Silver Case

Favorit

Originally uploaded by karavshin.
I bought this old Czech road bike, manufactured by “Favorit” for USD 12.50 today. I’m going to rebuild it into a singlespeed commuter bike for myself. Does anyone know anything about this bike? The guy who sold it to me didn’t know much/anything about it.

I took the wrench to it and tore it down to parts.

The wheels are junk.

I got the bottom bracket off. The grease was all dried-out and dirt-thickened, but the races and the bearings actually seemed to be in ok shape.  I’ll have to find some old-fashioned cranks for the square axle.

I couldn’t get the headset off.  The wrenches I have for removing headset nuts are all too big.  I don’t want to do some obscene with vise-grips or channel-locks, so I will have to go find the suitable tool to remove the headset/fork.

The stem is very cool-looking and has a nice “favorit” embossed on it.  However, I’ll want to replace the handlebars.  Not sure how to get them off though…  the stem is not going to release the bars.  hmmm.

The seat is totally hideous. It’s like sitting on a smooshed batting helmet. awful.

The chainstays appear to have been slightly crushed by clamp-on kickstand (even though there is a mounting for a kickstand welded onto the frame).

The frame is quite quite rusty.  It will take a lot wire wheel work before it’s ready for painting. It had enough ambient rust that my nose was on the verge of sneezing the whole time. (rust makes me sneeze like a maniac)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Favorit.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.