Thanks for the praise but to be honest, I only remained faithful to the spirit and era of that bike. There's a lot of "cheats" here and there, but most folks wouldn't notice and only the most pretentious would even care that the headset is from the late 70s, rims the early 80s, saddle is only 30ish years old, the hubs predate the frame by a decade, all sorts of little stuff. Of course, there's the obvious brand new Sturmey Archer barcon as well as the bar end mirror, and the glaring handlebar bottle cage, which will be getting replaced with something more appropriate.
I do have a set of "sprints" for the Rotrax, which are wood filled tubular rims with no brake surface made for the Velodrome only. These are currently laced to a set of Brampton hubs. One of these days I will be finding the absolute correct NOS spokes for those wheels. I'll need to have the rims "rolled" in a kind of press to gently re-establish the roundness of the rim before lacing, as they have some flat spots. Then I'll need to find the best tubular tires I can find while maintaining the look of what should be period correct. Once those wheels get built and the decals and headbadge are on the Rotrax, I could say it is actually restored. If I get really crazy about it, I would use an inch pitch block chain, but those are going for insane money when they are available and they do sell. I mean more than $100 per foot and a track bike needs at least five feet of chain... Inch pitch roller chain is cheaper and a way to use inch pitch 3/16 cogs and chainrings, but in that instance I might as well just use 1/2" x 1/8" normal chain, since it's cheating on the build just the same.
Last fall I thought I had found the matching red flange Airlite hub for my restoration build of the R.O. Harrison. The front hub came from the UK and was NOS but it hadn't been properly packed, so the flanges were slightly bent. Mind you, the newest of these hubs is 60 years old and anodizing goes back to the 1930s. I can tell by the axle that this hub is post WWII, but not into the 60s when they adopted wider diameter hollow axles and wider shells for quick release skewers. These are bolt on track hubs with 5/16" axles. Anyway, let's say the hub is 70 years old and it has two slightly bent flanges. I'm not going to trust the flange on a front hub since it may have been work hardened from the impact and made more brittle. It was so sad. I told the seller, he filed a claim and I got a 100% refund and I got to keep the hub. So it's back to the old plan of getting my original Airlite matching anodized to the rear hub, then build the final set of wheels for the Harrison. These aren't priority issues, so I'll surely sit on the parts for a while.
Next project up is the Frejus, which is going to be much closer to original, once I find the correct front hub.
Phil
