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Recently I found an abandoned Raleigh detour 1 bike approximately less than a year old. The bike showed evidence of being dragged behind a vehicle then falling off said vehicle. Since the rear tire and rim were bent to hell and the handlebars were twisted it seems the previous owner had just abandoned it.
I have tried with store that sold it, they kept no record of serial number when they sold it so have no idea who it was sold to. it was not registered, there is no reports of missing, stolen, or lost bikes, and the serial number has not come up on police registry. Ive checked these a few times now.
Rather than let a scrap collector bring it in for scrap I took it home and worked at straightening the bent aluminum( or as the british say all luminium, still dont get that extra L) alloy rim. After much work with a wooden mallet it was pretty close. I remounted the rim to axle tightened down spokes and trued up rim as best I could. Getting tire on or off these things is a royal pain in the rear.
I have been taking it for rides to and from store and stuff. Each time the rim becomes more rounder than the last time and I have to true up rim again.
Not a big fan of the non welded joint rim. The rear derailer was also bent. Its half plastic which is not impressive and truthfully the design is kinda stupid. I did my best to get it into shape. Again not perfect but it seems to work.
The bike itself is made in cambodia but designed in washington usa( not sure if that is state or city) The shimano shifters are made in china.
The good.. it shifts well and its quite easy to pedal up to speed. The shifters are ratcheting and kinda cool to shift with making things easier. The whole bike is quite light and the seat is really comfy to ride on and the adjustments for angling it are a good design.
The bad. It has quick release front rear and seat. NOt the best thing to have on a bicycle as they have bad tendancy to pop off. It also makes it easier for someone to steal components.
The brakes are not disc or cantilever but v type lever brakes...these are picky about having true rims and a pain to adjust.
The brake levers are part of the shifter so you cannot set the shifter at a better angle to the brake levers.
The most annoying thing however is the axles. They are not standard thread or metric but something completely different. I may have to custom make a set just so i can put actual nuts to hold the wheels.
Not a reflector on the bike at all. This is a safety issue pedals have some but none on rims, seat or front handlebars.
The bike is light though.
My review is that although this is listed as a mountain off road bike it really is more of a road/street bike with its 28" (700r) rims. If you get one of these as a daily driver put on some reflectors and be prepared to adjust rims every once and awhile.
Its a pity the england sold out the company. But then again this is not the first Raleigh ive had, first one got stolen. It was an 80s model street bike that I had fixed up. That one was not all that easy to repair either.
For this Raleigh for example I had to mill a custom wrench to set the bearings on front axle. None of my other bicycle wrenches fit.
It has a wonky big gear in the rear for lowest gear, indexed but still about 2.5 times larger than you would expect.
Still i kinda like the way it really gets up to speed easily and cruises really nicely. Just a few issues to work out and once the rim is nice and true in rear probably a good bike.
Anyways my review on it.
Comments
The last Raleigh I owned......
Was a Grand Prix, which I had way back when I was in high school. That bike and I spent a lot of time together; it was the key to my sanity for several years, providing me a way to get away from home and my abusive father. I would spend hours riding it, rain or shine, night or day.
I eventually equipped it with panniers and took quite a few trips on it through the latter years of high school, and later during my college years. The summer after I graduated from high school, two friends of mine and I rode from Schenectady, NY to Orlando, FL and back.
Thank you for bringing back those memories.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
sounds like
A pretty standard entry level hybrid to me.
Raleigh are still extant, extant, you have there is Raleigh USA which hasn't been the same company for a looong while now.
Just a few points
Pinned aluminium (no idea where you got all those extra l;s from) rims are very common and are not generally any problem, welded rims are much more expensive and require the brake track to be machined. You might try some loctite blue on the nipples to stop them loosening but it also sounds like you need to destress the wheel when you straighten it up.
Your axle issue - well I can say with some confidence that it's almost certainly 10mm - if your tools aren't metric they'll never fit properly.
QR - a brilliant idea wrecked by stupidity. QR seatpost fixtures are easily replaced by bolts - the bike shop should be able to sort you out with something suitable. On the wheels, if they are set properly they will never undo without assistance - they are not wing nuts. With the lever in the open position, turn the nut side until it bites the frame, then close the lever, it shouldn't need a lot of force but be firm. You might need to give it a few tries to get the bite just right but once there (the lever is marked 'close' when it is) it'll stay put. I ride thousands of miles a year and have never had one come undone, heck, it even stayed put through my accident last week.
Brakes - well any rim brake hates dinted rims so given the tale of your wheel it's hardly a surprise you get grabbing.
The other stuff, brake levers, gears etc are all pretty standard at this level, Shimano have factories all over the place and mfrs will shop around to find parts to fit the budget so you get unbranded plastic bits, combined gear/brake levers etc based on cost not performance.
Glad you are generally enjoying some riding
Mads the bike
Madeline Anafrid Bell
its not metric
actually said that in post. I was talking about shaft size, as well as the wrench I made for adjusting it. It is an oddball. In metric size it would be 12.7( which doesnt exist), Standard size its smaller than 3/8 but bigger than 5/16.
I have the QR adjusted I just think they are stupid to put on bicycles. Just makes it easy for people to steal off with rims seats ect. Once your bike is set none of those should ever move.
The rims are machined alloy rims that are pinned and the pin area is a little weird.
Took it for a long ride( for me who has not gone more than three blocks all summer) of about 90km give or take. Have to adjust the rear derailer stop as chain came off but otherwise seems good.
Just a note it was not a buckled rim just bent. Almost a soft u shape. The frame is not exactly true but its livable. (just a slight twist in the rear, but since it was dragged behind a vehicle enough to bend rim twice before it fell off and then abandoned works fine for me)
11/32
The higher grade wrench and socket sets will have that and many more sizes that will appear strange to those who buy less exspencive wrench and socket sets.
Have a good day and enjoy life.
have wrenches and sockets
its not 11/32. The shaft size is just plain odd. I may just take a standard 10mm from another mountain bike rim and grind the hardened race area a slight amount to clear the bearing holder on these rims( another oddity)
If it isn't metric or SAE...
Then, as strange as it sounds, it might be BSW (British Standard Whitworth). I'll keep this brief. Early on in the industrial revolution in Great Britain, every manufacturer of screws and threads made things their own way. In 1841, Joseph Whitworth devised a standardized relationship for shaft size, thread pitch and bolt head. It actually was a very good system and was used in Britain into the 1960's. With typically idiosyncratic British logic the size didn't refer to the bolt head, it referred to the shaft diameter.
As British bicycle and bicycle component companies changed hands, there were vestiges of Whitworth sizes that just got carried over. I have a Sachs 3 X 7 rear hub on one of my bikes (from the first decade of this century). Sachs bought some of the old Raleigh (England) patents and tooling. When I tried to put a locking nut on the shaft, nothing would fit because it is a Whitworth threaded shaft.
If my father hadn't insisted on my learning to maintain the car I wanted i high school a "cool old" Morris Minor, I never would have discovered the joys of Whitworth sizes, Lucas electrical systems, Girling hydraulics, positive ground electrical systems and the need to have pay phone change and be on a first name basis with every tow operator in my hometown.
my luck
It is a qr whitworth thread that, being canadian, we dont have at all.
Confused
12.7mm is 1/2 inch. If that isn't a standard size, we must be measuring different things.
I was taught that metric sizes are "AF" - across flat; presumably because Imperial sizes weren't.
Could it be half inch AF ?
it was mistype
was something like 9.7, wrench was 12.7 and no half inch didnt fit either tried that. I/2 and 13 are really close with 13 being a tiny tiny bit bigger. I believe 12.9 is 1/2.
That pesky metal
It's not an extra 'L', it is an extra 'I' before the second 'U'. That is what changes the pronunciation.
I would also add, don't ever ride on a rim which has been buckled, you are asking for trouble. Most rims are tempered to keep their shape and there are almost certainly hidden stress fractures around the crease area. One pot hole or drain cover and the rim could collapse completely while you are riding it.
Ditch it.
I'd also agree about the quick release levers: tightened as per Maddy's advice, they will do the job properly. The seat post, if only you are riding the bike it doesn't need a quick release bolt. Replace it with a normal one.
Penny
to be fair
cheap end Al rims are never tempered, even expensive examples aren't actually tempered, machined, de-stressed, anodised but not tempered. A lot of performance rims are only pinned not welded but they will be machined on the brake surface, I have some waiting to built atm of just such a beast.
Pretty much any rim can be pulled out of shape with poor building practice, the industry standard is 2mm for true and 4mm vertical, in reality you'd have to be unlucky to find a machine wheel in a new bike that much out of round, a decent mechanic would sort that to half those numbers in a few minutes. Personally I work to 0.25mm true and 0 for vertical - just takes a bit of time and patience, true, distress, check for as many times as needed - don't expect a shop to work to those tolerances unless you have full pockets!
As to the service life of such a 'recovered' rim, probably not great but being on the rear means failure isn't such a health risk, on the front I wouldn't even consider it.
Madeline Anafrid Bell
re cycled
Good to see you are getting decent use out of a gutter find. I share a preference for fixing stuff if it can be done rather than throwing away, and you have saved the effort of someone finding a disposal and/or scrapping route for it. At least you're not dealing with cottered cranks, as a youngling I could never get those to stay put.
"Reach for the sun."
wheel straigtening
When my daughter was preteen, 11 or 12, we got her a used bike that I repainted and prettied up a bit as a Christmas present. That summer she was riding it back from the neighborhood swimming pool; as she rode by a convenience store, someone coming out of the parking lot, clipped the front wheel. Fortunately she wasn't seriously hurt, just some road rash. It was a hit and run, so there was no recourse with the driver. I got the bike home and trued the wheel as best I could. (We were seriously poor at the time.) I put in a vice and using a piece of pipe as a pry bar, I got it close and then remounted it on the bike and with a spoke wrench, managed to get it pretty true. It required using a pair of channel lock pliers on the spoke wrench to put enough tension on the wheel to make it true. It got her back on the bike and later, her grandfather popped for an new rim. I spent an afternoon lacing the new rim to the old hub and truing the rim.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Aluminium.
When aluminium was first smelted out of bauxite the British called it Aluminium using exactly the same Greek scientific suffix as they used for many other metals like Titanium and Vanadium and Sodium and Potassium, Germanium. Plutonium, Uranium and so on. Somehow, the Americans got it wrong (probably through laziness in pronunciation), and ended up pronouncing it Aloominum, like Platinum which is a precious metal like gold and silver.
One of the first casting experiments with Aluminium was the production of the famous EROS statue on Picadilly circus in London. At the time it was a very valuable metal because of the amount of electricity it took to melt the bauxite. In the initial production / reduction process it was more expensive to produce than bronze. Today with cheap hydro-electric energy, Aluminium is cheap to produce.
Actually
Americans spell it Aluminum because that is the name Sir Humprey Davy, an English chemist, gave it after he discovered it in 1812. Britain later acceded to the wishes of France and Germany in pursuit of a false consistency (platinum?) and changed it to Aluminium.
But the author of the original comment about where did all the l's come from was referring to the tendency of some British radio announcers to pronounce it something like: All-Luminium, trying to put the L in two different syllables. :) Others pronounce it Al-you-minium.
I had a friend (one with an engineering degree) who pronounced it alunimunum. :) Of course, he liked to put cinnamunum on his oatmeal, too. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Thanks erin
Just a note this is actually in Wikipedia.
It just seems weird to hear it as AL-loo-mini-um...the second L just gets me. I understand the i part and it was pushed by a german fellow i think. But the first part kills me everytime I hear it. Just a note some Australians say the same thing.