Carlton Circuit to postmodern faux randonneur

[Goldie]

I made a series of horrible bike purchases a little while ago (and when I say "a little while ago", I mean about ten looooong years ago) and the bikes in question have followed me around ever since, stuck in a kind of limbo as a result of me not being able to admit to myself that buying them was a massive mistake but also not wanting to spend the time or money on making them half way decent.

This Carlton was one of the mistakes. I have already owned a 5 speed Circuit in the exact same colour scheme, and it was one of those awesome bikes that looked awful when I got it but just needed T-Cut, polish and a bit of chain lube before it was working perfectly. Here it is:

With my Charge Spoon saddle, you can see I was at the cutting edge of cycling fashion in 2010.

This one was different. It looked awful when I bought it and really was awful. When I went to pick it up, from somewhere near Glossop, the lad I'd bought it from was in the process of kindly pulling it out of the clump of weeds that it had clearly been living in for some time. The only bits that weren't rusty were the Raleigh three pin chainset (because they never corrode as Raleigh was using some dark magic in the manufacturing process back then. Really heavy dark magic) and the pedals, which were made for someone with tiny feet even though the bike was a gate. A bit like:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQKvHViK2MA[/youtube]

But with bike pedals.

I've kept making resolutions to do something with it, but every resolution has ended up with me just throwing a bit more of it away as I realised it was beyond saving.

But I had another go last year, and it's got to the point now where I'm so confident that it will soon be an actual working bike that I can tell its story. I wanted a bike for riding to work on, and I nearly went for one of these https://www.cotic.co.uk/product/escapade

But my inner tight fisted Yorkshireman was all "Yer don't need a NEW bike lad! You've got that Carlton in the shed. Just needs the tyres pumping up..." So I thought I had better try and hammer the square peg of the Carlton into this particular round hole.

Here it is right after it got back from https://bikeaboutfiley.co.uk/ where the boss, Richard, had smashed out a stuck cotter pin and chopped up a very stuck stem to get the frame to the point where it could be painted:

There is a powder coaters round the corner from my work, and that's where the frame went off to next. Meanwhile, thought I'd sort it out with some wheels...

 

[Goldie]

Re:

Ah yes, the wheels. I had been moving this rusty rimmed wheel with its Normandy 36h hub around for years too. It might even have been on the Carlton when I got it, but its been so long that I can't remember.

I also had a nice-ish front wheel, with a Nisi Evian rim and a Cyclo hub. These were going to be the wheels for the Carlton. I wanted them to be as good as they could be, which meant getting them rebuilt by someone who knows a lot more about building wheels than I do (total successful wheel builds to date: 1). So I set to work taking the wheels apart, and polishing the Nisi rim and the two hubs...

This was very therapeutic.

This created an endorphin rush like an afternoon at Alton Towers.

Shiny hubs resulted.

However, at this point I was undone by my own cack handedness. I put the hubs away in a very, very safe place, and when I finally got round to arranging for https://www.cycle-heaven.co.uk/contact- ... -the-angel to build up the wheels, I couldn't find them anywhere.

The Carlton Facebook group came to the rescue with a replacement set of really nicely polished 36 spoke Normandy hubs, and a nice long GB Stelvio stem, to replace the old GB stem that Richard had put out of its misery when he was taking the frame apart.

 

[Spokesmann]

Look forward to seeing more. Ive had bikes like this which for some reason languished in the workshop for a number of years... A 25" Pro am comes to mind, why I bought it I don't know. Took 3-4 years of on-off working to finally built it and restore it. was a nice bike once done, rode well, but a bit too big. Now thank fully sold.

 

[Goldie]

Re:

Thanks Mike. I remember the Pro Am! Hopefully this should be bang on in terms of size (and I’ll be quietly sobbing if it isn’t, after the pain in the backside that it has been). If I’d been around in the seventies, I’m sure any bike shop would have put me on a 25 inch frame, although I usually ride smaller frames with a bit more seatpost showing.

 

[Goldie]

Re:

While the frame was in the queue at the powder coaters for its turn in the blasting cabinet, I did some fretting about colour schemes. I was eyeing up everyone else's bikes in the Carlton Facebook group for inspiration, and I really liked the look of Bodmin General's lovely red ride:

Plus he lives in a bit of the country which is similar to my own in as much as everywhere is up a steep hill, and I thought his SJS triple chainset and good range of gears out the back were choices I could learn from. Also, the powder coaters had a pretty good flam / candy red in their book of swatches (a translucent red lacquer over a silver base). And last but not least, I have the right decal set knocking about somewhere.

But I was also thinking about how absolutely miserable I'd be if I chipped a nice paintjob on the way to work, and I started to lean towards something a bit more utilitarian. Also, I kept seeing lovely French randonneurs from the '30s - '60s, lovely Japanese randonneurs from the '70s that imitated the French randonneurs, and lovely American randonneurs from right now that imitated both of them.

I started to wonder whether I could pull the Carlton in a similar direction. My mind was made up for me by Planet X, who briefly had Sun XCD cranks with the same five bolt 110 BCD pattern as Specialities TA six arm chainrings in stock at a really good price. I ordered some of them, along with a 50 and a 34 tooth chainring from Spa Cycles, and told the powder coaters to paint the frame a slightly muddy green before I changed my mind.

And this is what I got back:

 

[Nob]

Are you going to put Carlton decals back on like the original?

 

[Goldie]

Re:

It’ll definitely get some decals, but not the blocky black and white ones that it originally had. I’ve got some in a drawer somewhere that are the same as on Bodmin General’s bike above, so if I can find them, that’s probably what I’ll go with.

 

[Goldie]

I'd love to say that I steamed straight into putting the thing back together. But I actually stuffed it in the back of a wardrobe so that I could faff a bit more until the wheels were ready. These looked rather beautiful with their shiny spokes, and eventually guilt tripped me into getting the Carlton back out of the wardrobe so that I could put the headset back together and end up with something that looked a bit more bikey. The headset bottom race would not fit over the powder coat on the forks, even when I alternated pleading with it and swearing at it. So I popped it into the oven and stuck the forks in the freezer, until physics defeated the cantankerous bike components and got me to here:

 

[Goldie]

Re:

Here's Molly the cat pointing out that the threads on the fork don't look to clever, and probably won't take the headset that well.

Molly is lucky she doesn't have opposable thumbs, otherwise she would have ended up with the job of fitting the stupid headset.

As it was, the frame went back off to https://bikeaboutfiley.co.uk/ so that Richard could chase the threads and fit the headset.

There's a big, empty stretch of headtube there which I'd like to fill with a metal Carlton badge. As built, the bike would have had one of those slightly Art Deco looking black and white stickers for a headbadge, but I want to go back a bit further to the graphic identity that Carlton used in the mid or late sixties, with the oval "cycling man" headbadge. Let me know if you've got one going spare!

The saddle that it came with did not make the cut on account of its genera horribleness:

The box of bike spares that I got from my dad here viewtopic.php?f=23&t=403184 turned out to have a nice 25.4mm aluminium seatpost, which went in to replace the chrome steel post that the bike came with.

 

[RabC]

The Cycling Man badge is available as a decal from Lloyds if you can't get hole of a metal badge.
https://h-lloyd-cycles.myshopify.com/pr ... n-homepage