Originally Posted by
Road85rebel
Very thoughtful and insightful comments. It was a labor of love effort focused primarily on preserving a piece of family history....if a bike can actually have such meaning. Regardless, I plan to pass it down and hopefully it brings another generation into the joys of riding. As for myself, I am approaching the joys of retirement, but doing my best to fight back against father time when I ride.
As you will notice we are 99% an agreeable bunch of old bike nerds who get along with each other exceptionally well (there are a small handful of exceptions).
I live on a coastal barrior island that hardly has a 10-foot elevation change. While we have our transient tourists, we also have a nice size population of year-round residents, including children and teens (and not just retired old guys like myself).
What has been really cool to see are the tween and teen girls (pre-driver license) riding their modern versions of your resurrected and preserved time capsule '50s Columbia, around the island. Of course, the boys favor their MTBs, but the girls are into single speeds with fenders, chainguard and baskets. The middle school ones are my favorites, because they tend to be in packs of 3-6 girl riders, and usually rendezvous with a pack of boys on their MTBs.
BTW, I made a hub shiner for one of my bikes yesterday. It's an experiment. I have an early '80s Phil Wood front hub wheel. Typical of this era the hub shell has rusted in places. I want to see if the leather hub shiner, with an inner layer of Scratch-X, will polish the shell as I ride. More later.
