A Bicycle's Point of view

My new Bicycle, My Atala Build

After having sold my Raleigh Sport road bike along with a few other bikes and things to clear out the garage and supplement some much needed income at the time, I started to miss having a bicycle that was fairly new ( meaning less than 10 years old). I wanted a bicycle where I could start anew, something upgradable and something in the steel variety.

I had a few parts lying around in the garage and saw no need to buy a whole new bike with all the components already on it. So I went on eBay and purchased this new old stock Atala bicycle frame which I then built up myself.

By the way, I love eBay and I love PayPal. The bill the later feature allowed me to finance this frame over the course of six months, not bad to pay off a frame a little over $300.

The wheelset, brakes, saddle, stem, handlebars and headset were all items that I either had from other bikes or that were given to me on trades and other small parts purchases. On a previous post I said I would not be going back to brifters, but every man has his price. When a coworker offered to sell me his brifters, crankset and rear derailleur for $25 I went for it. I ended up replacing the crankset with an ISIS drive crankset from eBay due to bottom bracket compatibility issues. I could not get a JIS crankset to work with the Italian bottom bracket I already had, so I went full ISIS drive. The rear cassette had to be adapted with a spacer to work with the 7 speed shifting. I purchased the chain, tires, tubes, rim liner, handlebar wrap and shifter boss adapters from the bike shop were I work at. Nearly $200 in parts later, I now have a complete bicycle.

So how does it ride, $500 later? The bike is very smooth and pedaling and shifting is effortless. On my usual 20 mile, hilly ride I hardly had to get out of my 53 tooth font chainring, and felt like I could have done the whole ride on my large chainring. The shorter chain stays allowed me to pedal up hill with a higher gear ratio than I would normally do otherwise. Despite their reputation for failure, the Shimano RSX shifters shifted on a dime making the bike ride like a champ.

But how does this bike compare, to say, My Woodrup? The Woodrup is definitely the nicer riding bicycle. The steel is more springy and I hardly feel the road under my feet. For a steel frame, the Atala is very stiff. Not jarring stiff, but noticeably stiffer than my Woodrup. The frame is made from Dedacciai Zero Tre tubing, so one would expect a really nice ride quality from this bike, Italian tubing and all. The ride quality is comparable to 4130 Cromoly steel. The frame was so stiff that I did a magnet test to see if it indeed was a steel frame. The bike feels solid, but the fork hardly has any give and doesn't shock absorb as well as my Woodrup. I'm glad I decided on using 700x25 tires on this bike, otherwise I would feel the road imperfections even more so. This is my only beef with the bike, that I could have bought a used Reynolds 531 frame for the same price or even a complete Fuji Connoisseur bike, also with Reynolds tubing.

I plan to make this bike work for me. Even if I don't do anything more than ride around for recreation, it is a good bike to cross train on. I feel the frame supports by body well and that I can keep it around for a long time and come out even if I ever want to sell it. Soon I plan on commuting on my bicycle more and it will be a nice bike to have around for that purpose. I can ride the Atala hard on the weekdays and relegate the Woodrup as my Sunday bike.

I feel like overall I really got a good deal out of this bike. $500 isn't chump change, but there is nothing out there at the moment cycling wise that can compare at that price point. Hundreds more could have been spent if I didn't have all those parts to build up the bike with. Therefore, I still feel like I built this on a budget, since I only had to come up with $200 up front. $500 all at once would have put a real dent in my finances, so I'm glad I went this route, even though I had other alternatives to choose from. Hopefully this is the beginning of many new and happy memories on my Atala.

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