1987 Raleigh Equipe Student Restomod
The beginning. I bought the Raleigh on eBay as a student hack, but couldn't let it be. What followed were multiple sheets of sandpaper, a paint-streaked garden wall, a room filled with bike parts and the tentative start of my adult journey into bicycles.
I think it's kinda fitting that the first two pictures are so grainy, 'cos this bike was as grainy as they get when I first bought it. I needed a decent bike to get to Uni and back and had just discovered eBay, so trawled through it to find a relatively clean-looking 1987 Equipe on sale for £60. My thoughts were probably 'how bad could it be?'
As it turned out, the answer was firmly 'not amazing.' The Equipe was straight enough but a combination of age, worn components and my own mechanical ineptitude resulted in various parts starting to rattle loose within a few months. At the time, I was riding through Birmingham city centre to an internship, and I didn't know how to service the bike properly yet. The only way to learn, I decided, was to take it all apart.
At this point, my natural artistic curiosity led me to the idea of restomods. I had, mostly, taken the bike apart and, mostly, cleaned and polished all of its constituent parts. All that remained was the frame in its increasingly tatty 80s white and grey paint. After seeing some very pretty single speed conversions online, I had made my mind up: the Raleigh was getting repainted.
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What followed was a masterclass in thriftiness. I didn't want to spend loads on the build and didn't have the common sense to visit a sand-blasting facility, so instead, set about stripping the paint by hand. What I didn't realise was that 80s bike paint had the thickness and tenacity of military paint; so what followed was a miserable few weeks painstakingly scraping it off first with a paint scraper, then various grades of sandpaper.
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Luckily, the painting itself was easy enough. I chose a fetching Battleship grey Halford rattle can and got to work. Two coats of primers, three of paint and two of clear later, I was done. I was especially happy with the decals I'd ordered, bright gold 'Raleigh' letters in a serif font. Classy.
One other thing I was especially proud of was my attempt at building new wheels for the bike. I decided to keep the original Weinmann hubs, but remember the box-section steel rims being quite pitted with rust. I ended up buying some questionable 'Aero' profiled aluminium rims from eBay and, after a few mornings lacing them in my girlfriend's room (mine was filled with dismantled and various drying parts of bike) I had new wheels.
Admittedly, I didn't do them right - my hastiness meant that I'd ordered too-long spokes, and my laziness meant I couldn't be bothered to return them. This left me with a remarkably ropey ride, which I never really got along with. On the plus side, I remember this every time I build wheels now - use a Damned Spoke Length Calculator!
And, just like that, I was done. I had built my first bike (more or less) from scratch. It didn't matter that it rode like marbles (see above: spoke length) or that I used it for around half a year more before selling it to some other hapless student. I'd proven to myself that I could, and wanted to, build and fix bikes in my own back yard. I haven't looked back since.