February 18, 2006:
Have a look at James Black's Fuji Sagres commuter bicycle.
I'm proud to share with you a series of photos and a brief description of what's unusual about my latest bicycle build, a circa 1986 Fuji Sagres sports-touring bike decked out as transportation bike. (editor's note: As of 2007, this bike is disassembled, replaced in daily use by the Nishiki International.) I snapped it up cheap on eBay and replaced nearly all the parts on it with components I already owned. It's got the seat tube 62cm c-c and the top tube 59cm c-c.
This is what it looks like surrounded by Los Angeles:
It is my fortune that some lunatic genius thought that it made sense to combine metallic ice blue and metallic dark grey into a color scheme. We are all rich who live in a society where bicycles like these have such low market value.
The SR Royal stem is smooth and elegant, not least because it has a hot dog-shaped flute in its side. Look at it too long, and you’ll find the bike steering itself to 7-11 for a couple of Big Bites and a blue raspberry Slurpee.
The Sagres sports a five-speed internal gear hub with drum brake, with its thumbshifter usefully mounted onto the left bar-end of a Nitto Grand Randonneur handlebar.
The platform of the front rack is unobstructed, as one must not interfere with pizza-carrying capacity. Therefore the hub-powered Lumotec headlight is located just below the platform, on an ESGE machined aluminum mount. I also devised a way to keep the cyclocomputer inconspicuously out of the way, but still visible while riding – it is clamped to the right front brake pad. I did this by screwing the female half of a seat binder bolt onto the exposed screw-end of the brake pad, and then fastened the computer mount to a P-clamp sized to fit the binder bolt.
I bent the non-adjustable upper stays of the rear rack to go around the chainstays in order to get the platform more level, as it is clearly sized for a smaller bike. This had the added benefit of making the rack noticeably stiffer and reducing the shimmy caused by loads on my rear rack.
I clamped the enormous-but-cheap 18 LED taillight to the seat tube (seat post in these photos) with the mount Cat-Eye provided for the smaller taillight which is mounted on the reflector bracket of the rear rack.
So far, the hemp twine whipping is holding up well. I want to wrap twine around everything now.
James Black : chocotaco at gmail.com
Some more photos: click on thumbnails for larger expanded view.
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