Built for Touring

I'm still sick today, so rather than ride I will get down one of my other bikes from the rafters. Here it is, a Platano Touring frame in Cadillac's Desert Rose Mist Pearl, circa 1973.

I had forgotten about the founders of Platano but thanks to the power of the web I can remember now that Bruce Hecht made my bike. Go here to read about the brutal riders who formed the Banana Gang.

In fairness I must say that I do not have this bike because I was an especially-fast rider. I worked at Bicycles Unlimited and we maintained bikes ridden by the Banana Gang. I designed the bike from stem to stern and asked Platano to build it. After 40 years I am still happy with the way it rides, and the way the paint glows in the sun.

The bike has lots of "braze-ons." Notice the arrows and captions on the illustrations. You can see that I set it up for tours with racks, lights, water bottle, powerful brakes, etc. The frame has a long wheelbase for comfort, a relatively high bottom bracket for dirt road use, very low and "half-step" gearing, vertical dropouts for easy rear wheel removal, clearance for fenders and so on.

Bicycle archeologists will notice that it represents an international selection of the best parts available at the time. I have frame, seat post, derailleur pulleys and bottle cage from America; saddle from England; bars, gears and shifters from Japan; crankset and rims from France; spokes from Switzerland; pedals, tubing, hubs, skewers from Italy, etc. Other than a few tires, a pair of rims, some chains and handlebar tape, the bike is as it was when I built it.

Here are some views of the front end.

View of the rear end and the greasy bits.

Much of the touring gear is still up in the garage - generator, lights, racks, bags, camping equipment.

Everywhere we look I see details that I thought were important at the time. I guess they were important, because they still function and and the bike looks good. It's an old-school piece of equipment, but comparable with many high-quality bikes even today.

Having a custom bike is really a pleasure. A few years after I left Bicycles Unlimited, I went to work at Casa de Oro Cycles in Spring Valley. While I was there, I commissioned and assembled a custom tandem bike. We'll review that one in another blog posting.

Bill Holland owned Casa de Oro and later sold it to concentrate on buying and selling Porsches. That lucrative pursuit didn't last very long, and he got back into frame-building. For several decades Bill and Holland Cycles have been making superb custom frames and bikes.

(Disclaimer - I've never owned a Holland frame but I'd like to ...)