Funny Bike

Back in the day I used to trawl Gumtree for interesting for interesting bikes and then, if something caught my eye, I would buy it.

I freely admit, I bought some weird things and made more than a few questionable choices, but for the most part, they were diamonds in the rough.

So it was with this wonderful creature.

I saw the bike online early 2013. It was in Melbourne. I was in Mildura. It was late, but I was scheduled to go to Melbourne the next day for work. I messaged the guy who had listed it and he said he could only meet the next day during his lunch break if he rode it to work. We agreed on an early lunch date!

It was Chapel St. It was a bugga to find parking.

I found old mate on the pre-destined corner and gave him my Blackberry and keys to the hire car as collateral and went for a blockie in my suit & tie. It was a pig to ride, the geometry was all wrong, you couldn’t take your hands off the bars without heading for the gutter. It had a 3 speed, fixed gear Sturmey Archer internally geared hub that gave you 1, neutral and 3. Despite all of that, I had an inkling this bizarre fixie was more than it seemed.

I got back to old mate and I was like, “It’s an interesting ride…” and he just gave me chapter and verse on what were basically his regrets and then that he needed to offload it because he was onto the next leg of his world tour and then did the haggling for me and we both walked away happy!

So then I had to stuff it into the hire car, but fortunately I’d had the presence of mind to book a large sedan that I could fold the seats down and poke the bike in without unduly making my suit look like I’d slept in it or trashing the car and set off for my next appointment. Even more fortuitously that meeting was with an equally bike obsessed colleague and so I was able to stash the bike in his office until my next trip when I was better prepared to cart it home!

Thanks Bruce.

So, what had caught my eye was the angles of the tubeset and despite how my new Canadian friend had set it up, or bought it, it was clearly a track pursuit frame, that someone had put a 700c fork and front wheel into. Probably thinking that would make a cool Melbourne hipster fixie.

Nice idea to turn a pursuit frame into an urban weapon, although the Velocity Deep V rims and the Sturmey Archer hub pretty much eliminated all the advantages of the lightweight alloy frame.

I got it home and rode it around a bit, a few friends had a ride on it, they all thought it was shite and a waste of money, but I had faith. Anyway, not long after I bought it, I packed everything up to move to Ballina, so I stripped the frame to pack it and after we’d opened The Bicycle Emporium, I decided to rebuild it – properly.

As I often do when I’m working on a project, I bring it into the shop and let people see it and sometimes (often) they share their thoughts – everybody has one. I occasionally glean a bit more information or get some ideas about how to progress the build. In this case I had several people tell me that it had to have a 650c front wheel, but I wasn’t completely convinced of that and of sources at the time were saying that these were originally 700c rear and 26″ front and that the “Funny Bike” trend in track cycling pre-dated the advent of 650c road bikes – dunno about that.

Assimilating all of the available data and opinions, I went with my gut, that 26″ was probably right and a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the only fork I could get close to the approximate era was a Kenesis 26″ polished alloy. So that pretty much sealed it for me. But the real kicker was when I went looking for a rim and then there was nothing available except 26″ in an old-school square section eyeleted rim. I should note that this was the only option, old school 26″ rims are also as rare as rocking horse shit.

So, I sent the frame off for a bit of paint job, it was originally white, with a few stickers on it, nothing else. It was looking pretty shabby, so we sandblasted and powdercoated it – I have no idea what possessed me to make it light grey! I secretly suspect the powdercoater had just bought it and wanted to see what it looked like. He told me the colour was French Champagne and I fell for it – nice one, Ricky. It’d probably look alright on garden furniture or the pool fence!

Although, I must admit, it grew on me.

While that was going on, the fork was inbound and the rim arrived, so I laced it around a Dura Ace 7800 or maybe 7900 front hub with some sort of Kenda wire-bead 26 x 1″ tyre (25c), which sat in the fork very nicely.

The frame came back and I popped in a generic alloy seatpost and an old Selle Italia Flight saddle – actually the original saddle from my C50, so I could clamp it in the workstand and then fitted the for. I anchored the fork in place with a bunch of spacers and an old ITM stem without cutting the steerer.

I had an old track rear disc wheel I’d picked up while I was at university (another story) and put that in, a VP Components sealed bearing bottom bracket and a decent mid-priced single speed crankset with some nice Wellgo pedals with CroMo spindles and a garden variety single speed chain initially, probably a YBN BMX chain if I’m honest!

But the real exactment was what are we going to do for handlebars?

And this is where the bike gave us quite a lot of fun 🙂

And unfortunately I don’t have photos of all of the iterations.

The teak wooden handlebar, I loved that one. I fitted it rolled around, yeah, not quite the right feel. The teak bar was one inch, so I tried and old bullhorn bar I’d taken off one of Gavin’s bikes (more on him later). That was OK, kinda cool, bit a but agricultural and I didn’t have anything better.

Briefly, we tried a straight alloy bar – ho-hum, boring. Then a one-piece flat bar with an integrated stem, cool-ish, but not even close to right. A Soma Noah’s Arc – very cool – too cool – didn’t even fit it. Nup. Hmmm. Wait just one goddamn minute ………….

It was a long minute while I dug through lots of boxes of old parts. I say old parts like I had stripped them off different bikes, etc., found then in some old warehouse or whatever. I’m sure someone had, just not me. I merely found them on the internet and bought them because they were “cool!” Mostly because they reminded me of eras of my cycling obsession and TV, video, online, cycling watching, hundreds and hundreds of copies of cycling magazines, you get the idea – a hundred hours of GCN in todays money. Anyway, into the collection I dived and found a very Greg Lemond-esque Delta handlebar and we finished the bike off with that.

I was extremely cool!

Next level cool.

I rode it to work for a while. It hung in the shop for ages.

We took it out on weekends and cut hot-laps after beers …

But is still wasn’t quite right, stopping was arduous – we fitted a brake. We felt fast, we convinced each other we were fast [and in our best form!]. But despite the many available hand holds, the best positioned one was too low and the rest were too far away. Despite its peculiarity, it wasn’t the right kind of wrong for this bike.

So, it sat in the shop and then the shed and it was probably a couple of years before I came back to it.

By then I’d decided that the bullhorn bar was probably the way to go.

Disturbingly, we had a lot to choose from!

The one I got off Gavin’s Scattante had the same issues as the Delta bar, the main hand position was lower than the flat of the bar and with the sloping frame and smaller front wheel, it meant that the rider’s weight was a long way forward and you used a lot of core energy holding your body up and you took a lot of your upper body and head weight on your arms and hands and that became really uncomfortable quite quickly.

So, obviously we canned those because I wanted to ride it to work when we lived 7 mostly straight and flat kilometres form home.

Conventional flat bullhorn bars – seems I had a few of those as well and one was a nice Deda, fairly modern – possible even 21st Century bar, 31.8 bore, black alloy – let’s see if we can make that work.

With a lovely Deda stem, albeit for 1-1/8 steerer, it was just the right reach, added a shim for the steerer, which hadn’t had a thread cut on it by that point, so we were still A-Head system, a few spacers, not too low for a not-as-old-as-I-am-now bloke and it was perfect!

As a responsible cyclist on the bike paths, I thought we probably needed a brake and particularly since my knees weren’t that keen of skid-stopping on anything that wasn’t wet tiles or polished concrete. We already had the Tektro dual pivot front brake caliper, but the little fixie suicide lever wasn’t gonna work, so I needed a brake lever.

I had in my “collection” these distressingly lavish ITM bar end brake levers for a TT bike that I was building and then the bar came with carbon brake levers and … what was I to do, these went into the box. And voila {link to Emma Koch} years later, they popped out for this bike. A few people asked me why I put two levers on a bike with only one brake? Well, for one it’s symmetry and I’m a bit OCD, so I think it looks better. The other, and probably the main reason was because with most of my bikes that have several lives and variations on the theme and If I ever needed the bar-end levers for another project, I at least knew where both of them were. But if I split them up, I might never find the other one. So the main motivation was to keep a good (and expensive) set of brake levers together. Then I busted out some of that Shimano plastic (pic) cable shaping stuff and wrapped the bars witj a bit of Deda tape was was a perefct match. I’m a little traumatised that Deda do bar tape in pool-fence powdercoats, but it works for me!

To make the ride a little less hardcore, I thought I should probably do something about the fixed gears as well. So, I ripped off the single speed lock-ring and sprocket and fitted a decent DNP freewheel and suddenly we had a very rideable bike – like you know a comfortable, pleasurable riding experience that has all the hallmarks of an Olympic athlete – HOOYAR!

🙂

I alternated between this and the Kirk as my main commuters for about 5 years – amongst the new acquisitions, test rides, custom builds and other projects, etc.

Then I moved to live on top of a hill and both this and the Kirk got relegated to the not compatible with the 20% gradient to get home.

Pity.

So, it sat in the shop again for a couple more years and with so many other projects on the go – finished, waiting, dreaming – I decided to list this one for sale in the hope that it might find a new “forever” home. Or at least give someone else as much fun and satisfaction as I’ve had out of it.

Chapeau Mace from Preston, I hope you love it!

People often ask me if I make money out of these when I sell them?

That makes me laugh.

I’d like to. I’d love to. But, if I costed out all the time and phaffing around, it would be more than the bike cost new, without the parts. But, I bought the bike in 2013 rode it, played with it. had a lot fun and enjoyment out of it and sold it in 2025 for more that I originally paid. Most of the original parts found there way onto other bikes, some of the parts on this bike came off other bikes and I’ve had it as a commuter, a toy, a bit of art and a conversation piece in my shop for 10 years. I think I’ve had my enjoyment out of it and made back my original investment – sort of – and now I think it’s time to let someone else enjoy a piece of cycling history in near new riding condition.

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The great question at the end of the day is what was the provenance of the frame?

From what I gleaned from the guy I bought it from and what he told me is that was a locally built frame. That could have meant Melbourne, or Australia more widely, given he was Canadian. That narrowed it down a bit.

In the 12 years that I had the frame, only a couple of people hazarded a guess at the builder and both suggested it was a Kenevans. I had been meaning to send Ken photos to verify, but like lots of things, I didn’t quite get to it!

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ADDENDUM:

A couple of people have asked me about the wheels. One person asked if I still had them and wanted to sell them. Sorry, long gone.

I stripped the wheels and later rebuilt the rims with single speed hubs and they ended up in another project bike. The front hub was a Sturmey Archer front hub brake. That briefly served time on another track bike as a commuter because it didn’t have any brake mounts. It was a carbon frame and fork, but with a few rubber spacers, I could mount the brake and stop without damaging the rest of the bike. Eventually, that hub found it’s way onto a restored 1970’s Raleigh ladies step-through and is probably still going strong.

While I had great intentions of doing something with the 3 speed Sturmey Archer fixed gear hub, I just found it too impractical and I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to ride with that set-up. Finally it ended up on eBay and funnily enough, it sold to a bloke in Canada – maybe even the same the bloke I bought it from!