A Unique Find - 1938 Raleigh USA Catalog

Here's a great, recent find - a Raleigh US market catalog from 1938. This catalog gives us a nice picture of Raleigh's presence in the US market in the early days.

 

This catalog places the arrival of Raleigh in the US to around 1933. Raleigh USA began in Boston, Massachusetts and expanded from there. By 1938, Raleigh had a presence, through dealerships, in 32 states. 

 

The catalog offerings from 1938 were still somewhat limited in the US. The catalog shows:

• cable brake light roadster model, 
• rod brake light roadster, 
• full rod brake roadster
• child's model
• carrier/cargo bike
• and three sporting/road models 

The catalog is certainly more limited and less colorful than its British counterpart.

 

Where the offerings do not fall short are in the parts and accessories area, which includes numerous items to help make cycling easier. The emphasis was on a combination of practical cycling (even a cycling poncho and rain hat are offered), and on sporting (numerous touring bags, pedal toe clips, etc.). I love this little time capsule from the early days of practical cycling and three speed bikes in the US.

 

I have submitted a full scan of the catalog to the Veteran Cycle Club library. If you enjoy British bicycles and are not yet a member of the VCC, I highly recommend joining.

I plan to study this catalog further, and to do a more general entry on early utility bikes in the US prior to WWII in the future.

 

Late Season Rides - 1959 Schwinn Traveler Three Speed

 We've had excellent weather here this week, with temperatures above 70 deg. F (21 deg. C.). So I took a couple of different bikes out for rides this week: 1940 Raleigh Model 35, 1953 Raleigh Lenton, and 1959 Schwinn Traveler. All of these are fun, solid bicycles to ride on a warm autumn day.

 

The 1959 Traveler needed some minor maintenance. I've found there's a break-in period for every rebuilt, vintage bicycle. This usually means minor adjustments to the brakes, touch-ups to paint, and truing to wheels. Sometimes the rear hub needs a little oil, or handle bars or a saddle need adjustment. In this case, I needed to adjust the front brake and true the front wheel. Thankfully, nothing more than that so far.

 

I try to ride every day that I can this time of year because the season is so close to ending. I probably have 10 days or so left to ride in the evening after work. Once the clocks go back to Eastern Standard Time, it's too dark. Sometimes I'll slip a day in on the weekend, if it's suitably warm.

Progress- 1957 Schwinn Traveler Tall Frame

 I've been working gradually on a 1957 Schwinn Traveler tall frame. This one is in pretty good shape, and I really like the color. 

 

The work included 

• general cleaning, 
• straight and polish stainless fenders
  
• clean-up and tighten the fender braces, 
• check all bearings and races, add grease where needed,
  
• verify frame and fork straightness, 
• straighten and re-build brake calipers,
• clean and polish brake levers,
  
• clean and polish all chrome, 
• clean-up and true wheels, 
• new front axle, 
• new tires, 
• cr-mo seat post,
• new SRAM nickel plated chain, 
• remove old electrical tape and tape residue,
• patch-up paint here and there,
  
• and new Brooks leather saddle.

My light set will be a Kiley retro LED front and a Soma torpedo retro LED rear. Brake housing will be grey, similar to the original housings. I'll have all new brake cables. I'll custom fit a fixed-length Sturmey Archer shifter cable in grey housing. Pedals will either be new-old-stock waffle block Unions or new MKS 3000S rubber block pedals. I have a couple sets of original Union bow pedals, but I've always preferred square, beefier rubber blocks over the rounded bows.

This bike came with a 1957 dated Sturmey SW hub. This particule SW actually seems to work with its stock, 18-tooth cog. The issue with the SW is that it stays in gear... until suddenly it does not stay in gear. I've never had much luck with SW hubs staying in gear once the cog is changed up to a 22-tooth. Some of them work OK with the stock cog and in perfect conditions. The minute the floating pawls in the SW want to stick at all, they seem to cam out of gear. It's not a big deal if you're just puttering around the neighborhood, but if you're climbing and putting effort into pedaling, it can mean a trip over the handlebars. We have some pretty challenging hills around here too...

So I decided in the end to replace the SW hub with a 1957 AW alloy hub. It's from the same year, also 36 holes, and a lot more reliable with the 22-tooth rear cog. I also have all the parts I need to keep it tuned-up.

It will make a nice match for the 1959 Traveler tall frame I rebuilt a couple months ago.

Editorial: Beware Dishonesty in Our Hobby

Here are a few thoughts on a rainy, windy October afternoon. 

In the vintage bicycle hobby, I think we should push back against the practice of sellers setting reproduction or knockoff parts alongside originals where no warning is given that some of the parts are reproduction or knock-off.

Let's look at an example. A seller has 10 sets of chrome fenders that appear to be for a Schwinn Black Phantom. Eight of the sets are originals and two are reproductions. The reproductions are not obviously different at first glance from the originals being offered, but they certainly are not as well-made in general. All sets are laid out on a table or seller's mat. There is no obvious difference in the prices and no description offered. The seller simply says he is selling "fenders" and puts a price on each, all within the same range. This kind of behavior is going to mislead a buyer into paying top-dollar original prices for a lesser, reproduction part. The seller comes out way ahead and the buyer gets burned.

I think, as hobbyists, we should collectively push back against this kind of behavior. There is no active statement misrepresenting the items, but there certainly is a level of deception present. This is a sin of omission. The seller tries to mislead the buyer by camouflaging the reproduction parts alongside originals. The buyer is ultimately burned when he gets home with his item and finds it's a reproduction that was placed alongside originals, or when the item shows up in the mail and something turns out to be amiss. It leaves a bitter taste, and if the buyer is a newbie, burns him on the hobby.

I've seen this happen a few times - fenders, handlebars, vintage bicycle advertising signs, etc. It's something that is not necessarily "common" in the hobby, but it happens frequently enough that it is a problem. I think people in our hobby should be better-behaved than that.

I think the right way to do things is if you list several similar items together, and one of the five things you listed is a reproduction, you should call that out rather than using the originals around it as camouflage to pass off a reproduction or knock-off as original.

I sometimes see this kind of behavior utilized along with "shill" bidding. Shill bidding is where a seller or a friend of the seller acts as a straw bidder to artificially raise the price of an item. Sometimes the same guys who "camouflage" knock-offs and reproductions, as described above, use shills to raise the prices of items (which may or may not be the camouflaged items). 

I've seen quite a few auctions for parts, or even whole bikes, where the bike is listed on eBay and "sells" on eBay, but then a week later I see the same original seller pushing the bike for sale on another website or at a swap for a much higher price. This isn't a case of a bidder backing out, but rather the seller being unhappy with the eBay price, and with the failure of the shill to draw higher bids from the real bidders. Evidently, the shill bidder won the no reserve eBay auction, and the seller is still stuck with the item or bike. Again, as hobbyists, we should push back against this kind of behavior. "Times are tough" is never a justification for outright dishonesty.

I'll end my Friday editorial with that.

1953 Raleigh Lenton - And the "Sporting Roadster" Concept

 A focus for me this season was to put together a couple premium, sporty bikes with upright bars and a utility bike type configuration. The goal was to take the basic concept behind the famous Raleigh Sports light roadster, and to increase the performance a bit. My thinking was to do something similar in increasing performance, but also keep the core comforts of a utility bike like a Raleigh Sports would have. This seemed like a good idea for dealing with the hilly terrain around here.

I found three bikes to serve as a basis for this "sporting roadster" type of bike, two of them being Raleighs. One was the 1949 Raleigh Clubman, which I took for a ride last night. The Clubman was a significant increase in performance over the basic Sports model, given the wide variety of alloy parts, in addition to the Reynolds 531 frame. The alloy seat post, bars/stem, and rims make a huge difference. The frame helps some too, but those alloy components really reduce the weight.

The other Raleigh in this concept of a sporty roadster was a 1953 Raleigh Lenton. Like the Clubman, the Lenton would have started life as a road bike. 

 

 The Lenton was a step down from the Clubman but up from the Sports in terms of components. The Lenton has steel components, though some are lighter than typical Sports components. The Lenton especially has a nice set of lighter, Dunlop steel endrick rims. They're not as light as alloy, but they definitely are lighter than Westrick Sports rims as well. The frame is a bit lighter than a Sports, having Reynolds 531 main tubes, and the frame dimensions are a little tighter than a Sports. It falls right in between the Clubman and the basic Sports along a spectrum of sporty roadsters.

 

Overall, I like what this produced. The lighter weights are helpful when handling hills, though the comfort and usability of a light roadster are still present. All these bikes are equipped with saddle bags, light sets, bells, and sprung Brooks saddles. But the Lenton, and especially the Clubman, feel livelier and faster than a basic Sports. That's not to say the Sports is a bad bike - I still have several variations of the Sports in my collection. But these "sporting roadsters" hit a sweet spot that blends comfort, utility, and performance when you want something with a little more life than the usual.

Heading Toward the End of the Season

Over the years, I've developed a late-season routine of sorts for dealing with old bikes. 

Priority, as usual goes to riding bikes as frequently as weather and my time allow. But late in the season, that priority placed on riding is even more emphasized than other times of year. Given the now-limited number of days to ride, I try to get out as much as I can.

Below is a shot of my 1949 Raleigh Clubman, which is in a very comfortable, touring configuration. Those Nicelite/Reflectalite LED bulbs are great.

 

 

Second to riding come the minor projects and maintenance that keep a bike on the road. These are your one-evening type projects, such as fixing burned out light bulbs, repairing flat tires, and truing wheels. This keeps bikes on the road through the end of the season and keeps them safe to ride.

The lowest priority are large projects such as rebuilds. My assumption here is that even if I prioritized these projects, the bikes in question probably would not be on the road in time to make the end of riding season here. These projects can wait until winter in that case, and there's no real loss to me. The other nice thing about keeping these projects near the bottom of the ladder is that it takes all the pressure off to rebuild bikes. Trying to rush through a project is a recipe for stress and mistakes. 

Late season is also a good time to start thinking about what you might need by way of parts over the winter. Vintage parts that come in need to be cleaned and prepared for use. New parts usually are OK, but some parts, like MKS pedals, benefit from some additional grease and fine-tuning. Below is a set of MKS 3000-S 1/2 inch pedals straight from Japan for use on a vintage Schwinn 3-speed bike. The box is from a general "Japan goods" type retailer, who apparently also sells items related to Japanese cartoons. I'm not sure he has any idea how nice those MKS 3000S 1/2 pedals are on an old Schwinn... but it's great to have good pedals either way.

 

Late Season Rides

 We're down to the last few weeks of riding season here. It's starting to turn cooler and the days are getting much shorter. It's dark by about 6:45 p.m., so that means leaving for my rides a little earlier each day. Once the clocks change of back to eastern standard time, it will be dark very early indeed. I might as well make the most of it while it lasts...

I've been spending more time on the 1940 Raleigh Model 35, a simple and enjoyable light roadster with not much in the way of "extras" on it. The only real "extra" was the fact that it came with a three speed hub rather than a single speed. Other than that, it came as a very basic bike: no chain guard, no rack, no lights. I added some retro LED lights and a nice saddle bag. 

I recently also made some changes to the 1959 Schwinn Traveler three speed. 

 

I reverted the grips from the white reproductions to a set of vintage Schwinn teardrop grips, and added heavy duty saddle clamp with a safety notch on it. I have found the modern, black reproduction Schwinn grips to be supple and comfortable. The white reproductions I used on the bike previously turned out to be harder and less comfortable than expected. I ended up converting to a set of aged Schwinn grips from the 1950s, which suit the bike nicely.

The saddle clamp is a basic, Sunlite brand clamp that is made in Taiwan. However, I have come to like these clamps because they have a couple features I look for: a safety notch on the inner clamp, and a full square carriage bolt rather than a thin (cheap) bolt with just a couple flats on it. The safety notch is nice when you use a 7/8 top seat post  for a 13/16 Schwinn frame. The heavy duty bolt is nice because it bites better and is stronger than the really cheap, thin bolts you see that have just the two flats mashed into them. A full, square saddle carriage bolt is the way to go, I think. You see the beefy, full square carriage bolts on the older English clamps, though I've seen even some of the newer England clamps with the cheapo thin/flat bolts.

Get out there and enjoy it while you can...