Dutch Bike Project

snowboarderstu

Hey everyone! I'd like to say hello to begin with, my name's Stu and I'm a student living in Portsmouth. Ive been lurking round the commuting forum for quite a while but now need to ask for your help.

Ive decided to bring my dad's old bike back to life. Its a traditional dutch bike, a Union Arizona according to the frame, that must be about 25 years old and so is completely different to anything I've serviced before. It has all the traditional features of a dutch bike and makes the first job of looking at the back wheel properly more complicated. In the way is a skirtguard, chainguard, mudguard with a built in light that may be routed to a bottle dynamo on the front wheel, an O lock which is built in to the frame and goes through the top of the back wheel and what is a drum brake i think. You need to pedal backwards in order to operate the brakes.

I was wondering if anyone had experienced fixing up one of these before and knew of any potential pit falls or of any resources, either online or off that i might be able to use.

I'll put some pictures up soon so you can all have a look as it hopefully transforms from the heavy dusty abandoned wreck with two flats it is at the moment to a shiny, functional and stylishly slow commuting beast of a bike.

nicklouse

sounds just like any standard bike from Europe.

depending on how far you want to go with new stuff you could do a lot.

re fixing yep most things should be fixable, dependent on what you actually have.

First things though why are you doing this? restore or make working?