I have a beautiful Franklin road bike. This bike is so beautiful that I would never have been able to afford it (I can barely afford to keep it on the road). The luck of my ownership of it I owe entirely to the laziness of a former roomate. In college I had a short lived roomate of about three months. He brought with him to my apartment his stepfather's old Franklin equipped with exotic, intimidating names like Cinelli and Campagnolo. It sat in our living room completely unused on flat tubular tires because he would always rather ride the racing Haro BMX bicycle he bought when we were in grade school. At the end of his tenure as my roomate (he dropped out of school) he moved to Dallas TX and told me I could have it because he didn't feel like moving it back with him. I let it go further neglected fearing it's exotic nature (it's components all bore the above mentioned brand names of refined Italian breeding), choosing instead the cheap safety of my yellow Goodwill cruiser.
Upon my depressing return to Shreveport Louisiana I found myself struggling to get around it's hilly neighborhoods on this same extremely heavy cruiser. I realized I needed something lighter in weight, something with gears for my coffee shop trips and I had this Franklin just laying around that was the lightest bike I had ever handled so I took to it and have only rarely, on flat roads, looked back to to my cruiser.
It's lightness and gears have liberated me here but I have found new struggles with it in trying to afford to keep it on the road. For all the neglect it has suffered it has paid me back in need of parts and maintenance. I am well aware of the debate between the impassioned riders of both clinchers and tubular tires but their arguments have rarely included price. The Franklin has had three flats since I brought it here and each has cost my sorry unemployed self thirty dollars apiece. All concern for ride quality or rolling resistance have gone out the window with the bitter knowledge that if I'd had clinchers these flats would only have cost me three dollars for new inner tubes.
Another recent potential financial burden came in the form of its brake hoods. The original gum hoods on its Campagnolo Record non-aero brake levers were UV damaged, dry rotted, and falling apart (as gum hoods are so apparently prone to do). The only thing I was keeping them on with was yellow electrical tape.
I searched for new replacement brake hoods. They were available by order at my LBS, in black rubber only, for nearly sixty dollars. Completely ignoring the expense I was unwilling to accept, I did not think black was a fitting color to compliment its navy frame and canary yellow tape and housing. I searched and found some NOS brown gum hoods but they were equally expensive. I was assured by the website that these NOS hoods were "show quality," but my bike is going to be ridden not be on display. These were unacceptably expensive solutions so instead I bought some cheap brown Cane Creek brake hoods:
They are obviously not a perfect fit, but they work. They are ridable and more aesthetically pleasing than the rot covered in electrical tape that they replaced. Plus, I saved fifty four dollars over the new or NOS alternatives. Now I only hope that its fantastic Benotto Cellotape holds up because I can accept no substitutions for it.
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