Hardly "Retro" it's a fixy.

[Kid_Carbine]

Hardly 'retro', this is the real deal while retro is "pertaining to times past" or 'in the style of an earlier period or time' [I looked it up]
Nothing fake, replicated or "pertaining to times past" about this, so that 'SNAG' term is summarily rejected here.
[SNAG= Sensitive New Age Guy, or is it a thin skinned spineless bag of offal, ... I forget which.]


This is one of the toys in the collection & is clearly a fixy. Fixy as in I need to fix it up, so a fixy it is. [restorers delight?]
This one, I am now advised, was built somewhere around 1918 to perhaps 1922 & is, apparently, a road racer frame. By the time I got it, it had been a bush bike for a while & that's pretty much how it is represented here. [lower photo]

So the question is, what do I do with it?
Do I try to faithfully represent it as it would have been when new in the late teens/early twenties as a racer, or capture it in it's later life, just pre war, as the bike of an itinerant rural worker?
It had been parked where I found it in the early 80's by a young man who was catching the train to Sydney to join up to go to war in about 1940. He never came back to pick it up. If you saw the condition it was in & you were a cashed up returning serviceman, you wouldn't have picked it up either.

This is a backburner project but I would be interested to learn what others think.
Interestingly, a Brooks B17 saddle would not be entirely out of place as these were in production from at least 1908 & probably a few years earlier & yes, I actually rode it like you see it here.

[triode12]

Gee...there is hardly any stem length...is it a wobbly ride?

So the bike was actually parked in one spot for 40 years?!!

[Kid_Carbine]

The top picture is actually a photographic exercise when I had a good 35mm SLR in the mid 80's. The bar & stem are from a girls bike with the bar inserted upside down, just to see what it looked like. In the second picture it has its original diamond stem & bars, & the stem can be seen just behibd the blanket. I rode it about 20 yards [18.288m] with the short stem & low flat bars then removed them & fitted something else.

Yes, it was leaning against the wall of the inside of a building in Boorowa in NSW for over 40 years.
The saddle was completely [censored] so I added the Brooks. The forks held a rear wheel while the left side crank was actually a right side one with the chainwheel bashed off. The left threaded pedal had been forcibly screwed into the right threaded crank & riveted over at the back to make sure it stayed there. It was still floppy in the hole.
They were different length cranks too.

The chain ring was bush riveted to the crank because the threaded holes in it were striped or damaged, so some metal was shoved through the holes & bludgeoned into rivets.

In the two pictures here I had recovered it from the building & leaned it against the car. I removed the huge buildup of cobwebs & took these pictures.
Sorry about the picture quality but they were taken on a bright summers day, in direct sunlight, with a cheap camera, by in inept photographer.

[triode12]

Thanks for sharing.

It would make a good museum/conversation piece if you could trace what became of the original owner. The fact that it wasn't moved from it's last location for over 40yrs is amazing.

If the owner's wife had a kid the day he left the bike, that kid would be roughly 40 yrs old (older than me) the day you found it.

[Kid_Carbine]

There is no real suggestion that the owner 'never came home' although it's a possibility. All that was known is that it was left there when he caught the train & didn't return to claim it. Quite simply put, I was amazed that in the mechanical condition it was in, that it could have been riden at all.

I junked all the damaged components & refitted serviceable parts to make it rideable.