Michael found a mystery Bianchi frame and promptly got to work on a killer single speed coaster cruiser build. Let’s check it out in this week’s Readers’ Rides!
My name is Michael Castro. I live in State College, Pennsylvania. I’m a neophyte antiques dealer and full time bike bum.
Over the past couple of years I’ve built a lot of bikes. Some of them inspired, some of them duds.
I feel like this one is particularly inspired.
This winter was a rough winter, both in terms of riding conditions, injury and personal turmoil. I had an endo in the fall that, while not particularly serious in terms of injury or damage, broke my confidence on the bike. After a couple of months of moping, not riding, blaming everything on the weather, I went to my bike shed and constructed a plan to get that feeling of control back. I decided on a back to basics approach, stripping out all the extraneous elements from some of my bikes that at the end of the day felt like it was getting in the way of riding. Gears, cables, brakes, they all had to go. Single speed and fixed gear riding was the ticket to me feeling like I could ride my bike again.
So back to this bike. I’ve always been interested in the early development of the modern off road bike. Over the years I’ve had a great number of bikes built up to the standards of the mid to late 1980s, but I had never had a true coaster brake klunker. Like any good bike build, the project started from a single hub. I had set aside a 28h Sachs Torpedo Duomatic kickback coaster brake hub months ago with the intention of building a bike around it. The project wasn’t started in earnest until a friend of mine handed me a 28h Campagnolo Record front hub and told me he had no use for it. Score, now the wheels start turning. I had been eying a set of NOS 90s Campy K2 28h mountain bike rims on ebay, exactly the kind of oddity I had been waiting for. I snapped up a set for less than the cost of a single Velocity rim. Other than spokes and nipples, the rims are the only part of the bike I bought.
The rest of the parts I gathered from my personal collection or rescued from the trash. The frameset is an early 80s Taiwan built Bianchi that I bought from a collector’s trash frame barn. It’s in the style of a lot of early factory made ATBs, somewhat degraded tig welded copies of the Ritchey MountainBikes pattern with some questionable modifications and freakish proportions. Long top tube, long stays, absurd frame angles.
The designers decided that the best way to accommodate shorter riders was to drop the flat top tube so that it meets the headtube about an inch from the top and change absolutely nothing else about the bike. Great if you’re an Orangutan. The bullmoose bars are original to the bike, made by HL with the 21.1 quill diameter that was typical of a lot of these first generation bikes. They’re not bad, not super heavy, very wide. The crankset and pedals I found in the trash. The crankset is the Shimano Deore XT FC-M730 with a light sand and polish with a 44 tooth red anodized Sugino BMX chainring. The pedals are another copy of a copy, the Wellgo Lu-393.
A ripoff of the Suntour ripoff of the Titron pedals born just miles from where I’m writing this. They were a rusty mess, the cage was attached to the body with rivets that were falling out of the pedal body. Despite all that, they are a surprisingly high quality pedal that was worth the hours of cleaning, drilling, tapping, and repacking it took to get them into a rideable state. The front brake came from my personal collection of parts I always wanted to use, but never found the right platform for. It’s a Scott Pederson self energizing cantilever brake, a novel design that I would dare to say is one of the easiest cantilever brakes I have ever set up.
The brakes do not pivot on the brake boss, but on a helical screw that allows the pads to be pulled forward by the rotation of the wheel, increasing braking power. Some people feel like these brakes are potentially dangerous on front wheels, that they would self energize themselves so much that they would lock the wheel and send you over the bars. I haven’t found this to be true, yet. They do work great though, probably second to the Magura hydro rim brakes I have on my fixed gear mountain bike. The brake lever is a Shimano BL-MT63 two finger lever I took off a trash bike. I was considering a full four finger motocross style lever, but I’m glad that I went with the two finger lever.
Looks sleek, feels wonderful. Highly recommended. Seatpost is a Kalloy I bought cheap a while back. With old bikes having all sorts of oddball post diameters, I don’t see any sense in spending good money on fancy parts that fit on a single frame and add almost nothing to the functionality. Saddle is a reissue Turbo, I really like those. The Hite Rite is a cool addition, I think they’re fun and people love to see them. I was given a single roll of Celeste Newbaum’s tape and wrapped up some grips and finished them with some shoelaces from a pair of old Adidas that my cat puked on. The barplugs came from an old road bar in a trash pile. I slapped a pair of Panaracer Fire XC Comp tires that I had sitting around gathering dust on the wheels.
The build process was a birthday present to myself; a five day marathon of part selection, hub rebuilding, wheelbuilding, trash-heap part restoration, assembly, cleaning, and preening. The wheels are built up with Phil Wood double butted spokes with brass nipples. It’s spendy for what is essentially a trash bike, but the wheels are worth the expense. They feel like truly one of a kind objects, I doubt anyone has put together these hubs with these rims ever before and I doubt anyone ever will again. They were a joy to build, other than the ergonomic nightmare of building a light rim to a three pound hub.
The bike rides great, a real street ripper in its current configuration. The gearing is much too short for the kind of trail and gravel riding I want to do with the bike, a smaller chainring might be necessary as much as I might want to avoid that. I’ve heard one can grind down the splines on a Shimano HG cassette sprocket, might be a fun experiment.
Anyway, that’s my long-boy. I wrote a lot, but this bike meant a lot to me and it was a real labor of love. Shouts out to my ride or die shop, Justin at Freeze Thaw Cycles. This whole build wouldn’t be possible without access to his bottomless piles of parts, his willingness to give them away, and the invaluable advice along the way.
My instagram handle is @sunspex
Thanks for reading any of this.
We’d like to thank all of you who submitted Readers Rides builds to be shared here at The Radavist. The response has been incredible and we have so many to share over the next few months. Feel free to submit your bike, listing details, components, and other information. You can also include a portrait of yourself with your bike and your Instagram account! Please, shoot landscape-orientation photos, not portrait. Thanks!