That's a piece all right! This one looks like it may have a bent front fork. Actually not that big a problem since we could bend the forks back by hand when we were building them in the shop. Gitanes regularly came with bent forks from mishandling and we were good at using the venerable old Eldi pedal wrench to reallign the forks to match from side to side. The forks were softer than the main triangle so they were pretty easy to allign. That's why the bike shop's had back rooms back then. You might have to stand on a BB with one foot while pulling the stays back into true. You just didn't want the customer to see what these bikes often had to go through to make it to the showroom. I still think the bike's had a much nicer ride than a lot of what was going around then in inexpensive bikes. I still own a UO-8 Peugeot. Its only original part is the seat pin. ;^)
Dan Artley in a balmy Parkton, Maryland (might make it to 40 today)
>>> Steven m Johnson <grisha2@juno.com> 01/03/02 10:25AM >>>
Some nice photos, including the famous foil stickers of a Gitane
Interclub on ebay:
What a piece of bike boom history!
Steven M. Johnson, Chesapeake, VA
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