I’ve wanted one of these for years and I recently devised an excuse to buy one. I’m going camping next month and this bike will fold in half and fit inside my Westfalia. No need to buy a bike rack. What I saved on the rack, I spent on this bike. Actually, the bike was free, all I paid for were the new tires that the previous owner installed on the bike, having got it for free. As with many old things I’ve bought over the years, as soon as I acquired this Raleigh I was finding out all about it from various websites. They can be tricked out, modified and kept going forever if you have the skills, money and the desire.
The heart of the bike is the old reliable Sturmey Archer 3 speed internal geared hub. These things are next to immortal, it seems. The one problem I soon discovered was that the lowest gear was not low enough for the slight grade on my street. The solution was simple enough, as I have some experience with fixing bikes, chains and gears and all that. I removed the 15 tooth cog on the hub and swapped it for a 20 tooth cog. That was the easy part. The chain was then too short, so I added about 4 teeth to it, using a free bit of chain I got from my local bike shop, where I also got the used 20 tooth cog. Because the world is full of Sturmey Archer hubs, cogs of various sizes are dead easy to find. I have a toolbox full of bike tools from long ago, and there I found my old chain tool, among other things.
This bikes reeks of nostalgia for me, having grown up in the era when a 3 speed bike made in England was a luxury item. I had a 3 speed as a youngster in a town that was dead flat. One day when I was a teen I bought a single speed bike, since gears were of no use to me at the time. Then came the 10 speed craze of the 1970’s, so I bought a “Torpado” Italian 10 speed, which was like getting a sports car for slightly older males who had some money. The Torpado served me well for decades, but eventually I sold it because the riding position was too radical for my neck, wrists and butt. I moved to a mountain bike, and eventually to a very comfy Townie e-bike, which is still my main ride today, and likely will be for the foreseeable future.
There are Raleigh symbols all over the bike, pedals and handlebars, frame tubes, etc.
They plastered the bike with symbols wherever they could find an empty spot.
When I got the new gear installed, added the chain links and adjusted the brakes, I took the bike out for a test ride to the closest thrift store. The hills on the route are fairly big, but the new low gear enabled me to make it over without too much knee strain. Perhaps an even lower gear would have been better, but this should work for now. The top gear is still more than high enough for my needs. This is a bike on which one rides at a leisurely pace and not one wit faster. My treasures of the day were a ball of jute twine, a plastic outdoor thermometer, and an old post card of an English village. The postcard seemed appropriate for this bike, which was designed for short jaunts to the shops, or outings to the country, with the bike going into the boot for the trip.
nathanguitars 