Orange Prestige - Retro Hope Disc Conversion - For Sale

[Rob H]

Towards the end of last year I was looking for a nice cheap retro project to keep me entertained having just finished building the misses' Christmas present (a very custom P7) and I found me a nice Kona LavaDome. After a couple of weeks I'd tracked down a suitable pair of project 2 forks and a velocity stem for it. Then I found an Orange Prestige frame on eBay and all that went out of the window!

A couple of days before Christmas I called by the sellers house to check out the Prestige frame, now I knew at the time that the down tube had been replaced but after checking everything several times, taking a thousand & one measurements and even doing a bit of trig I decided that I was happy with both the repair and the frame so a deal was done and I bought myself an early Christmas present.

I then spent the next six months and way too much money tracking down all the bits to build it up. Now I've finally got all the bits I' at a stage where I'm ready to start the build, so here we go:

The frame as I bought it:



Back home on my getto stand, the string is for double checking that everything is true:



One of the things that was on the cards from day one was a full respray, but to triple check that I'm happy with everything I decided to strip the frame myself.



Getting there:



Nearly:



Done:



I'm dropping the frame off with the painters on the weekend, I'm not saying what I'm going to have done but it will be a bit of a twist on the original colour scheme.

 

[OrangeJase]

Re: Orange Prestige - From Rags to Errrr

liking Prestiges,what year is it-93 ish?
I went the same way and stripped and painted mine,I think its something Ill never part with.
And I know exactly what you mean by spending too much money but if the end result makes you happy then something that puts a smile on your mush is priceless

 

[Rob H]

Re: Orange Prestige - From Rags to Errrr

According to the frame number it's an early 93 frame so just over 20 years old.

 

[brocklanders023]

Re: Orange Prestige - From Rags to Errrr

Watching with interest.

 

[Rob H]

Re: Orange Prestige - From Rags to Naked

When I was collecting parts for the Kona, I picked up some cheap Middleburn RS7 cranks which had be previously used on a trials bike. There where pretty shabby and not quite retro but they where cheap, British and pretty strong.



The first step was to remove the 20th chainring and bash as I wanted slightly taller gearing. Then I used a fine file to remove the burs caused by many a grind, then multiple applications of wet add dry getting finer and finer before a final coat of autosol to bring them up. They took about a week of evenings to do but this was during a particularly wet and miserable winter month so I didn't mind being in the garage as it seems to be a better option than most of the crap on the telly.

I then spent ages looking for a suitable set of rings and spider, the rings showed up quickly for a good price but the spider seemed more elusive. I eventually found a chap one in the for sale section for a decent price but it was black, so I took a punt and got it re-anodised.

The final result is not prefect but I've very please given how little it cost me:

 

[Rob H]

Re: Orange Prestige - From Rags to Naked

If anyone's been stalking me on RetroBike you'll have seen a couple of posts relating to Pace RC30s:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=240866
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=254217

So there's no points for guessing what forks I'll be using.

When I got the frame it was just that a frame, so I had to think of something fork wise and as I've always been a fan of Pace and want to keep things British where I can I decided that a set of RC30s was the way to go.

I quickly found a pair but alas the chrome had been damaged:

Now after talking to one of my mates who happens to be a fellow member of RetroBikes who did his PHD in electron-plating or something like that, I was convinced that they were savable even though I didn't under stand half of what he said. So I took them down my local chromer who also said lots to sciencey stuff but he was able to do the job and did an very nice job indeed, the photos really do not do them justice:




Building them up was a wee bit scary as I was pretty worried about chipping the chrome but they went together nice and smoothly:



The Hope hub was purely an aid to make sure everything was aligned.

 

[OrangeJase]

Re: Orange Prestige - Updated 8 June - With Middleburn & Pac

Top work,I reckon this will be a stunner.

 

[reconminicon]

Re: Orange Prestige - Updated 8 June - With Middleburn & Pac

Looking good.

 

[Rob H]

Re: Orange Prestige - Updated 8 June - With Middleburn & Pac

Thanks for the positive comments.

Also the keen eyed amongst you may have noticed that I removed the pannier / mudguard mounts off the the rear dropouts, as I thought they were a bit ugly & pointless given the nature of the frame and as it wasn't 100% original anyway (as previously mentioned the downtube had been replaced) I wasn't too worried about effecting it's future value.

 

[Rob H]

Re: Orange Prestige - Updated 20 June - Wheels

Whilst the frame is away with the painters I thought I'd crack on with the wheels which is one of my favorite parts of any bike build. I managed to find a pair of mint M737 hubs with no play and super smooth bearings which I matched to pair of Mavic 217 rims, not sure why but I have to have matching wheels on my builds, miss-matched wheels annoy me no end. Spoke wise I wasn't worried about being period perfect so I went for a set of DT Swiss Competition Spokes as they done me well in the past and whilst I was ordering them I noticed that CRC had a deal on the SRAM PG830 cassette & chain if you bought the pair together, again not period perfect but I'm not a purest.

Lacing wise I toyed over trying to do something a bit fancy but then thought better of it and decided to stick with classic three cross as it works. It took a couple of evenings sat in front of the telly to build them up and a couple more evenings to true them but that was more due to the fact that my eyes go squiffy if I spend more than twenty minutes on the truing jig at a time.

Finally I tracked down a new Dart to go on the front and a used Smoke for the rear, happy days

I reckon a pair of silver x-lite skewers would look fantastic on these so if anyone knows of a pair for sale please pm me.