Back From The Brink

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I got my first road bike in 1978 when I was 13. It was a 10-speed, BSA Tour de France. It had solid steel cranks attached to the axle with cotter pins, and weighed a ton.

The bike I yearned for was a Dawes Galaxy with a Reynolds 531 frame. I bought one in 1994 from a bike shop in Kettering, which specialised in end of line models and odd sized frames. I tried to convince myself that the Dawes was fine but in the end I had to accept that it was too small for me.

There are plenty of Galaxies available on eBay now but competition has become fierce as people realise the virtues of a classic steel frame. One Sunday afternoon, while I was searching under ‘Reynolds 531’, I came across a Dawes Stratos.

The Stratos dates from 1992. It also has a Reynolds 531 frame and fork combination and was probably one of the first bikes to be fitted with the Shimano 105 groupset. It seemed an ideal substitute for the Galaxy.

I knew from the pictures that it wasn’t in great condition but when it arrived, calling it tatty would have been like calling the Dalai Lama a nice bloke.

My long-term plan is to use it as my daily transport and rationalise the number of bikes I own. I have two other road bikes, a mountain bike and a tandem. My wife, Fionnuala, said I’d grown as a person when I told her about the plan.

Last winter my local council spread thousands of tonnes of salt on the roads. I decided that if the Stratos was going to be my one and only, summer and winter, road bike I had to do something about all the exposed steel on the frame. A total respray means a strip down and rebuild, which offers possibilities... The options were to rebuild the Stratos to its original spec or go hog-wild and bring it up to date.

Cascade effect