Frame Mods
Bicycles are fantastic tools, for practical transportation as well as exercise and entertainment. The beautiful thing about steel bikes is the ability to modify that tool to do what you want it to, to add to what it can do, to be what you want it to be.
A customer reached out about an old Bridgestone MB-3 they had, and wanted to talk about adding disc brakes to it. They had talked with someone else about this project and had been turned down, with the advice to learn how to tune the existing canti brakes, rather than adding disc and changing something as classic as an old Bridgestone.
I can appreciate ‘appreciating’ a classic, but I am not a fan of “celebrity” in either people or things. At the most basic, a bike is a tool and I am down to help make that tool work better for a customer, and that means both functionally and aesthetically.
So the customer and I chatted about the bike, and the changes they wanted to make. We talked about the risk of disc brakes being added to a fork not designed for disc, specifically running disc brakes with vertical quick release dropouts… where if the quick release isn’t tight, or loosens up with riding vibrations, the hub can potentially rotate out of the dropout when the brake is applied. The customer purchased an off-the-shelf disc ready fork to swap in and we went ahead with the disc conversion to the rear end of the frame.
In our conversations other frame mod goals surfaced as good ideas to add to the project, fender mounts on the chain and seat bridges, an entry port for wiring to a new rear light to be powered by a front dyno hub, and cable guides on the drive side chainstay for an internally geared rear hub they were going to use to build up the new disc ready rear wheel, as well as the cable guides to the new rear disc brake and the removal of the old canti posts on the seat stays.
The customer is going to clear coat the raw metal, after gun bluing, where the modifications were made to show the changes, and to match the raw, clear coated, front fork.
A custom frame will get you a perfectly fit bike with all the details and features you are looking for right off the bat, modifying an existing frame is the next best thing i think.
-G
