I’m reasonably mechanically minded so stripping the bike took about four hours. The likes of Ellis Briggs won’t judge your preferences, so I went for Ferrari Red. Originality is everything for many people but not me. It didn’t look good in 1992 and it looked worse in 2017. The Stratos originally came finished with a white headset fading into a mustard yellow overspray with the down-tube, stays and fork turquoise green. Most customers want their bike restored to how it was, but some want them to look more contemporary.” “Sometimes we’re refurbishing an existing bike but often we’re working on a vintage one that the customer fancied when they were younger but couldn’t afford. Some stopped cycling when they got married and have now come back to it. Often they get the same frame re-sprayed every 10 years or so. Paul Gibson, from Ellis Briggs says, “The majority of our customers are men over 50.
The company currently receives about 10 frames a week, evenly split between repairs and repaints.
#ELLIS BRIGGS SERIAL NUMBERS PROFESSIONAL#
I wanted a more professional job, which included replacing the Dawes decals and the all-important Reynolds 531 transfers, so I checked out a number of frame builders online before settling on Ellis Briggs ( .uk). A local engineering firm quoted £55 for bead blasting and powder coating the frame and fork. There are different options available in terms of getting a bike painted. With a bike of this age you can pretty much guarantee you’ll have to replace the bottom bracket, chain, cassette and possibly the headset bearings.
Given that the Stratos does what I need it to do, I decided just to get the frame shot-blasted and re-sprayed while replacing any worn out components. Still, it’s a lovely bike and Fionnuala has now forgiven me. I was £650 poorer and all that was left of the original bike was the frame, front wheel and the brakes. The shifters didn’t work on the existing sit-up-and-beg handlebar so I had to fit a flatter bar, which then necessitated new brake levers. I upgraded the crankset from two chainrings to three to increase the number of gears available, which meant installing a new bottom bracket with a longer axle, a new derailleur and new gear shifters. I went down that route with an old tourer I rebuilt for my wife. The options were to rebuild the Stratos to its original spec or go hog-wild and bring it up to date. A total respray means a strip down and rebuild, which offers possibilities. I decided that if the Stratos was going to be my one and only, summer and winter, road bike I had to do something about all the exposed steel on the frame. Last winter my local council spread thousands of tonnes of salt on the roads.
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