Spring is finally getting around to us

    About nine of us got together for a vintage bike ride this spring.  We got lucky and had absolutely perfect weather.  If there was a cloud anywhere during the day I was too busy hyperventilating to notice.  It was cool shirt sleeve weather in the morning and a mid seventies in the afternoon.  It couldn't have been a better day for a bunch of vintage riders to ride around on vintage bikes.

There were even a few woolen jerseys mixed in among the spandex.

Bikes ranged from Steve Cox's very well ridden 60's Pogliaghi

to a perfectly pristine Myata

and meticulously preserved Mercian,

but Tim Potter took the show with his latest tinker toy

 a '68 Louison Bobet 650b conversion from 

a classic French road bike to a beautiful Rando bike.

My "de-finished" Hunqapillar raised a few interested eyebrows.

We spent the morning on the White Pine Trail which is mostly paved

but approaching Howard City, degrades to a gravel two track. 

 It's an enjoyable ride, a rail trail with a mild grade

and we were able to find room at the local pizza joint 

in bustling downtown Howard City.

There were frequent and lengthy stops for the vintage riders as this was the longest ride any of us "enjoyed" this year.  It was a killer metric ride up and back on a rail trail.   Yes, a metric century with less than 2% grade one way brought  all of us to our knees before getting back to Jim Townsend's house where his tolerant and over indulgent wife had prepared 

second lunch for us with beers all 'round.  

Back at Jim's house we had a chance to admire a couple of his latest finds.  

A beautiful mixte by JP Wiegle he had found for his wife,

 and a practically unused Nishiki he found somewhere.  

       All this talk about meticulous restoration of vintage bikes and especially a detail of the Nishiki left me in quite a quandary.  Jim said he placed the top tube cable guides carefully to be sure they were exactly and evenly spaced.  That's important.  I recently managed to break one of the cable stops on the Hunq and have the correct size cable guides ordered to go "old school" with a full housing.  Now, placing the guides correctly and evenly spaced becomes an issue.  Do you measure from the center of the seat tube and head tube, or is it more aesthetically pleasing to measure from lug tip to lug tip, or base of the lug or seat tube wall, or......