Full service on this lovely Raleigh Transit

It’s been a while since I’ve had to use imperial-size spanners, seen cotter pins, cup-and-cone bottom brackets, or serviced 3-speed Sturmey Archer gears, but this bike was a pleasure to work on and I was impressed by the build quality.

Parts replaced:

• 2 x Tyres (I had two second-hand ones in stock),
• 2 x CR2032 batteries for the rear LED light (perched on top of the original light). These batteries are about £1 each if you buy from the right place, but can be £5 if you go to the watch shop!
• Replacement clutch for Sturmey Archer 3-speed gears
• Fitted a front light, just something out of the ‘spares’ pile that I keep, something that (almost) fitted the period of the bike.

The full service on these bikes includes all the points that are ona modern bike, but in addition you need to re-grease and adjust the bottom bracket. Modern dérailleur gears take less effort to service than hub gears too. (but as mentioned above, some of this old technology is a pleasure to work on, as the build quality and engineering is superb)

The gears were sometimes slipping between high and middle gear (the clutch wasn’t fully pushing the pawls outwards within the hub gears), and would sometimes jump from low to middle gear (due to the notched clutch, see photo). In other words none of the gears really worked very well (but with a new clutch fitted they do now!)

Some of the metalwork received a re-rust and polish, although the chromed wheels aren’t something I can’t do much with. In fact with the rim being a bit rusty it has probably improved the bike’s braking; compared to modern aluminium wheels chrome wheels are quite slippery!

I charged £50 for this, inclusive of labour and parts. The customer bought the bike to me and collected it afterwards so there was no travel charge.