Dave Hinde/Brian Rourke - 90's Campagnolo

[thepedaller]

So I picked up this frame earlier this year as a slightly impulsive eBay purchase, it was the electric blue and the small size that attracted me. I'm not actually that short at 5'8" or 172cm but my bike fitter recommended me on a 52cm top tube bike. The seller said it was supposedly a Brian Rourke frame and it was refinished by Dave Hinde hence the decals. It does have the distinctive wraparound seat stays (experts please chime in) and also came in quite light weight.

1.89kg for the frame and 668g for the forks so really quite decent weight. It takes a 27.2mm seat post. Not sure on the tube set but guessing it might be 531c or something similar. The geometry is quite unusual, as it has a steep head angle of about 74º and seat tube at 76º yet the tyre clearance is huge, I thought it might have been built for a 27" wheel set as the brakes barely fit.

I also nabbed a Chorus groupset for a reasonably good price, the ad was pretty poorly described with bad pics. So it was a slight gamble but the shifters were still quite snappy. I date this to about 1995 Campagnolo Chorus 8sp groupset. Just needed a bit of a clean but I decided to rebuild the shifters anyway.

Argh... Front brakes don't have enough reach. They are rated at 50mm reach so this is more like 53 or thereabouts at the front and 51 at the back. I had a suspicion this might have been a 27" frame originally as that would mean it would fit standard short reach brakes. This is just a tad over which is quite annoying.

Test fit with my other wheels. You can see how tight the geometry is with the wheels tight to the frame.

 

[thepedaller]

So then I pulled apart the shifters and replaced the G springs and carriers. The RHS spring carrier is not available any more so I had to take a later model one and saw off the post and file down the nub to make it fit.

Original on left, new one on the right before modification

Now modified and filed flat.

And I also stuffed some little bits inside the holes as the little nubs that stick out are smaller than the original part, I'm guessing if I didn't do this the spring carrier would rotate under shifting.

All done with new hoods to match. To be honest they felt pretty good before but I thought I might as well do it.

 

[Nob]

Nice job on the shifters

 

[velocipede]

That’s impressive work with the shifters

Shame about the callipers - tektro do some nice looking long reach Allen key callipers that I’ve used to good effect - def worth a look

 

[thepedaller]

I ended up buying some Centaur calipers from the early 2000's as they have a few mm more reach. Looks like they only need a little bit more on the front...

Back is actually fine

So on the front, I ended up filing a few mm out of the brake pad slots... worked a treat

Also I polished up the cranks. They weren't looking to great as they were, fair bit of crank rub so I used oven cleaner to remove the anodisation and went from there

 

[thepedaller]

Now I have a slight dilemma about what I do with the wheels. The objective of the bike is to do a sort of tribute to mid 90's Campagnolo stuff, so everything shiny and curvy. I've always loved this stuff. Seeing as the shifters are 8sp and the options are to use a Shimano hub and space a cassette to match or use an original Campagnolo 8sp hub.

However the latter is really quite limiting as the 8sp free hub is effectively a dead end. At least the 9sp Campagnolo hubs can fit 10 and 11sp cassettes, I also am running 2 other bikes with 11sp Campag. Fitting an 8sp cassette to a 9sp Campagnolo free hub seems doable but difficult, I think it'd be easier just to convert the shifters to 9sp and run them like that, there is much better availability of 9sp stuff and it allows future compatibility if I ever want to change groupsets.

So I literally just did that, bought a pair of Veloce 9sp shifters and swapped over the gear indexing ratchet thing.

Went in really easily and I've tested it with a Campagnolo 9sp cassette and it works perfectly! This is with the 8sp rear derailleur. I'm honestly surprised at how easy this was to convert.

 

[zerogravitas]

Great job so far. Enjoying your careful fettling!

 

[thepedaller]

Now for the hubs... I managed to get a set of wheels which the seller described as Chorus. Whilst I have owned a few groupsets from the 11 speed era I'm less knowledgeable about the earlier 90's stuff.

On closer inspection it turns out these are 9sp Record titanium hubs!

From scouring old catalogues it looks like these were produced between 1997 and 1998 and are quite unique as they retain the basic design and appearance of the old 8-speed hubs with a traditional threaded axle. The year after they changed the design for Record/Chrous to the oversized 15mm alloy axle design which is more similar to modern hubs.

The later style Mk2 Exa-drive free hub suggests it's probably from 1998. The axles front and rear should be titanium and the free hub has a titanium inner and alloy outer.
Axles are definitely Ti

And the free hub is marked as such

 

[thepedaller]

Now for the bad news... Seems like the DS Cone is pitted to hell, also the cup has slight pits too. So basically needs to be replaced. These hubs have replaceable cups luckily but the DS cup and cone for these hubs are rare as hens teeth. NDS Cup and cone were fine however

Other than that the axle was straight and the rest of the hub didn't seem like it had anything wrong with it, I'm guessing it was just either run for very long without much maintenance and wore out the DS as these are nearly halfway down the axle so take a lot of load.

 

[thepedaller]

Snippet from the 1998 Spare parts catalogue, these are the parts I need, but aren't readily available

However I managed to track down a NOS Athena/Veloce hub from similar vintage which shares a lot of parts, so this would mean I could also change the balls, cups, seals, pawls, springs etc... So actually not too bad. This was a bit of a deep dive for me, as there was no guarantee that this would be the correct hub as it seems Campagnolo has a habit of not labelling or stamping any of their parts so difficult to tell everything apart and when it was made.

NOS Athena/Veloce hub... box fresh from 25 years ago or so! Came with all the manuals as well as the wire tool that holds the pawls in for the free hub when installed... This thing is a heifer, heavier than a lot of hubsets!

So I quickly stripped this down... the main thing was that it should have the same cone and cup

Cones look identical on both sides, only difference is the axle which is Titanium on the Record, also slightly different profile as well as I think the free hub on the donor hub is made of steel and takes a different bearing size.

You can see where they reduced weight, in particular the free hub weight is significant...