EjustE

... in a different way.

My 11 year old son has shown a pretty good size interest in bike maintenance as well as an interest in graduating from his BMX and potentially riding a road bike. I have always been fascinated in the H.P. Snyder products and have been in the lookout for something that would be an appropriate bike for him to ride and a good bike for us to work on.

So today I picked this up:



It is a 197x Rollfast Bromleigh Sport. Miniscule, 24 inch wheels, 47 X 49 (CC x TT) It needs mucho work (nice fork, et. al, probably the result of trying to shove a 26 in Kenda MTB tire on that 24 inch rim up front; check that bulge out), but it is very lightly used and has the original seat. It even has what I think could may be the original goodyear back tire that shows very little use:



Still not sure how this bike will end up looking when we are done with it. (part of me wants to restore it because you don't see many of these surviving the press. Lot's of possibilities and lots of learning. I hope that it would make a boy happy.

bbattle

Wow, that is the biggest chainguard I have ever seen.

Will you keep the drop bars or go with risers or maybe something totally different?

I'm not sure, but I think the fork is bent. A little.

Crampangoslo

I don't want to be the one to rain on your parade, but even after you spend $ fixing it up (new fork, cables, brake pads and most likely more) it will still be a low quality bike that probably won't work all that well.

Those steel centerpull brakes, with steel rims and funky brake lever/safety lever setup are not a good setup at all.

Decent used bike shop 24" wheel bikes are tough to find, but if it were me, I would hold out for that or maybe start off with a 24" or 26" mountainbike of better quality and easier to find.

EjustE

You think? just a tad...

I'll let him decide what he wants to do with his bike.

Regardless, it needs alloy wheels (the front, will not be a problem, the rear might need to be built up with a rim and a 120mm hub), that crank has to go and suicide levers and breaks will go as well. Other than that, the shimano FD and RD are fine.

EjustE

I hear ya. And this really is an experiment to see a. how he likes riding a road bike and b. to get him learning to fix a bike, the components of a bike and how a bike needs to be to work properly. Now if he likes it, and wants to do more down the road, in a year or so he will be able to graduate to a 650B wheel road bike that is easier to find in high quality steel.

squirtdad

I just did a similar project with my son.....I fixed up a 78 univega (need to take pictures).... he kinda of got bored with the process (it was lot of little at a time in the garage) and wasn't sure how cool the bike was....ok he thought it was geeky.

All of this changed once he got on the bike and realized how fast it was compared to his BMX bike.

Very rewarding and only one downside.... he can now push me as he is now a bike that has some speed.

grant40

I have been wanting a rollfast road bike for an extremly long time and the only ones I have seen on the internet are the dark green ones with 27 inch wheels. This one is probably super rare. Are those tubular tires?

merziac

Great thinking IMO, if this BSO style gets him going then he will likely be in for a penny, in for a pound.

My son was already all in on bikes but low skill working on them as he hadn't been able to sit still for it until we tore down a Raleigh Super Course I found, down to the bare frame and frame saver. He did all the bearings and fussy cleaning of every single part without any hesitation.

Fantastic experience, outcome and all else as I had always been a bit sad that I hadn't buckled down and worked more with him on this but finally got there.

merziac

I had the same fantastic outcome as well.

ascherer 

I like the idea of learning to wrench on a bike like this one, as far as performance the result may still be only a mediocre impression of what a road bike is like and he wouldn't "get it". <shrugs>

merziac

I started on BSO's as many of us did, one piece crank, all steel, imperfect at best, fussing and futzing, trial and error with good practice and experience being the valuable outcome.

Real bikes were a piece of cake after all that.

squirtdad

to note soon after he discovered fixies, so this one got converted (with front brake...I have standards) and then par for the course for my son he out grew the bike and sold (nominal price) to someone who really needed it

we built of another fixie on a soma smoothie frame and he rode that through college....but no his work kinda precludes riding (self employed and has to keep a ton of video equipment with him) so history repeated and it is now with a friend of his who commutes every day on it

ascherer 

My first waltz was a class in High School, where I completely dismantled and reassembled my mid-60's Schwinn Varsity. Started with the front hub and ended with the wheels. The limitations of that bike were apparent as soon as I started riding with intention. "Graduated" to a gaspipe Chiorda and learned the secrets of cotter pins. A year later I bought a Zeus Pro. The rest is history.

merziac

I never had any formal early training aside from watching my Dad wrench starting at 2-3 years old which I can actually still remember with the help of a photo at the time.

He and a buddy stuffed a small block chevy in a Willys window panel. He was a pretty good wrench so I got lucky inheriting that gene from him as him and my Mom split up when I was about 10 so I learned how to fix my own bikes starting right about then and like you said, the rest is history.

He didn't really ride bikes but he had ridden mc's which I took to many wins at the drag strip.

He did make sure I had some pretty good bikes along the way so that helped too.

I got my first good bike lesson when I let the grease washout of the Sugino Mighty Comp BB and nice MKS Unique Quill pedals that had almost none to begin with. All the spindles and races were scoured out pretty bad. I put in new bearings, spent about 6 months changing the grease about once a month and setting them up "just loose" until they came back around and lasted another 10 years and were stolen with the Raleigh SC they ended up on.

Cups, cones, spindles and races give you a pretty good finicky, fussy, knats PITA feel for how mechanical things can and should be, get it right and you're golden, get it wrong and you suck.

That sort of thinking saved my you know what more times than I can count, made a pretty good living doing it, won a lot of drag races and fixed a whole bunch of messed up stuff everywhere in between.

Kabuki12

Bike maintenance and repair is a really good way to start. I started at a very early age with a Murray frame that I converted to a Sting Ray . That was when I was in sixth grade . I had the help from a guy who ran the Schwinn shop in Oxnard. My Mom and us two boys just moved to the other side of town and the shop was right around the corner. I had found a set of butter fly handle bars and a banana seat some where and figured out how to mount them on the bike . The man at the Schwinn shop helped me get everything right and never asked me for money(I had none) . I would help him by sweeping or taking out the trash or moving stuff around the shop. My next project was a go cart with a Tecuhmsa motor….but that is another story.

Murray Missile 

Regardless of the quality of the bike it will be time and money well spent.

RB1-luvr

I hope you guys have a fun time. He'll always remember what you teach him.

John E

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2howud

bark_eater 

thinktubes 

2009 was a long time ago. I though we’re not supposed to touch these.

Bad Lag

Personally, I would not even consider starting with a structurally compromised frame. I'm not sure why you are.

Let's tally some of those items already mentioned - new fork, new crank, new wheels, new brakes, new bars, new tires, new tubes, new cables.

Even if you do all that, you still have a crap bike that has been severely damaged in a front end collision.

Spend a little more time to find a better candidate such that, when you are done, you have a nice bike.



ETA - Sorry, Ijust noticed it is a zombie thread - 13 years old. I wonder how the kid is doing now.

grant40

I think the cranks and the brakes are perfectly fine. The handle bars seem to be perfectly fine as well.

Bad Lag

Those were things the OP mentioned as needing to be changed. I don't disagree, sort of, except to say I think this bike is, overall, the wrong starting point.

Does the OP ever post here any longer? I wonder how his kid is doing these 13 years later.

grant40

It's probably due to them wanting to upgrade it with the square taper. He also said he wants to upgrade the brakes but they don't need to be replaced in order for it to work. I don't think kids are that picky when it comes to quality of bikes. I don't think I realized the different types of cranks in which ones were better until I was 13 years old.

The Golden Boy 

It's a way to keep his posts circulating.

I miss his posts. He was posting here for like 3 years and knocked out 3.5K good posts.