Dave’s 1980 Raleigh Pro Campy - Restomod
"Breathing new life into this classic 1980 Raleigh bicycle, we fully restored it to modern standards at The Polka Dot Jersey bike shop. It was a journey through time and a testament to the enduring appeal of vintage cycling."
““I acquired this one year old Raleigh Professional full Campy race bike (full Reynolds 531 tubing, made in England, (with tubulars) in Maine in 1980 while at college, and continued flying along the many long coastal peninsulas and farm roads near school, putting on 5000 miles a year (and I still managed to graduate).
Moving to Seattle, I sped around on it less, mostly for shorter “rough riding,” errand runs, commutes, and even towing toddler rigs. For the last ten years I’ve used a superlight carbon 29er hard tail with knobbies for all mountain and urban riding – but I knew the time had come to ride the Raleigh Pro hard again – on modern components. Many thanks to The Polka Dot Jersey shop on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle, this classy vintage-plus-modern fast ride is the result.”
My baby has new clothes.”
Here are a few photos of Dave’s bike before we started working on it. It’s still so cool looking with all the original parts!
Then the project began by fully stripping the frame to the bare minimum, inspecting, cleaning and polishing, to prep it for reassembly.
Doing a resto-mod has a few constraints to work around, including, frame spacing. For this, we had to cold set the rear end from 126 mm to 130 mm, to fit a more modern wheelset. Our choice of wheels went very quickly toward the Astral Veil 4, paired beautifully with polished White Industry T11 hubs, setup tubeless with some Panaracer GravelKing SK 30s.
The rest of the build came naturally, using a compact Shimano Ultegra R8000 grupo, paired with a sweet silver Zipp cockpit.
This project was truly a real gem to work on! The exceptional quality of the Reynolds 531 tubing undeniably contributes to making this bike so unique and authentically distinctive. It retains such a classic heritage and a rich legacy that sets it apart from many others.
531 tubing became the tubing-of-choice for most framebuilders at least partly because of the huge range of butting, diameters and thicknesses of tubes along with different stays and fork blades available.
We are looking forward to seeing Dave riding his beautiful bike for many more years to come.
To be continued…
Romain.B
