Kase's Bottechia

Never has there been a more appropriately named person than my buddy Kase. The guy is a total case. The sort of dude that could make a porn star blush uncomfortably. He's not quite a hipster but he certainly has the tendency. he would never be able to pull off hipsterism though because he's just too damn loud and irreverant. I like irreverant. If there is one quality I cherish in a soul above all others it is irreverance. When he came to me about making him a bike I had nothing. All my stashed frames are for my size of a person and as you can tell from looking at the pics, he has pretty short legs. He wanted a fixie. You know, the new thing, a tarck bike that he could hit the bar with and have some style, but something that you don't see everyday. He gave me free reign, which was a good thing for like I said, I had nothing. So clean slate.

    Now of course he wanted things relatively cheap but completely unique, he threw out a couple of modern brand names at me, stuff I had heard of but didn't really know much about. I told him to kick back and let me see what I could I find.

   What I found was a late 60s Bottechia frame and fork in the appropriate short legged size. We got it for what I considered quite cheap, less than a third of what modern mass produced fixie frame would cost. It was old so it had the horizontal dropouts we would need to get the chain tension right.  It even came with a Gipiemme headset. It was a start.
   A forty plus year old frame has it's own baggage to contend with though. The seat tube up by the clamp area was very badly mangled. Most likely from someone jamming whatever seatpost they could find in there and wrenching it down gorilla style. It took a few trips to various parts bins and some very patient "reverse mangling" to find a seatpost that sorta fit. The poor seat tube wasn't just squished too tightly but had been rendered unround as well. But in the end I got something to work, as long as he doesn't change his seat height too often.
   The ancient headset cleaned up fairly well and before long I had a frame and fork in my stand and unified. Next up was finding componetry. The fact that this was gonna be a tarck bike made that somewhat easier but modern Shimano 600 poo just wasn't gonna cut it on this frame. That'd be like putting raver pants on your Grandpa. I had to find some properly aged junk for this thing. Once again fortune smiled and via my super secret interwebs source I found an entire Campagnolo Gran Sport gruppo (including pedals!) from the Bronze Age that needed quite a bit of love before it would be recognizable as such, and for cheap too. Of course chainring choices on these old three arm cranks are nil so I would have to stick with the meaty 52 toofer, but coupled with the proper rear cog (18 or 19t) it should be just fine. Besides that big ole' ring would make my buddy Kase look like a manly stomper as he tooled barward.

The next challenge was wheels. These old frames were made for 27" wheels while most of what is readily available today is of the 700c variety, a smaller diameter overall. Now many an old codger has modernized his ancient frame with 700c wheels, it can be done, but it just looks like you took Grandpa out of the raver pants and stuck him back in some navel perched Bermuda shorts replete with fanny pack and some white socks and sandals. It may work, it may even be comfortable, but it is still wrong. So back to my super secret interweb source and presto, 27" wheels brand spanking new laced to some sorta modern but classicishishish looking hubs, hipster friendly flip/flopper in the back. On with the some cheapy tires and Fubar hipster "double" toe straps and I was almost done.

Cockpit accoutrement next. I threatened to use the old chrome and black vinyl seat that I yanked off my Bianchi Pista the day I bought it along with some high rise Stingray bars, But Kase would have been just fine with that so the humor would have been lost, besides I had taken great pains so far to not make Grandpa look foolish so proper bars and saddle were a must. I must confess a weakness for distressed old Brooks saddles and after digging through my pile and forcing Kase to sign his first born over to Bob I offerd up a properly withered old saddle of the appropriate age. And Origin 8's Major Taylor bars wrapped in some leatherish fit the bill nicely. I cleaned up an old Weineman and dug through my pile for a BMX lever to add some front brakishness and we had a bike! BTW, I always put front brakes on fixed gear bikes, it just plain makes sense, especially for someone who has never even pedaled a fixie in their life. Speaking of that it was about this time ole' Kase started getting the heebies about that very fact and thought maybe he should go with a freewheel and a rear brake. I heckled him good and pure, and to be honest I was done with this old Grandpa and quite pleased with how it turned out, so I told Kase to go ride the thing a while and if he's not hooked I'll gladly make it into faux hipster bike for him. He rode it around the block, shook his head a few times, put it on the bike rack on the back of his Saab in a defiant act of true hipsterism and drove away. I changed my phone number that day.