While top-tier models might set you back five figures, it's perfectly possible to get a great entry-level road bike – with an aluminum frame and disc brakes – for under £1,000/$1,500. Nobody needs to spend hours restoring an aged steel-frame machine to enjoy cycling on a budget. However, there's a lot to be said for the personal satisfaction that comes from breathing new life into something old.
That's why I chose to restore this Ribble – but how long did it take me, and how much did it cost? Finally, was it worth it? Let's dive in...
Winning the eBay bidding war
I decided to buy this particular bike because it was made from Columbus SLX tubes (with internal helicoidal spine ridges to improve stiffness, if you believe the marketing), so for a steel-frame bike it’s relatively light.
The full Shimano 600 Tricolor groupset was a big plus, and the frame is fully chromed, which means that it’s about as weather and corrosion resistant as a steel bike can be.
Checking an older steel frame for rust is essential, particularly around the bottom bracket, the seat clamp and the headset, not to mention the chain and seat stays. The steerer tube and fork crown are also crucial inspection items.
Having won the eBay bidding war (a minor skirmish, really) for just £199 ($270 for our US readers), I collected the Ribble from Greenwich, which is less than 10 miles away from home. Since Columbus SLX frames alone sell for upwards of £150 (it’s worth getting a general sense of prices before buying your bike), it was a no-brainer. I would have paid the extra £50 or so for courier delivery even if the bike was further away – it can be a worthwhile expense if you find your unicorn.
All used bikes need some TLC to get them running smoothly, and the base condition of the bike dictates just how much time, money and effort you’ll have to put in. This generally works on a sliding scale, with bikes in good condition sporting the highest price tags, and the real dogs being offered for a song.
The Ribble, it turns out, was closer to needing daily walks and regular flea treatments than I’d hoped. But I still got away with spending just less than £370 ($500) for a mechanically sound and delightfully rideable piece of dead sexy British cycling history.
Here's how I did it.
The component search
From careful scrutiny of the eBay photos, I fully expected to replace the tyres (cracked and worn and 23 mm), the saddle (tattered and torn), the bar tape (ditto), the chain (very evident wear), the gear and brake cables and housings (as a matter of course), the brake pads (safety first) and the pedals (I ride Shimano SPD pedals on all my bikes for convenience).
But with older bikes, you often don’t know what you have until you take it all apart, so after a few ‘before’ photos I put my Allen keys and socket set to good use. Once I had all the bits laid out, it was clear that I’d soon be forking out for even more replacement parts.
The lower saddle clamp was inexplicably split in two, the inner chainring teeth were worn to resemble shark fins, and the front brake caliper had corroded into position and refused to respond to my rigorous degreasing and lubrication. The headset was in terrible condition, with multiple grooves worn into the lower cup.
The geometry was spot on for me personally. With a 54cm top tube despite being a 56cm bike, the frame was clearly made in heaven for my slightly off-kilter body dimensions (long legs, short torso). However, the 110mm stem proved to be a touch long, and the gorgeous Cinelli handlebar was too wide for me at 44cm. Perhaps the nastiest surprise was the cracked rear derailleur parallelogram.
In this world of instant gratification, there’s something deeply satisfying about hunting for bike parts that are often no longer in production. Rather than simply clicking online or swiping your bank card at your LBS, you have to trawl the online classified sites and forums to find the specific hens’ teeth you’re looking for. And when you find the right component at the right price, the thrill is real.
So, I subjected my eyes to more blue light from my laptop screen than is strictly healthy and, lo, I found all the bits and pieces that I needed, with the proviso that I wasn’t being overly pedantic about maintaining the original component specs.
The basics, like gear and brake cables and housings, bar tape, chain, ball bearings, and bottle cage I quickly bought new. The other bits took a bit more work, with the 39T chainring and Shimano 600 Tricolor brake calipers (with new brake pads, no less) eventually coming from eBay, the front tyre and Shimano SPD pedals after patient Gumtree searches, and the rear tyre from Freecycle (a Continental GP5000 S TR for free).
A near-mint Shimano 600 headset and rear derailleur (both for more than I was hoping to pay) came from kindred eBay users, while Golden Age Cycles – a great resource for vintage restorations – provided me with the 90 mm quill stem.
The three non-original replacements comprised a System EX seatpost from Tredz, a Fabric Radius saddle (it keeps my bum happy) from Merlin Cycles, and a handlebar from Temple Cycles, one of the only companies currently selling compact bars with a 25.4mm clamp diameter.
These purchases pushed my restoration spend up to £242.68, over and above the bike's purchase price. But I recouped a few quid for the sale of the Cinelli A1 110 mm stem, the Shimano 105 pedals, the Turbo saddle, the Shimano 600 Tricolor seatpost (even with the broken lower clamp) and the Cinelli handlebar (no surprises there). All of this netted £72, bringing the total bike and restoration cost to £369.68.
Of course, I managed to keep the total cost low because I did all the work myself. If the restoration was left to your LBS, you’d be paying anywhere between £200 and £300 for a full strip, clean and rebuild, not taking into account the additional replacement cost of the component parts. But if you have a decent set of Allen keys and a shifting spanner, you can do the bulk of the restoration work yourself, like replacing brake and gear cables and housings, fitting a new chain, installing derailleurs, setting up brake calipers, inserting the stem and handlebars, and wrapping bar tape.
The trickier jobs that require specialised tools aren’t far out of reach either, and I’d argue that they’re worth the investment even in the short run. Buying the relevant cone wrenches for around £15 and learning how to service a wheel hub has paid for itself many times over (a hub service at your LBS will likely cost around £20 per wheel). Servicing a headset and bottom bracket follows the same simple principles as servicing a wheel hub and will comfortably save you £50. Truing the wheels accounts for another £30 saving.
YouTube is a wonderful resource (RJ the Bike Guy and Sheldon Brown are two of my favourites), and you can rest assured that any issue you come across while restoring a bike has already been experienced by someone somewhere, and there’s an online tutorial, blog post or forum thread for fixing it. If there is a better way to learn about the basics of bicycle maintenance, I haven’t found it yet. Also, steel-frame bikes are slightly more forgiving for the home mechanic than the exacting tolerances and torques required by carbon frames. So, if you can do it yourself, do it!
Grunt and labour
More than just a wondrous mechanical learning curve (you have to take something apart to understand how it works), a lot of restoration work is simply about grunt labour. When a frame and components haven’t been cleaned for years, all sorts of gunk builds up in the nooks and crannies. And it’s the assiduous application of elbow grease – and toothbrushes, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, ear buds, wash cloths and miscellaneous cleaning fluids – that peels back the years of abuse to reveal the glory of former years.
When a thorough cleaning doesn’t quite cut the mustard and the paintwork needs more focused attention, you have a handful of options. I decided to leave the Ribble as is, patina and all (as the enthusiasts would have it), but the careful application of colour-matched Humbrol model paint or even nail polish is a surprisingly effective way to touch up an otherwise-good-enough paintjob.
You can, of course, respray a frame that is simply too far gone. Rattle cans are a cheap option that can provide a decent finish if you remember the golden rule – painting is 90 per cent surface preparation. A step up from this is Spray. Bike, a paint developed specifically for respraying bicycles (the clue’s in the name). Touted as a non-drip alternative for amateur users, you can manage a full single-colour respray for under £50, including primer, base coat and lacquer finish.
If you’d prefer a professional to handle the job, the prices ramp up quickly, with a single-colour frame and fork spray starting around £350 if you provide the painter with a stripped and prepped frame. Frame prep, multiple colours, masking, decals and logos quickly push you towards (and even over) the £1,000 mark, so you’ll be reserving this treatment for high-value bikes.
The bit money can't buy
When you buy a bike off the peg, it takes a while before it really feels like yours. But restoring your own bike makes it very much yours because you’ve painstakingly brought it back to life. And you can be assured that yours will more than likely be the only one of its kind out there.
There’s something wonderfully elegant about the slim tubes of an old steel-frame road bike, not to mention classic aesthetics punctuated by ornately filed lugs, smooth fillet brazing, chromed stays/forks, intricate pantographing and myriad other details handcrafted in steel.
Riding a steel-frame bike from previous generations really makes you stand out in the sea of ubiquitous carbon and aluminium, and it’s seldom that I don’t receive a compliment when out riding one of my gleaming restorations.