This is now a post-mortem. When I moved house at the start of 2001, I no longer had a garage in which to store piles of dead bikes. The Repco, and the half-recumbent it was once going to be converted into, got donated to the bits-o-bikes pile at CERES enviro hippy centre in Brunswick.
Read on if you care...
This is what became of my old mountain bike.
I bought this bike, an 18 speed Repco Ridgeback, when I was a first year Engineering student in 1993. It was a pretty ordinary hi-ten steel bike, second hand, and in pretty average condition, but better than the Malvern Star 10-speed I owned at the time.
We went through a few sets of cheap tyres together, and a set of cheap wheels. I did my first few 100km rides on it, and my first overnight tour. We rode together in the back of an ambulance when we took on Sydney's traffic and won (my wrist healed okay, and my new wheel cost much less than the panelbeating bill for the two cars that got towed. I also got medical exemption from four exams that week). I eventually got sick of the plain white paintjob, so I attacked it with whatever spraycans I could find (yellow, black, brown and silver).
When I got my first good MTB at the end of my undergraduate course, the Repco became a spare. I started building a recumbent bike, with the intention of using the rear wheel, drivetrain and brakes of the Repco. I moved most of these to the 'bent in one of the short building frenzies I had, but since the 'bent still didn't have a seat or chain routing pulley, it was still unridable. I also realised I'd made some fundamental mistakes in the frame design.
I took lots of photos during the building process, so I might make a page about the recumbent one day. It would be nice to have a successfully finished product to show off rather than the rusty display of poor design (and even worse welding) that I have. I doubt I will ever finish this bike. If I ever build a 'bent (and I hope I do one day), I will be able to list this first attempt as a learning experience.
I finally decided that it would be better to have one (more) working bike rather than two non-working bikes, so I decided to put the Repco back together as a cheap, simple shopping-and-pub bike.
The original plan was to do without a front derailer, and make the bike a 6-speed. I used the old squeaky STX-RC crankset off my MTB. For no justifiable reason, I ended up also doing without a rear derailer, and pulling most of the sprockets off the cluster to make it a true single-speed. At the moment I'm running a 32-14 gear ratio, but I expect this to change a few times before I settle on something.
I only had one of the brake levers from this bike available (the other had since become the drum brake lever on the stoker bars of the tandem), so I went even more minimal and did without a rear brake. There's no dirt tracks between home, the shops and the pub, so traction is not an issue. Front wheel braking is only limited by the bike's endo-ability. I know from experience that the Repco is much harder to go OTB of than my MTB is.
As a finishing touch, I intend to fit my spare luggage rack, to which I will zip-tie a milk crate. A single-speed shopping bike should look the part...