Bike 3 – The Winter Trainer

1980 Schwinn Le Tour, Xtra-Light, 1020 tubing, lugged frame.

OK, so this is going to be the training bike I started out to build and now 2 bikes later I’ve actually got a bike with no other cause than to be turned into a winter training machine.
I chose this bike for several reasons:
• I already have 2 Varsities
• 3 piece cranks, so no pedal conversion issue.
• It’s a lot lighter
• Center pull brakes that are a lot heavier duty
• Still not a valuable frame that I’m afraid to “ruin” by making modifications to it.
While I want to keep some vintage appeal to this bike, that plan is only for keeping the cost down and ensuring I’m never afraid to take it out into the mud, snow, salt, rain, etc…
Frame modifications:
• Brazed on 2 sets of water bottle bosses, one on the down tube and the other on the seat tube.
• Widen rear drop outs from 120mm to 130mm to accept 8/9 speed hubs.
• Modify rear brake hanger to fit wider spacing for 700c rims
• Remove kickstand bracket and replace with tubing
• Powdercoat -Sparkle Blue Sky, I just liked this color, no way I was going to paint the bike silver again.
The best part of this frameset is that it was made in the USA, I really got lucky and got one of the two years that Schwinn made the Le Tours in Chicago (1979 and 1980)! I didn’t actually know this when I picked out the bike. Great fit for keeping my bike collection all Made in the USA.
Now another issue, many Varsity owners have found out about this problem also, I haven’t ran into this yet because I left the stock stems on the two previous bikes. The stem on this bike is 0.833” or 21.1mm (same as the Varsities), no one makes this size anymore, and finding a different stem length or angle would be darn near impossible. Since this is a training bike I need the geometry to be as close as possible to ideal for me! So handler position has to be modified. Here’s the solution: The next closest size stem is 22.2mm, still not easy to find parts for, but there is an adapter available to use threadless 1 1/8” stems, which is today’s standard. So all I need to do is machine this adapter down from 22.2 to 21.1mm, and since I have access to a lathe, so this is a really an easy modification, and with this adapter created any stem length/angle is now available!
One thing that wasn’t a problem is the seatpost, the seatpost is a 25.4mm (or 1”) on this bike with a thin adapter to fit the 26.2mm seat tube. 26.2mm while not standard is still available today.
I had an old Xero wheelset sitting around and to still use the old chain and shifting system, I installed a 7 speed cassette (with spacers) and voila two more gears on the non-indexing stem shifters! (Well, actually it would be 4 more gears since Schwinn counted all the possible gear combinations when calling this a 10 speed, so now its a 14 speed).