The Ancora is coming along.
Roger at I-Pro (Bellbrook, OH) worked on the fork - he said it wasn't as bad as I'd told him. He did a quick check of the frame with using straight-edges and strings, and found it to be pretty close to straight, so for now I'm building it back up without visiting the frame alignment table at Wheelie Fun.
Warning For Owners of Sheffield Pedals!!!
The pedals that came with the Ancora are Sheffield Sprints with aluminum cages. They are almost unused, so I decided to open them up and see what they looked like inside. The outside (dust cap end) bearings were bright and shiny and had old sticky oil on them, but the inside (crank end) bearings were bone dry! Doesn't look like they've ever had any grease OR oil, and already the bearings were turning grey from lack of lubrication. So, if you have a bike with Sheffields, and you've never opened them up, I'd advise you do so before your next ride.
Wooden Rims
I was lead too believe that the rims on the Ancora were probably "Ghisallo" from the 1970s, but they have no name on them, and when compared to the set of Ghisallo-labeled rims I have on another bike, the Ancora rims have a rounder cross section. What ever they are, they're quite lovely and round, and true up quite nicely.
Anyone familiar with Clement "Brio" tubulars?
The tubies that came with the Ancora are Clement "Brio" with "Criterium"-style mixed tread, apparently round formed (not flat molded) and reasonably round. There is no lettering anywhere on the tread of elsewhere to indicate country of origin, just a 1980s-style label with red/white/green Italian flag, yellow rectangle with black "Clement" script, and blue rectangle with "B R I O" in white. Didn't Clement use green labels for light silks, yellow for normal silks, and red for cotton casings? Did blue labels indicate synthetic i.e. nylon casings, or did all that go out the window by the 1980s?
Pic of the Day
Does anyone have anything they want me to watch for in the big pile of magazines? I've nearly 400 magazines now, in singles and bunches covering the years 1924 to 1960, so send your requests and I'll see what I can find.
I've just acquired three dozen copies of "But et Club - Les Miroir des Sports" from the mid 1950s to early 1960s, so I'll be posting a few "newer" images in the coming weeks. So much for my plans to focus on the Tour de France 1947-1952! I'm also bidding on a whole stack of "Match l'Intran" from 1936-39. These magazines are printed on a paper which gets EXTREMELY fragile after 65 years or so, but the images are much larger and printed more clearly than either BetC or Miroir Sprint, so I'm anxious to look through they're disintegrating pages. Expect to see, in the coming months, exciting new ways to wear your tubulars!
Well, that's more than enough for now.
Aldo Ross
Blue Ball, Ohio