Birthday

The bicycle restoration was meant to be a birthday present for my girlfriend (who I'm happy to say is now my fiancee!). Here are some pictures of the finished product. Needless to say, the bicycle was very well received and she takes very good care of it. It is my intention to eventually get around to restoring my Raleigh 3-speed one day so we can have "his" and "hers" bikes :)

(I did not put the decals on the bicycle as I have not found a place that can print decals with white ink. I'm thinking of finding a place that does bumper stickers that may be able to print these decals for me, the trouble is most places require a minimum order of like 500....and I don't have time to rebuild that many bikes ;)

Assembly

The World Cup was on while I was assembling the bike, so I was forced to do the assembly in my living room (luckily, it was a fairly clean task!).

The white-wall tires that I purchased from a shop in California (it's impossible to find any selection of whitewall tires in Canada!) turned out looking sharp! I also opted to buy a (non-original) chrome rear-rack for practicality, and to give the bike some more character.

Re-assembly of the brake pedals was a bit of a pain since the bearings literally fall apart when the pedal is disassembled. I needed to use grease to hold the ball bearings in place while I reassembled the pedals. I tried looking for new, or "reconditioned" pedals, since the rubber blocks had been a little worn out, but I was unable to find any. So the original ones when back on after a thorough cleaning...