Okay, this post is really for myself.
I bought this Peter Mooney a couple of years ago and have been playing with it off and on since. When I bought it off of Ebay it had been "upgraded" with a bunch of junk, and I slowly brought it back to life. One thing that always bothered me was height of the bars. It had about 1 1/2" of headset spacers. I couldn't remove the fork to cut it down, because sometime in the past quarter century someone had overtightened a stem which wasn't inserted far enough. This caused a budge in the threaded fork pipe which prevented the headset top cap from being unscrewed. I knew eventually I would have to deal with it, if only to grease the bearings. Now it had come to a head, because I've decided to have the main pipes painted and I have to disassemble everything, including the fork to do it.
Saturday I took it to Jens, who had the proper tap to recut the threads. After an hour or so of smart talk and and fusting we got the threads cut, the fork removed, and cut about an inch off the tube. It may not seem like much, but its enough to be visually "right", but still keep the bars pretty high, enough for bag clearance and to save my old back.
Now I can knock her down and haul it up to Chris Kvale for painting. I was lucky on the paint.
Curt Goodrich built a killer bike that was painted a color which had originally been mixed to match 1938 Ford blue. When I asked him if he had a number or formula for it, he said there was enough left over to paint a bike and I could have it, rather than just let it dry out on a shelf. Gunnar Scores! I think we'll keep all the lugs, braze-ons, rear triangle and front fork chrome and maybe red for the "Peter Mooney" graphics and red infilling on the crank, etc. The chip below really doesn't capture the color... too many generations of computer grabs.
I bought this Peter Mooney a couple of years ago and have been playing with it off and on since. When I bought it off of Ebay it had been "upgraded" with a bunch of junk, and I slowly brought it back to life. One thing that always bothered me was height of the bars. It had about 1 1/2" of headset spacers. I couldn't remove the fork to cut it down, because sometime in the past quarter century someone had overtightened a stem which wasn't inserted far enough. This caused a budge in the threaded fork pipe which prevented the headset top cap from being unscrewed. I knew eventually I would have to deal with it, if only to grease the bearings. Now it had come to a head, because I've decided to have the main pipes painted and I have to disassemble everything, including the fork to do it.
Saturday I took it to Jens, who had the proper tap to recut the threads. After an hour or so of smart talk and and fusting we got the threads cut, the fork removed, and cut about an inch off the tube. It may not seem like much, but its enough to be visually "right", but still keep the bars pretty high, enough for bag clearance and to save my old back.
Now I can knock her down and haul it up to Chris Kvale for painting. I was lucky on the paint.
Curt Goodrich built a killer bike that was painted a color which had originally been mixed to match 1938 Ford blue. When I asked him if he had a number or formula for it, he said there was enough left over to paint a bike and I could have it, rather than just let it dry out on a shelf. Gunnar Scores! I think we'll keep all the lugs, braze-ons, rear triangle and front fork chrome and maybe red for the "Peter Mooney" graphics and red infilling on the crank, etc. The chip below really doesn't capture the color... too many generations of computer grabs.
1 comment:
Nice stem! Pity they don't make them like that anymore.
Stevy
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