Tires Good, brakes bad

I've finished the gluing process and the tires seem fairly well stuck to the rims. I will see how they are tomorrow night but I would be confident riding on them at the moment, I just can't imagine the tires rolling off the rims as the force required to move them with my thumbs is more than I can foresee occurring on a road.

The brakes, however, do not inspire confidence. Only the front brake is connected at the moment and on application the entire bike shudders. I will replace the pads when I can find a good replacement here (Such as the Kool Stop Salmon pads recommended by Sheldon Brown) in Melbourne but I am not convinced that will solve all the problems. The stray bits of tire glue would probably not be helping the braking either.

I've followed Sheldon's advice here and am trying the Shimano RX2000 levers that were already on the bike. Whilst I would like to get some Mafac levers for appearance's sake, if I am going to ride this thing down Mt. Dandenong then I want the best brakes I can get my hands on.

The wheels most certainly need to be trued and I guess the bike shop would need to take the tires off for that. That is a shame.

Anyway, I will head out on the bike for a cruise after work sometime this week when I've installed the rear brake and report back on how it felt.

Edit: I have ordered some Kool Stop Mafac/Campy replacement pads and will report on their usefulness shortly.

Tubular gluing has commenced.

Following Dave Moulton's procedure I have begun gluing my tires.

Major problems I will know about and document by the weekend, minor problems with my technique, however, I will probably only find out about when road starts to eat at my face and sides.

Off to buy some brake cables tomorrow to see if the Shimano levers currently aboard can at least get me out on the road.

A little history...

The bike was purchased in May 2007 from Mjölby, Sweden. I was lucky to get it out of Mjölby let alone back to Australia as the Östgötatrafiken (local train company) wouldn't allow me to take the bike on board. Thankfully, the man that I had purchased it from kindly drove me the hour long trip back to my flat. He said he was happy to see the bike going to Australia to be restored; I was happy to not have to dink my girlfriend 70kms on flat tires.

I had to pack the bike into a box to travel with me back home to Australia so I decided to strip as much of the weight from it as I could. The chain went, as did the bar tape (at least 30grams saved there!). At the time I had decided to turn the bike into a fixed gear machine so I also did the unthinkable and simply threw out the Nuovo Record derailleurs and shift levers. I learned a very valuable lesson there about checking the value of bike components.

On my return to Melbourne most people I asked suggested I attempt to restore the bike to original condition rather than fix it. Combine this with the realisation that in a big city fixed gear cycling was really quite trendy (unlike myself) and it was settled, I was going to have to restore it.

The hope is that this site can serve as an information and image repository for myself and an invaluable source for the many millions of non swedish speakers out there restoring a 1970s Swedish racing bike.