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USA, USA, USA!
It's true, I'm strongly opposed to nationalism in all its forms and for any country, seeing it larger as a motivation to kill "them". I get it. It makes sense given evolution. In times of scarcity, groups that banded together more strongly than others, and took what they needed, were more likely to survive and reproduce. They reproduced even more people who banded together and took what their group needed.
Sigh.
So, yup, I, with my sense of, let me darkly call it humor, rather enjoy that the free bike I collected from the end of someone's driveway last week wears the moniker Team USA. Not enough irony for you? It was produced by the Raleigh Bicycle Company of America, a branch of the British company, yes, in England, the country from which the USA revolted some two hundred fifty years ago. Oh yeah, the bike itself, it was made somewhere in Asia.
But that 555SL (what it reads to vision that wraps around more than my camera's) sticker, I'd heard of 555 tubing before, despite never previously owning a bike with it. I thought maybe it was a lower cost production version of the famed Reynolds 531 tubeset, and with now owning some of it, I finally educated myself. Thank you Retrobike.
Read the fine print! I learned there are in fact four different tubesets that start with triple five: RSL is equivalent to 531, T is triple butted and possibly rebranded Japanese Ishiwata, SL is double butted, and no suffix denotes straight gauge chromoly. Years, ok, decades, ago I'd read that double butted tubing is the point of diminishing returns. It provides the benefits of more material at the ends, which see higher loads, without the significant added cost of tapering a tube thickness three times. Of course, yes, more modern hydroforming makes all of that pretty moot.
Old fashion or not, I like it. It's a nice, nice riding bike, said the person who happily rode a pretty low end driveway find to and from Boston's airport a couple months ago. Seriously though, the Raleigh was a much nicer find than that bike and I really rather like it, despite the name and general stars and stripes paint motif.
Of course, to evaluate how it rides, I needed to actually ride it, and to do that, I had to spend a bit of time with emery paper wrapped around a piece of tubing to clean up the inside of the seattube so I could force a 26.8mm seatpost into it. I think I know why I found it with a 25.4mm post and 40% of a 27.2mm shim. It's what, sort of, worked. When I started, the 26.8 inserted an inch before binding on obstructions. In addition to hydroforming, production bikes from the last thirty years also have improved quality control.
Seatpost installed, along with a more svelte saddle stripped of its cover and padding, as per my preference, I rode it Monday to meet my friend and running race promoter Amy to collect the excess yogurt left over from Saturday's All of the Above event, where I'd conveniently forgotten to take my share of the leftovers, thereby avoiding carrying them home from Northfield. Amy is an engineer for the town of Amherst and easily carried them in her car to work.
The bike, it rides like a bike, which is a good thing! Happily, the brakes and frame easily clear the 32c tires I swapped on for the shockingly narrow 28c width that came on it. I don't know if they ran narrow for their claimed size, or it's just been so long since I've ridden narrow tires, but I was guessing they were 23c. Maybe it's the lack of saddle padding, I have no interest in riding tires that narrow. Speed be damned!
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