Bored Yet ??
Good . Buckle up , I'm continuing anyway
Although the R4000 came fitted with a few half decent bits , it was let down by others , so I decided to fook the spec route off and build it how I think they should have built it if they'd have tried a bit harder .
I wanted it to resemble the original bike and for it to be feasible that Raleigh could have built it , so set about using (where possible) parts that would have already been in their US / UK stock bin or available to them at the time ... an upgraded 'Could have , Should have , Would have' build.
The Araya Aeros were originally laced to blue lacquered , chromed steel 'King Kong' hubs , which although seemed very nice weighed a fookin tonne.
I'd already picked up a set of nos rims , so didn't really want to lace these into them .....
Glynnyboy came up trumps with some rather lovely hubs , suitable for the build ......
Laced to these beauties along with a nice Suntour 16T freewheel .....
Stem and seat post clamp needed an upgrade too ......
Nos Suntour seat post clamp instead of a 'style' one ....
The Viscount Aero and 44T Sugino 'crossfire' chainwheel came early on in the search for parts , as did the DC Tech II's and Vee bars all of which were spec parts .....
It was never my intention to finish this in a hurry and as it sat in the loft for a couple of years , I bought some Race Inc straight bars which I thought would look much better on this than the vees .
The Tech II's would have to be replaced with something more suitable too .....
Re-anodised Dia Compe Pre Bent Levers
I was a little worried that the colour wouldn't be anywhere near a match with the calipers, but was pleasantly surprised when they turned up .
Here they are next to a nos DC 890 ......
With the R4000 being fitted with DC levers , you would have probably expected it to have DC calipers too ...... that's right , no you wouldn't , it's feckin Raleigh we're talking about here
They came with blue ano 'Raleigh Foreign' 890's , so matched the levers up with these instead .....
Nos '83 DC 890's , cables and clamps ....
Next up for replacement was the pedals . Originally fitted with HTI rat traps , these were another weighty component that had to go .....
Swapped over for SR MP 130's .....
The stock crank was in pretty good nick and slightly different to others I've had with it being stamped 'Chrome-Moly' on the arms , but ended up using a refinished Sugino Cro-Mo that I already had waiting in the wings.
Here's a photo of the original Sugino 'Chrome Moly' opc for reference ....
Raleigh's standard models usually came fitted with Cheng Shin tyres in a fat thin combo and did on this model too , using black snake bellys.
Although I'd stuck to the same colour scheme as the R4000 , leaving off the black 'smoked' chain guard (and possibly the pedal colour change) ,
made black tyres look out of place when fitted .
Not usually a big fan of coloured tyres , I think on a blue and chrome build they always seems to look well .
I thought this might be the case from the off , so had some blue Cheng shin Comp III's ready to go on instead
.... and to finish it off , a very nice pad set from Steve Firebird
