Can I go riding?

1988 Terry Gambit

My 10 year old son has been wanting to go riding on a "real" bike (as opposed to his Trek mountain bike) with his older brother and I. The big problem was finding a road bike with a short standover height.
I found this women's bike built by Georgina Terry on the Dayton, OH CL and snagged it. These bikes were and are still made primarily for short legged women. It had a cheap saddle, upright bars and levers, well worn tires but in pretty decent shape. It is a cro moly frame, has a nice Sugino VP triple crank, 6 speed freewheel and Shimano indexed shifting.

We first stripped everything down to
the bare frame and my 10 year old insisted on removal of any trace of girl related evidence. After a complete cleaning of the frame I then overhauled the bottom bracket and headset. I went ahead and did the hubs at the same time.
I had a set of Nitto drop bars and stem from who knows where that worked. I then ordered some Crane Creek levers that have a closer reach than normal. I also ordered replacement 27" and 24" Panaracer Pasela tires and tubes. They are about the only manufacturer of 24" x 1" tires and were kind of hard to find.
The wheels were in pretty good shape with just a little truing necessary.
We cleaned and polished rims, brakes, derailers and crank. New cables, a San Marco saddle, carbon look bar tape, matching bottle holder and an old Pedro's seat bag completed the project.


My 10 year old along with my 15 year old and I went on a 11 mile test drive on Saturday. We parked near the Richmond, IN airport and planned to ride a block that went into Ohio and back. This is probably the flattest route I knew but as luck would have it we had a pretty good breeze which of course he thought was going against him the whole way. He enjoyed how much easier it was to pedal and how fast he could go down the "hills". As soon as he gets used to letting go of one hand to shift we will show him some real hills.