That’s good deal! I have Hunt wheels on my mtb.
Interestingly they dont offer H_care on mountain bike wheels. Not really suprised.
They’ve seen me ride it
Brompton suffering in the market as well, just about turned a profit last year.
I know London is probably a tiny part of their market, but I would guess that the hire bikes are taking a big chunk of their commuter market.
Why carry a bike onto the train if you can easily grab a hire bike outside the station at your destination?
For the cycling as transport rather than sport or fitness market, everyone seems to want an e-bike now.
I see a lot of Brompton e-bike conversions out and about, but my big standard Brompton is heavy enough without the added weight of a motor and a battery, so they must be heavy if you do need to carry them at any point in your journey
Actually surprised this lot are still around. Just Chinese made shit these days.
My first ‘Road’ bike was a team banana replica as a kid.
I had the Red Ti Raleigh team 10 speed racer. In retrospect it was a junk kids replica which put me off cycling.
I desperately wanted a Raleigh Record Sprint but my parents had set a budget for my birthday and it was about £20 over. I offered to pay the difference myself but they weren’t having it so I got a Carlton Cyclone. It was a good bike and I had it for years and went everywhere on it but it wasn’t a Raleigh Record Sprint which was black & gold like a JPS Lotus with anodised gold levers, brakes, cranks etc.
I’m still scarred to this day and very nearly bought one a couple of years ago just to scratch that itch.
So my banana rep was the ‘posh’ one with Reynolds 501 tubing. Problem was it had the same components as the cooking version.
Alloy brake levers with no rubber hoods, plastic SIS downtube shifters, you pretty much had to tweak the gears every day to keep them indexed.
I remember the black/gold record sprint, that was a thing of beauty.
I bought a banana rep many years later as a turbo hack. It was already in a pretty rough state and I finished it off with my acid rain sweat over the next few of years.
I had a black+gold Raleigh Record 12speed (not the Sprint though, so was bog standard tubes not Reynolds and no gold anodised bits)
In hindsight, it may not have been the sprint I was taking about, the mists of time have probably clouded my memory. Reynolds tubing would have been much more expensive, even in the 80s, I seem to remember the budget being about £100/120 at the time.
For years I kept the printed Raleigh catalogue that I had from the period with the prices hand scribbled on the pages by the shop owner. (J M Richards in Perth.)
I occasionally wonder how competitive Raleigh bikes were in period, at the time there were very few alternatives avaliable, certainly in Scotland.
After about 2 years I moved on to a Giant of some description, (Cadex I think.) that was exponentially better.
I’m guessing I’m older than you and if I cast my mind back, I think Raleigh pretty much had the market covered, the Carlton I had was a Raleigh with a different sticker.
I remember a mate (who spent every summer in France) having a Peugeot but at the level I operated at I can’t think of any other makes off the top of my head.
I also had a Tomahawk (smaller version of a Chopper) a Chopper (2nd hand) and a succession of “Trackers” (road bikes that we put cow horn handlebars on and rode over the ash banks) no-one had heard of Mountain Bikes at that point and BMXs were a fairly recent addition.
I had a Raleigh Chipper! One size down from a Tomahawk. I don’t think I have any photos of my old bikes. I’ll ask my sister as she has got the family archive of photos. I then had a 5 speed racing bike with smaller wheels 24" maybe, which was something like Royal Enfield. Then the Raleigh. I sold the Raleigh to a mate who did it up and took it to uni… which was stolen in the first week.
I think mine was £120 in around 1982 from Grierson and Grahams in Dumfries
It’s nice to pop down memory lane every now and again. I had a black and gold raleigh record but can’t remember any spec. I then got a raleigh sirocco before changing to mountain bikes. Before all that it was home made trackers as per @JaRok2300 which I used to spray in wacky colours and before those it was the trusty, indestuctable grifter. My sister had a chopper which would now be worth more than it cost then. My uncle had a raleigh bike shop !
That sounds about right, my birthday is in August and I was told I could have a “proper bike” when I went to “big school” and was 12 in August 1982. I remember they let me have it at the start of the summer holidays so I had use of it for the 6 weeks rather than a few days before going back to school again.
I also remember they bought it quite early (a sale maybe?) and kept it at my uncles house until then. We used to visit them every couple of weeks and I used to ask if I could go and look at it in the spare room whenever we visited. It sounds mad now but it was a really big deal then, my dad worked in the printing trade and my mom had a part time job at the local butcher’s so £120 was a lot of money to them, and I knew that too.
Wasn’t there a Chopper type bike called a ‘Commando’ or something? I’m sure my neighbour had one.
Well done, I forgot I had a commando as well, a baby grifter