Late 70s Takara Sport 10- Flipped

Make: Takara

Model: Sport 10

Year:  Late 1970s

Obtained:  May 2014

Found: Community Garage Sale

Paid: $10

Asking price

Yesterday was our annual community garage sale here in West Seattle where there were literally hundreds of garage sales going on.  So as I did 3 years ago I went looking for a project, and found a set of Takara Sport 10s, and walked away from them...at first.  The sport 10 is a city bike much like the Raleigh sprite with north road type handle bars and a cushy sprung saddle.  

I looked them over and decided to move on to see if I could find anything better but after driving around for a while longer and doing some thinking about the 27 inch wheels, Sun Tour drive train and Dia-Compe brakes I could "harvest" for a few of the frames I have laying around, I decided to go back.  The bikes had each been marked at $15 so I picked out the one with less rust on the handlebars, from years in a garden shed, and offered $10 and had my garage sale find for the day.

My prize

After getting the bike home though I started thinking that maybe I could just clean it up and resell it, the classic "flip".  I don't consider myself a flipper, I think when you take a bike down to the frame and then clean and rebuild it back up with new parts its a refurb not a flip, but in this case I was willing to make an exception.  First of all the bike didn't excite me much as a refurb project, I guess drop bars make my heart race more than north roads, second it was hi- ten rather than CroMo steel and lastly it wasn't really in too bad of shape.  

There was surface rust on the stem and seat post, but thankfully neither was stuck.

The tires were old but they held air and didn't have any visible dry rot, and the rims had surface rust but nothing a little super fine steel wool couldn't handle.

left side shows what a little elbow grease and steel wool can do

So I decided to give it a little TLC and then throw it up on craigslist to see what might happen.  First I gave a wash to get the dust of a decade or so of garden shed storage off of it.

Bath time

And then I made a checklist of things I wanted to do before listing the bike;

• Wipe down the frame with armor all wipes
• Clean and lube the chain and clean the freewheel
• Check that the shifting and braking work correctly
• lightly sand the brake pads
• remove surface rust from rims
• remove clean and lube seatpost and lube seat tube
• remove clean and lube stem and lube head tube
• add cable ends to where they were missing on the front derailleur cable and rear brake

After a short test ride I put it on craigslist for $50 with the admonition that while rideable it could use a tune up and new tires.  I had it sold by early evening.  It didn't hurt that today was a nice sunny day.  My next project will involve actually taking apart a Peugeot UO-8 so the quick and easy stuff is over for now.

Until next time ride.smile.repeat.