Rachel’s Pink Apollo Dream Bike
The story behind Rachel’s Dream Bike is pretty cool. She was my first real customer; someone I had never met, knew nothing about. Previously I had only made many bikes for friends and family, and sold the odd one here and there on eBay. This is where the Dream Bike idea started.
Rachel discovered Delightful Cycles, when she feel in love with this Cyclops Graduate. Someone tried to re-sell it on eBay and after a quick Google search she found me. Unfortunately Rachel was unable to win the bidding war so I offered to restore this pink Apollo which I had recently purchased. Heres how it looked…thats right, Im a miracle worker. But jokes aside, it was pretty bad to begin with.
We continued to bounce emails back and forth, where I described and explained a variety of different options, based on different colour schemes, which featured different components, upgrades and custom features. I explained the features and components in depth, provided images as examples and even made my own drawings of what the bike would look like based on her choice of different colour schemes. Its quite a full on process and took at least a week of emailing.
Rachel went for a mix and match between a number of options. And this is what we came up with.
- Extra long, lightweight alloy fenders with a classic smooth profile (the same ones on the Cyclops Graduate she loved)
- Gold luglining
- New handlebars
- New horn instead of a bell
- New honey brown coloured, shellaced grips which I finished with twine and a cork to plug the bar ends
- New matching honey brown leather saddle with springs
- New white outer cables
- New white walled tyres
- New silver chain
- New rubber block pedals
- New kick stand
- High quality components including a rear gear changer used on touring bikes
- Everything else to be reused but polished to match the fenders and new handlebars, the finish of the components was important to Rachel
And heres how it all looks. If your interested in a quote please feel free to email me at delightfulcycles at gmail dot com.
Hand polished, restored SR handlebar stem
This is the legendary SunTour rear derailleur. Super smooth gear changing action, and like the Toyota Corollas of today, bomb proof, it will never fail. It was the high quality, light yet rugged, derailleur of choice for touring bikes in its day.
Classic smooth profile fenders.
Seriously long fenders
EXTRA long fenders continue down underneath the bike
Original is better. Beautiful original paint with gold lug lining
