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Auckland Bike Slob

~ Cycling aimlessly around New Zealand – so you don't have to.

Auckland Bike Slob

Tag Archives: Peugeot

Monsieur Peugeot

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Mr Slob in Riding

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cycling, Peugeot

Do you wish your bikes could talk? I don’t. I’m pretty sure that if they could, mine would just complain. About the parts I’ve taken off them, the bits I’ve put on that they weren’t designed for and the fact that I hardly ever wash them. Take M. Peugeot for instance… I bought him a few years ago from a woman in Hamilton who I suspect had never ridden him, but perhaps found him in a shed. I think I paid about $150 after being the only bidder on TradeMe. He looked like this.
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Despite his sad state, he had clearly been owned by an enthusiast at some point. The Brooks saddle did not accompany him out of the Peugeot factory in the mid seventies and nor, I suspect, did the nice SunTour VX front & rear deraileurs or the Sugino Super Maxy crankset. When I first fixed him up, I just put on some new tyres, cables, moustache handlebars and brake levers. Compared to my other bikes he was fast, smooth and long-legged. A bit of a tourer. We rode around the city, and he was my assistant for my first Velociteer performance. Then I came across some genuine Peugeot mudguards, put those on, attached a dynamo to power theĀ  beautiful front light, and changed the shifters to bar-ends.
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These modifications made him more practical, but he was a bit awkaward to ride – mostly thanks to that crankset with it’s stupid huge 53T outer ring. After converting the Roadrat in to a semi-offroad touring thing, I needed a bicycle that was better suited to riding to work. So I bought a bunch of parts and made M. Peugeot in to an ancient-looking but with some actually-very-modern components, commuting/general purpose bike.
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He was fitted with a dynamo front hub, powering front & rear LED lights, a nice 48/34 PlanetX crankset, Tektro Dual Pivot caliper brakes and Grand Bois handlebars. In this guise we took a trip down to Raglan, as well as hundreds of trips to & from work.
The latest change was from carrying stuff on the back to, to carrying stuff on the front. I bought a Soma Porteur rack, changed the handlebars to a pair of Salsa Cowbells, and put a Chrome Front Rack Duffel on.
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This weird combination of an old frame, with a bunch of mismatched new parts, has worked really well for the last year or so. The mudguards mean that wet roads don’t bother me, I prefer the front loading, the dynamo lighting system is lovely, and the whole deal has been very reliable. There’s just one little problem. The frame is too big. Bicycle sizing has never been my strong point, but when I first got the Spacehorse, it felt too small. After lots of riding I have come to realise that it’s the right size and the Peugeot is too big. Every time I ride him now, I feel like I’m climbing up on to this huge machine. So there’s a change a-coming…

More pictures here.

Riding to Raglan (again)

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by Mr Slob in Riding

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Cycling, new zealand, Peugeot, Pukekohe, Raglan, touring

When I mentally filed away the story of my first ride ride from Pukekohe to Raglan (and back) it was pretty straightforward. There was a simple arc to the story. In the memory I constructed, I was a hero – a tragically incompetent and poorly prepared rider, who suffers heroically before returning triumphant. I spent at least a couple of weeks afterward feeling different, a better person. I was a guy who could ride 250km in 2 days. Alone, without a map (and pretty much without a clue) on the open road.
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Six months later I was feeling more experienced, fitter, and housebound. Coup had been doing lots of travelling – around NZ for Team New Zealand trainings, and to Australia for The Great Southern Slam while I stayed home. How about another ride to Raglan I thought? I’ll take a different route and a different bike, I won’t make the same mistakes, I’ll do it better, faster even.
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The route was mostly copied from The Kennets book again – they describe it as an alternative route, an “interesting ride”. I bought all the necessary NZ topo maps to cover Tuakau to Raglan, and marked the route on them with a pink highlighter.
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I left on a Monday morning train to Pukekohe. The feeling that I was escaping the city was reinforced by the way the train seemed to make it’s way through the ugliest parts of Auckland. The route alternated between droning motorways, sad backyards and industrial wastelands. Half demolished abattoirs followed acres of blank warehouses. Torn curtains looked out on overgrown lawns littered with broken toys. The only nice landmark was the guide dog training centre in Manurewa.
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The first section of the ride, from Pukekohe, through Tuakau and across the bridge over the Waikato river, was ok. Then instead of heading straight up highway 22, I turned left and took some gravel roads – kind of a back way to Pukekawa. At the top of the hill I turned left and headed east towards the river, past the place where The Dukes of Hazard have retired to. It appears they are now silver nomads living in a bus handy to the golf course.
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The weather was cold, still and overcast and the roads were very quiet. There were more animals than people around. Which is pretty much how I like it. Horses, donkeys, goats, turkeys (an enormous flock of turkeys in fact) and of course lots of cows & sheep. This turned out to be my favourite section of the ride. I saw a guy standing, staring in to a bonfire. He saw me and waved, he said “We keep pretty busy around here.” and laughed. “Indeed” I replied, because that’s what I always say when I don’t have anything to say.
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The roads got busier around the Rotowaro open cast mine. But it was still an interesting land mark I suppose. From the mine I rode west, through the hills. Past Glen Afton and the Waingaro Springs. Then I met highway 22, the route I had taken before. In my head it was a short ride, mostly downhill to Raglan from there. It’s not of course, it’s another 25km of mostly scenic rolling terrain, but they passed pleasantly. It had started to rain on and off by this point, but nothing too serious, and I arrived in Raglan tired but not exhausted, and with spare food and water.
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I watched World Cup highlights at the hotel in Raglan. Ate pizza, drank some beer and read The Book Thief for an hour before falling asleep.
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The next day, I took the same route back to Pukekohe. The weather was windier and rainier. On the Ohautira Road I saw several animal carcasses that had been picked clean. I wondered if this was the work of carrion eating birds. Or Bear Grylls.
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People often talk about one of the pleasures of cycle touring is that you have a closer relationship with your surroundings – you feel the hills, smell the trees, listen to the magpies. That’s true – but it’s not all good – you also see more clearly the rubbish that people drop. And not just the few bits flung out of car windows as they drive by. You see the big piles that people have driven out in to the country to specifically dump down banks and in to rivers. I hate those people.
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I arrived safely back at the Pukekohe railway station on Tuesday afternoon with a really sore arse but without a sense of achievement and it’s bothering me ever since. The sore arse I can take care of – I walked to work for the rest of the week instead of riding, and I’ve retired my ancient Brooks saddle. But I’m having trouble working out how to file away the memory.
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Route here

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