bikemig 

I picked up this Follis today. I'm not quite sure what I plan to do with it. It's not my size and so I'll probably end up selling it after getting it road worthy. The bike was repainted by the PO who did a pretty good job. He masked off the decals, the chrome, and head tube. The paint job looks good and the decals are great.

The bike may have decent tubing (reynolds 531?). It has forged simplex dropouts and the seatpost diameter is 26.8. The stem is weird; it measures 20.2 and has some funky British handlebars with very cool engravings. The bars had some pretty nice black cinelli plugs. The wheels are fairly nondescript high flange hubs (normandy? with "Bloc G" skewers), cyclo competition freewheel, and mavic tubular rims. The tubulars are old but they hold air. The stronglight 93 crank is pretty nice and the simplex criterium RD is fully functional. The brakes say "racer" but they don't say mafac.

I have a set of nice 27 inch alloy wheels lying around that I'll probably use to turn this bike into a townie with 1 x 6 gearing and upright bars. This is the bike as found in the wild.

I also wanted to give a shout out to @juvela and @francophile for helping me suss this bike out while I was trying to figure out whether to buy it or not.

Edit: the weird stem the bike came with is totally wrong for the bike. Not surprisingly a French Atax stem I had in my parts bin fit perfectly.

This is the bike as found in the wild:

bassogap

really beautiful bike! weird to see such an inappropriate seat...in it's day, that was a TdeF caliber bike...

francophile 

Cool to see it in better pictures. Glad you picked this one up, it's a really rare bird. When you mentioned it, I was like, "holy crap!!"

Any idea what the original color was? Was the person you bought it from the original owner?

bikemig 

Well this is how the bike was found in the wild.

Why do you think it was a TdF caliber bike? I'm thinking it may well have had nice tubing but the parts mix (other than the crank and the derailleurs) are pretty low end I think.

bikemig 

The original color was green as well. You can see it through the decals that were masked off. I couldn't get a lot of detail from the seller; his buddy owned it and obviously liked bikes but they couldn't figure out how to get this bike road worthy again.

uncle uncle

Are not brakes marked just "Racer" made by Cherry? Are there symbols on the heads of the pivot bolts?

francophile 

CLB: VeloBase.com - Component: CLB Racer Course

3alarmer 

...I find relatively nice bikes with strange, fat, padded saddles on them pretty regularly on CL here. It's one of the indicators for "worth a look, probably didn't get ridden a lot", but it can also mean,"stolen by some guy who thinks that's an improvement".

Anyway, I give the saddles to the co-op. There are always people looking for them there. I always liked Follis. You don't see them a lot, even here in the Bay Area.

John E

The 26.8mm seatpost and forged dropouts are great indicators of quality.

bikemig 

This is the first one I've ever seen. I've been reading about them on the web but there is very little info out there.

bikemig 

That's my guess as well. So this is likely to have a 531 main triangle? This may be a nicer bike than I first thought.

uncle uncle

+1

bikemig 

This could be a much nicer bike than I originally thought.

(1) The freewheel is a 5 speed cyclo competition, 14-22: Vintage Cyclo Competition Freewheel 14 22 5 Speed French Threaded France | eBay

(2) The bike might well be a Follis 172 with a 531 DB main triangle. This is a good site (in French) about Follis bikes: FOLLIS - Joseph FOLLIS - Marcel FOLLIS - ANCIENS VELOS LYONNAIS There is some really neat discussion of Follis back when it was hot stuff in pro races. Neat stuff. If you scroll down, you'll find catalog pages in English back in the 70s when Follis was trying to make inroads into the US market.

My bike has the chrome of the Follis 172 and the parts group--while not the same as in the catalog--looks roughly of the same quality. The higher end bikes are full 531, have a nicer parts group, and use nice stainless cable guides. The 172 has braze on cable guides in exactly the same position as on the bike I bought. So I think this is a Follis 172.

3alarmer 

...IIRC, one of my local guys here, @djkashuba, has one that he pimped out as a keeper.

djkashuba 

Follis by djk762, on Flickr

bikemig 

I saw the original thread on this bike; it's smoking hot.

bassogap

The Stronglight 93 won many TdeFs......

bikemig 

The stronglight 93 9s around 300 grams lighter than a campy NR crank as per velobase and you can get a 37 tooth inner for the 93 (which puts you almost in compact crank land), 122 BCD Conventional Chainring, 37 Teeth

Stronglight made beautiful, light cranks and the 93 is visually my favorite.

John E

I never knew a 37T 122mm BCD chainring existed. Without the repo you referenced, they would be rarer than a 41T 144mm ring.

gerv 

@BigMike Quelle Follis!! pretty nice score on that one... I have the puller for that Stronglight.. when you need it.

gugie 

Damn, that's nice! You're quickly becoming the C&V master of Middle Earth!

bikemig 

Coming from the master of the box o' crap, that's a heck of a compliment,

It's a really neat old racing bike; just wish it were my size.

Nwvlvtnr 

Resurrecting this old thread as this is the first example I’ve been able to find of a Follis that with a frame and fork that resembles the one I just acquired. The key details being the plane lugs, top tube cable stops and bottom tube pump pegs that don’t fit into the old catalog images that always seem to come up in Follis threads. I have my suspicions about the Vitus decals as they appear to be in better condition than the paint (although the clearly stock bottom tube decal does as well), the frame tubing sticker is a little crooked and appears to occupy real estate that should have been covered by the wavy foil decal. The seat post is some where between 26 and 27 mm (not marked haven’t busted out the digital caliper yet). It feels pretty light for its Low- Mid range component spec and, however unscientific, the main tubes produce a light hollow pinging noise when flicked with a fingernail.

Bikemig whatever became of your Follis? Now six years on can anyone offer any additional information?

rustystrings61 

The Nervar Star crankset, like all Nervar alloy cotterless cranksets, is vastly underrated. I used to see them as an also ran to the magnificent Stronglight 93, but now I think they have their advantages. First, they take a standard 22.0 mm puller; second, if you wind up with the version that took 128 mm bcd chainrings, you can Dremel the bolt holes of a 130 mm chainring inward 1 mm each and it works beautifully and doesn't look too bad. I've done it and was happy with the results.

Follis made lovely bikes. It's a score!

3alarmer 

...one of my current project bikes is a Follis that resembles very much the one you've posted.
Mine is one of the three tubes butted frames, which was second in the lineup, down from the top.

It came with the same somewhat ugly stem, and the same Nervar crank. If you look at the Follis history page, I think it's the Model 172 (scroll down to the 1970's catalog pages.)

The paint was a little better on mine, but the foil stickers were faded and damaged. I bought the seat tube sticker from Velocals (link), and did a little touchup on the silver paint. If i were redoing your bike, I'd just strip and repaint the whole thing, with all new stickers. Silver is one of those colors that can be difficult to match, because there are so many versions of it.