# Red Racing Bike

This is not my favourite kind of bike, the whole point of getting a Dutch bike was to limit the weight my wrists have to hold up. However I have a big hill to climb on my ride to work, and the geometry of an opafiets is not well suited to that. 

I refuse to wear lycra, though. that's where I draw the line.  😅

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25JUN2023

I guess I haven't detailed anything about this bike, yet. So here we go. 
It's a mid 60s CCM frame, painted red. It was restored by the guy I bought it from, and it's in pretty good condition. 
The first thing I changed was replacing the narrow old style drop bars with a riser bar with some sweep back (I believe the kids call those "alt bars" now), and some bar end grips for that bull horn style. It's fairly comfortable and gives me grip options. I've got tan grip tape on it which looks pretty nice. 
Initially the hub, which is a 1950 Sturmey-Archer AW3 (!!), was having trouble shifting up into second gear. I didn't want to have to open it up, so I squirted a generous amount of automatic transmission fluid into it, and every weekend I put a couple of cc's in to top it up. It works nearly perfectly now so I'm happy with that.
Next I bought a cheap rear rack that clamps to the seat post. It's not ideal, but I can bring my lunch with me at least. 
The next thing I want to do is to replace the pedals. They're an old style that kinda lets you rotate the front and rear bits to get fresh grip? They're square in cross section. Or were to start with. It's a decent idea, but it just means sometimes my foot slides off the pedal so that's gotta go. I learned that there are two sizes of thread for pedals, too. 
That's about it for now. I've done a bit over 200km on it at this point. 

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