ride against the machine

This is the first build I did.

I saw this beat up Peugeot bike hanging in the coop I volunteer at. I asked about it and they told me I could get it for free.

I was in a pretty bad shape

Lot of rust on the chromed fork, paint in a bad condition too. I decided to repaint it because it was too much damaged. And because I did not like the grey this much.

I knew I wanted to do a proper restoration so I needed to find a color that was an existing (or close) one in the 70s. I chose orange, as it’s not a very common color for bikes and I liked the contrast it gives with silver and black.

There still was a problem : the fork blades. The chrome on those was dead beyond repair.

In this case there is three solutions :

• Re-Chrome it, very expensive and hard to find a shop to do it
• Paint the whole thing like the bike, cheap but loss of the PR10 specific paint/chromed fork
• Paint the chrome part another color, a little bit more expensive than plain paint, but we keep the spirit of the bike

I chose the last solution, with a white paint, contrast nicely with the orange. And because price was the same, I decided to do the back too (just like the PY10 and PX10!).

Next step was to find decals to replace the old ones. There is plenty of websites proposing it online. Original orange PR10 in the 70s used the black lettering for “PEUGEOT” but the white one is clearly better visually (don’t know what they were thinking).

The 90s were a different time in term of bicycle design. Mountain biking was a hot topic and every manufacturer tried to be “unique”.

And of course Bianchi had to do it. They released a series of MTBs called “Ragno”, italian for spider, clearly inspired by the famous triple triangle iconic from GT design. But they pushed it a bit further :

img catalogue

There is 6 models ranging from the lowest quality to the highest quality:

• Meta
• Thomisus
• Pholcus
• Theridion
• Migale
• Araneus

I was browsing leboncoin.fr (our version of craiglist) when I saw a Bianchi Thomisus, to be honest my goal was to find a quality steel 90s mtb for a new build. But seeing this frame I never saw before I had to get it.

It was not the quality I was expecting but the weirdness of the frame made me call the seller, 2 days later I got the bike.

(It has been a long time since I rebuilt the bike so I don’t have all the original parts in mind, will update it)

The Thomisus is equipped with : (link velobase)

• Shimano Exage Long Cage Rear Derailleur
• Shimano Exage Front Derailleur
• A Biopace triple chainring
• Shimano hubs
• Shimano rims
• Shimano U brake
• Shimano front cantilever

Warning : It comes with a 21.1mm steerer tube fork, so you need to either keep the original stem (mine was in a bad visual shape so I changed it) or look into some old BMX stem matching this size. Exactly what I did.

Goal was to make it my daily driver, something confortable, relatively fast and useful for carrying things. I started by removing the triple crankset, the mtb tires and all the useless things for my usage.

I changed the crankset for a Shimano 600 I converted to single I had laying around. Changed the cassette for something with more range to compensate the single chainring.

I put Maxxis DTH 2.15” tires, with those lovely beige sidewalls, it looks so great on vintage MTB !

First iteration of the build was something like this :

I quickly realized that due to the old setup with triple, the chain was not very straight and I got a lot of chain jumps. So I put back the front derailleur, just acting as a chain guard to prevent it from skipping. Works like a charm.

I then removed the leather saddle and added a front rack later on, for more carrying capacity and because I needed that saddle.

And then I got a trailer for it, still need to transform it to a proper bicycle trailer with a wood plank and some metal railing to carry and attach things.

With the trailer came another problem, the ratio on the front was too much and I was only using my lowest gear on the back. So I switched for a new chainring, changing the crankset in the process because the BCD was not matching with my new chainring.