need a Stronglight specific puller. Note the TA puller is sized differently.
Brent

JBCIII

obrentharris now that you’ve had some rides on the bike, how do you like the performance of the bar end shifters? As has been noted, I remember them ghost shifting and driving me nuts. My original old bike had a record front drlr and my impression was it worked fine. Never used a GS which the latest bike has.

JBCIII

Ok I think I can post pic’s now.

bikingshearer 

Brent: Be careful with the crank puller. Yes, the Stronglight threading has an oh-so-slightly different diameter from that of TA cranks. The trouble is, Stronglight sometimes used the TA standard. I read this somewhere (can't recall where; maybe on BF) and thought "pish-posh, that can't be right; even the French aren't that idiosyncratic."

Ah, but they are. I went to remove my brother-in-law's Stronglight 93 crankset from his early to mid 1970s Gitane TdF. Even though the tool for Stronglights screwed right in, I decided to be extra-careful because of what I had read. Thank God I did, because the threads started to strip with the tool for Stronglights but I was able to stop before I did anything irretrievable. I gingerly tried the tool for TAs. It worked. The crisis was averted. My bemusement with all things French, however, continues even unto this day.

If there is a way to tell which Stronglights actually use the TA standard, I certainly have no clue what it is. Just be aware that not only did the French not use anyone else's threading standards, they didn't even always use their own.

P.S. I still have both tools if you need to borrow one or both.

merziac

Great thoughts and insights, many of either of these that I have encountered have always seemed to have been compromised by the wrong tool or possible poor practice somewhere along the way, especially this far down the line.

They seem to often be victims of the too close to call if you don't know better for many. If the threads are dirty, corroded, gacked by wrong puller or poor usage, it often goes from bad to worse.

I always take a very close hard look at all threads before I pull an arm off and usually do a through cleaning if not a thread by thread, mm by mm chasing by right angle pick to be sure they are viable and that the tool can be installed properly and completely for removal with no damage whatsoever.

obrentharris 

Thanks!
Perhaps @juvela or @non-fixie can help us out here.

Brent

non-fixie 

TA uses 23mm and Stronglight 23.35mm. I am not aware of them having used each other's standards. But I haven't tried them all. Yet.

What I can imagine is that someone has forced a Stronglight puller into a TA crank, after which a TA puller would be loose and possibly strip the threads.

unworthy1

I only encountered this one time, but it was so significant it stuck in my mind. I have owned a genuine Stronglight crank puller since about 1974, it has the brand and I used it half a dozen times until one day I was pulling a SL crank off some recently acquired frame and found the SL puller did not fit. I tried many times to thread it in and was extra-extra careful not to cross thread but there was no fitting it. Then out of desperation I tried a TA puller (also a tool I had used often before, but only on TA cranks). It fit! I unscrewed it and tried both again several times to make sure I did not hallucinate something but the TA was a "class A" fit on the Stronglight crank and the SL was "no-go", period. So when I put it to the stress-test that TA pulled the SL crank off without a hitch, no threads damaged or even complaining. Make of that what you will, I came away thinking things aren't always as they "should be".

tiger1964 

Presumably many have received the latest message from Velo Orange showing their analogue: Cherries

However, I could get a lot of one-use cable ends for what one pair would cost.

non-fixie 

I always try to keep my opinions to myself, but I'm having a hard time with these.

obrentharris 

A Bit of Weinmann Arcana

Thanks to @unworthy1 and @obuckler I now have a full complement of nice shiny Weinmann bolts that attach the caliper arms to the brake body. (caliper frame?)




The new bolts are presumably from newer Weinmann brakes which are built slightly differently. The photo below shows the old bolt on the right and the new one on the left. Not only does the older bolt have a thicker head, but it also is threaded farther up the shank which is necessary for the locknut style of construction on the older brakes. A problem easily remedied by adding 4 or 5 more threads to the bolt using an m6 x 1.00 die.

Both bolts have 11mm heads. Weinmann brakes that are even newer have bolts with 10mm heads. Perhaps one of you more knowledgeable folks can fill us in on the dates and models that correlate with these bolt changes.



Brent

obrentharris 

So Close

Thanks to @retyred the Allegro now has a real Allegro Seat binder bolt and nut. Retyred got this from Ted Ernst, so some fine provenance in this one.




I stole the remaining two brake pad holders from my Carlton Project so that I could complete at least one of these. I have about 80 miles on the Allegro now. I still need a pair of Weinmann hoods and a pair of open-C skewers. Also @rhm is recovering the saddle for me but it is currently fitted with a dilapidated spare saddle which I will ride while I wait. I am not at all impressed with the Campagnolo bar end shifters. Since I enjoy riding this bike and I enjoy some measure of predictability in my shifting they may very well be on their way out.



Brent

nlerner

Brent, looks great! On the shifters, I suspect that’s why I’ve seen lots of examples of SunTour barcons with Campy covers.

unworthy1

Yep, I had a pair on my Holdsworth (Touring) that were installed when that bike was purchased...I replaced them with Sun Tours after the shakedown ride, big improvement! I like the idea of replacing the ST rubbers with Campy, will have to look into that! The Allegro is looking great, keep up the thread updates so we can have vicarious thrills!

nlerner

Sold a couple of sets of these in the last year:

juvela

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seat binder addendum(b):

[at the risk of ]

in looking through the famous Bozzi catalogue of 1950 discovered that a binder of this pattern is illustrated on page 20 of the document

it is assigned the internal Bozzi item number of 1537.

in the listing is a W.A. done in boldface type

this is the Bozzi designation for an item produced by Way-Assauto

mentioned earlier in the thread that have seen the binder on Allegro products at least as early as 1937 but do not know a launch date for the part nor its employment by Allegro. Allegro appears to have fitted it to their cycles at least up through the mid-1960's. Way-Assauto began in 1906.

of course it is possible that more than one firm produced binders of this pattern...

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for readers who have not seen it the Bozzi catalogue of 1950 is available for free download in pdf format at the condorino web site: https://www.condorino.com/

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