Schreck83 

Last weekend I made some changes to my wife's mixte because that seemed to be a good place to start working on my queue. We bought this Miyata Sport 10 at a yard sale for $5 almost 20 years ago. I think it is a 1985 model and it is just about the bottom of the line. It came with mostly steel bits but it does have cro-mo tubing, so it's worth upgrading. I found a nice SR 26.6mm seatpost at the coop that is long enough so even I can ride the bike. Spent $35 on a Schwinn WorldSport to get the alloy wheels. I was going to donate the rest of the bike to the coop, but it shifted so nicely that the levers, RD freewheel and chain all ended up staying



Replaced the SunTour7 with this SIS RD. Gained a cog, so now it is a Sport 12

Bottom bracket and cranks from a donor Schwinn, alloy rings and guard from an old Maxy

Indexed shifting should encourage... shifting
I was overhauling this bike when I discovered BF ;-)

Schreck83 

When I bought the donor Schwinn, the seller showed me this Follis mixte that he couldn't sell on CL for $20. He begged me to take it too. Sharp negotiator that I am, I gave him $20.
I like Mafac brakes and thought the brake levers might be worth something, but the coop was the most likely destination.


Simplex RD/FD


Interesting brake cable sheave; don't know why they didn't mount them to a bridge on the laterals

Seeing the metallic blue paint shine through the vinyl decal is making me reconsider this one
Given the lock-down, I just may spend some time on this one after all.

Schreck83 

This mixte spent all of last year on CL without selling. It was about 75 minutes drive from me and went from $100 to 90 to 75 and finally $50 by December. Maybe the lack of a seat in the photo was a fatal flaw. Over the course of the summer I convinced myself that I had to give it a home, mostly based on the box lining and the luminous paint. I picked up this vinyl Brooks for $16; it's not French but it will do for now.
This is my first bike with a Huret drivetrain, so I'm looking forward to getting that cleaned up.


Quick release hubs are above-average for this vintage mixte

cut-out lugs!


Huret!

merziac

WOW! 3 proper twin tube mixte's!

clubman 

I love white plastic Mafac levers...

juvela

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Thanks very much for posting.

Great to see you have given this gal an appreciative home.

As far as anyone seems to know there has only been one U.S. importer for this seldom encountered marque - The Island Cycle Supply Co. of Minneapolis MN.

Evidently they only brought in one or two batches ~1973 as all examples encountered look to date from that time.

Lug pattern is NERVEX Nr. 45/159, shell Gargatte.

The UNIVERSEL chainseet from A. Duprat wears chainwheels from Cyclo (France).

Pedals are the not oft seen Lyotard Ref. 25 R.

Wheel rims appear to be SAMIR Saminox.

Two forum discussion threads on these reside here -

https://thecabe.com/forum/threads/fi...o-pics.134252/

https://thecabe.com/forum/threads/ficelle.134033/

An example was reviewed in the December 1972 issue of BICYCLING! magazine.

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Schreck83 

This is the same bike that Bernie posted in the second CABE link, so there aren't many around. Probably no action for a "Show us your Ficelle!" thread.
Both the Follis and the Ficelle have this stem:


I'll check the rims but I think they were labeled AVA.....

Tandem Tom

My wife's favorite bike is her Miyata 310 Mixte. I just added 2 sets of braze-ons for water bottle bosses the other day. I was able to mask and spray the areas with a gloss black.

juvela

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wrt the Ficelle -

BF stem and bar stock is Belleri - BELRI.

Found it interesting that while it has MAFAC brakes CLB front & rear hangers were fitted.

Bottom bracket assembly is VEROT. (Etablissements Verot-Perrin is the firm which made Stronglight products)

At one point checked the French forum tontonvelo and the Belgian forum veloretrocourse for the Ficelle name. There were no mentions at either which made me suspect name created for Island Cycle Supply.

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Schreck83 

Tore down and cleaned up the Ficelle. The rims are marked <>DEA<> Super-chrome. Both wheels had these loosely woven rim tapes with leather reinforcements at the valve stem. The hubs are not matched but appear to have been laced with the same spokes. All of the bearings and the chain showed minimal wear. I replaced the 24 tooth Normandy freewheel with a 26 tooth Cyclo 72 for the lower gearing. The seatpost was really short so I replaced it with an alloy post from the parts bin.



No markings of any sort on the hubs....

Found that the Mafac brake levers have a steel core inside the molded plastic.

Ready to ride...

nlerner

That’s a sweet bike. It’s very hard to find those brake levers intact; the plastic is usually broken off to the point where the metal core starts.

niliraga 

Schreck83 , this is magnificent! tell me, what voodoo do you do to get those fuzzy old galvanized spokes to come back like that?? or did you completely re-lace these?

Velo Mule

Three nice Mixtes. Your point about why don't they just put the rear brake on the twin laterals is a good one given that to place the calipers on the seat tube requires some twisty, curvy cable routing and that all adds up to more friction whereas if the brake was on the laterals, it would be much more direct. Peugeot and Motobecane did it this way. My wife's Panasonic also has the brake on the laterals. On your wife's Miyata, the side pull caliper is on the seat stays, however, it is a large radius bend because the brake cable pieces can be removed from the caliper arms and remounted so that the cable enters from the bottom rather than the more convention top.

I think that the only down side to mounting centerpull brakes on the twin laterals is that you need an extra long straddle cable. Unless you have Mafac calipers this could be hard to do. A long straddle cable will affect the braking force, but since it is on the rear, you don't want too much force anyway.

Anyway, you have 3 nice Mixtes. I like them all, but I like most mixtes. I wish more people would appreciate them.

Schreck83 

First I brushed the nipples with a brass wire brush, shaped like a large toothbrush. Then I used an old toothbrush to apply WD40 to each spoke and rubbed with a small piece of 0000 steel wool. Wiped with a paper towel to clean up. I used a drill-mounted buffing wheel for the hubs after cleaning with a nylon bristle brush. Not exactly fun, but mounting the wheels in a truing stand helped. My truing stand is an old fork clamped in a bench vise; I use a seat tube and rear triangle for the rear wheel.

Schreck83 

Thank you!
The downside to the side pull brake cable entering from the bottom caliper is that water can enter the cable housing and corrode the cable inside that large radius bend, which is what had happened to this mixte.

niliraga 

i also find that rusted cable housing usually turns up on those reverse-mounted calipers up on the seat stays. funny, but I notice that later mixtes (into the 80s) tend to favor seat stay brakes, even those from the same manufacturers who put the brakes on the laterals a decade earlier.

I had always assumed it was a legal department thing, once lawyers worked out that it was too easy for a casual rider to remount their rear wheel (in typical horizontal dropouts) in such a way that you could completely misalign rim & brake pads and end up with ... a product liability lawsuit!

but is there a real technical reason for the shift i dont know about?