China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

The beautiful orange Gitane track bike is finished! I like this French old vintage frame in this bright color. And the pretty 70s style decals were almost all still intact. What a nice bike to ride around Beijing. Even though the Soyo long grips gave us huge blisters on our hands trying to get it over the bullhorn handlebars.

My friend came again to the Natooke shop to continue working on his frame and making it as pure as possible. He cut off the extra holes which were for mounting the rack. And then he converted it to fixed gear. It is great to see this nice Chinese frame look so good.

Busy bike building weekend. There were 2 bikes in the make today in the Natooke bike shop. A friend chose this beautiful French vintage track bike frame from Gitane.

Another friend had bought a second hand steel road bike second hand (it is at least third hand) and came to convert it to fixed gear. Here is a picture of the bike before conversion (the red carpet in my shop makes the frame look pink, but it is actually white).

He worked the whole afternoon on the bare frame to cut off the cable holders and the parts for holding the break. He used our angle grinder, metal saw, file and sandpaper.

After all the work it looked like this:

In the late afternoon I had to go to see my acupuncture doctor to continue my therapy especially for getting my smell come back. After that I went to a friend’s house for a long and very nice dinner. It was great to see them and their son.

A friend brought his Merida road racer bike into the Natooke shop. He wanted to convert it to fixed gear. Here is a picture of his bike before the conversion.

We only changed the backwheel (completely new fixed gear back wheelset) and the cranks, chain and pedals, took off the gears and the back break. Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture after the fixie conversion. He had to head back to Wudaokou quickly.

And this is how the Chinese old style bike with the double top tube looks like with the newly laced Natooke wheel sets with extra deep rims and fixed gear hubs:

Thanks for the picture Philipp 🙂

Wow – my friend has this really nice very old road bike frame. It is probably from around 1970 and from the UK as it had Reynolds tubing decals. It has a really nice geometry. He had grinded off the original paint and repainted it himself with white and various grey tones and splatters. We converted it to fixed gear with nice components like Velocity 700c Deep-V rims. This is how his fixie now looks like:

It had taken us about 5 hours to put all the parts together and install them on the painted frame. Here is a picture of the virgin ride (unfortunately it was already getting dark outside). Now he can finally join our Beijing Fixed Gear Bicycle group on one of our rides around the capitol city of China.