Born Again Peugeot

Sometimes, postponing something can be good for you. There are times when we wanted to start a project just for fun, neglect the project many moons or even years later, then came up with a total different direction for it. We can draw similarity from said metaphor to Rimba Patria and his Peugeot that we just recently built.

Rimba bought this Peugeot in the form of fully-built bicycle some years ago, during the beginning of the fixed gear craze in Jakarta. He bought it from a small kiosk by the side of the road for real cheap. The intention was to convert it into a fixed gear bicycle, but then the Peugeot was abandoned .

We can't find any detailed information about this Peugeot. All we know, the headbadge came from the early '80s, the original brakes are nutted instead of recessed-nutted, the tire clearances are mahoosive, and it got YHM80531292 written under the bottom bracket shell. The bicycle was originally built with cobbled-together parts, so it's hard to estimate the exact year of which this bicycle was dated. All we know is this is not our first encounter with this model: we know a couple friends and previous customers who owned these Peugeots. Gibranos of Woof Jakarta used to have one.

While some of its brethren were converted into fixed gear bicycles, after a couple years of hibernation this bicycle is resurrected as the way it should be, but with modern componentry. We reused some of the parts that were originally installed though, such as the dropbar, stem, saddle, and seatpost. The Araya VX-400 rims came with the bicycle as well, we simply rebuilt them into a pair of Shimano Tiagra hubs with stainless spokes.

The frame's tire clearance calls for a pair of extra long reach brake calipers. We used Tektro R559 brake calipers since their reach range is, well, extra: 66-73mm instead of standard 39-49mm reach found on short reach caliper brakes. We also convert the brake mounts to receive these new recessed-nut calipers.

The rest was simple: A mix of Shimano 105 drivetrain with Tiagra cassette handles the power transfer. The bottom bracket shell is English-threaded, making ease of the bottom bracket replacement.