Le Gitane

Let me start this particular installment off with the fact that I am a sucker, a total quivering mass of denial with weak self control. Now that that has been cleared up let me introduce you to my Gitane, the ultimate townie. This project started as a 20 dollar craiglist frame find that came primed and with those amazing 70s Gitane era Huret dropouts. This was too be a joint project with my special lady friend (see the Vitus blog), a painter of note, and my self. She was going to paint the frame and we were going to build up a rather simple bike for the purposes of selling it and she was going to learn to make bike along the way. Well....somewhere along the way the Gitane became MY bike and she got to install a front brake, with entirely too much supervision from me (see opening statement).

The first nails in this coffin were those damn dropouts. I mean look at them! I couldn't just let that derailleur hangar  dangle there all alone on some single speeded let down of a bike. Those drop outs deserved a derailleur, not just so they could serve their purpose but also so any would be passerby's eye would be drawn thither and they could be admired. So a build philosophy began to take shape; I decided to make at least a 1x9 out of this bike as a buddy had left a 700c sized 9-speed wheelset with the intructions to get rid of them. Perfect! Oh...wait a minute, this is a mid 70s frame made for 27" wheels and 700c wheels just look lame on 27" frames. Time to do some ciphering. What if I could find a threaded 700c fork that looked kinda cool and put that on, thus maybe taking some of the dork factor of the smaller wheels in the bigger frame away? It would also steepen the front end and shorten the wheelbase a smidge, making things a bit more exciting in the handling department. Might work. Off to my super secret interweb source of ever cheap bike parts where I located a 20 dollar set of Schwinn forks in raw aluminum. Success! But wait, Gitanes are French, Schwinns are not. How might I fuse the Gaul with the Asian? (No, Schwinns of this era are no longer made in the USA). It was tricky, but I was trickier. By combining the cups and races of a French headset with the screwy parts of a standard headset I made it all work. Whew.

   With that obstacle out of the way it was time to start thinking about a color. The grey of the primer actually looked nice with the raw aluminum fork so I decided on a bit darker shade of grey for the final coat. The free wheels were black so grey and black was looking pretty sessy. Maybe some white acootermaw to offset it all and Bob's your uncle. We chose a single stage paint from NAPA and I rigged a janky rack to hang the frame from in the back yard by using a ladder, some square tube and basketball goal. My special ladyfriend did her amazing magic on the thing. We had orginally gotten some black paint to outline the lugs but decided that it would be too gauche and would look better kept simple. It was about here that I knew I wasn't gonna sell this thing.

Next came the parts bin shuffle and the interwebs deal making that is my forte when it comes to piecing together my vintage abherrations. I obsconded a set of unused Ofmega cranks from another project to be featured here later, the super secret interwebs source yeilded me stinky white tires, a proper French sized kalloy seatpost, some cheapy MTB bars and a stem. I was well under way when a few more unseen obstacles reared.

The first had to do with that old 700c in a 27" wheeled frame problem. See, my clever fork trick led to a brake reach disparity. The front wanted short reach and the back wanted long reach. Ugh. The thing was really starting to look perty so I didn't want to be all ghetto with the brakes. I pored over secret tomes of knowledge and discovered a brake of the same manufacture that came in both reaches. This particular brake, a Tektro model I believe, was even sufficiently high tech enough looking to satisfy my evolving aesthetic for this bike; a blend of old and new tech, mountain, city, BMX and road. Problem was I could find one reach in black and one reach in silver, not both in the same color. So I had to justify it somehow. My solution was to splash some more black in the color motif and hope no one would notice.

The next obstacle may seem trivial but it was killing me. These old frames did not come with brazed on cable guides, that in itself was just dandy, kept things simple, but it was gonna need some sort of bolt on cable guidage and the obstacle was in finding a single rather than paired guide set. I told you that I am sucker and now you are seeing just how sucked in I get. It just wouldn't do to have that orphaned front derailleur cable guide on the down tube for all to see, not to mention the other orphaned guide that would be on the seat tube down by the bottom bracket. I would not be able to bear answering the inane queries, "Uh..but what's that for?". Oh it was killing me, I was loosing sleep. But once again my super secret interwebs bike parts source came through for me and I was saved by a perfect NOS set of old Suntour SINGLE guides. I almost sacrificed a puppy I was so elated. 

  

The making began and things were looking nice. The dreaded chrome Pista seat was used for build up purposes only and never intended to live there. Some black Primo pedals and white ODI Longnecks, a Rapidfire shifter and 600 rear changer, a 110 50 toofer, cable it all up and POOF! There it is! My first test ride had me grinning wide. It jumps curbs, does wheelies, hauls major ass and looks damn good. And that front fork experiment did exactly what I hoped, quite lively indeed. I know I was supposed to sell this bike, but I am sucker and I have a problem. A making bike problem. Oh well.