I have the opportunity to take home one of these two retro bikes to restore/keep. Any and all advice welcome. One is a schwinn le tour l2.2 and the other only says Marinoni. I am an avid biker but worry because I’ve never had a bike with gear shifts on the frame.
by Altruistic-Egg-5162
2 Comments
take the Marinoni! Marinoni are (or at least were when this bike was made) handmade steel frames.
it’s one old Italian dude named Giuseppe Marinoni, who used to be a racer himself, who opened up his own bike shop in Montréal and has made handmade bike frames for 40 years.
the decal has come off (in your photo you can see a rectangular “clean spot” on the seat tube just below where the top tube joins) but i’m willing to bet that the sticker that was there was a Columbus SL sticker. Columbus is one of the top steel tubing manufacturers, and SL is one of their top tubing ranges. Marinoni was known to use these tubes for his frames.
He was also known for choosing good quality groupsets – Dura-Ace, Campagnolo – for his frames.
EDIT: stupid me. just saw in the photo of the shifters that this frame’s groupset is Shimano 600. the 600 range for Shimano was their upper mid-range series. it eventually became the Ultegra line. the 600 range was just below their Dura-Ace line (which was designed for professional racers) so not a bad quality groupset at all.
about having the shifters on the down tube – if you want to restore this bike to its original state, then you’ll just have to get used to them **but**, if your aim is just to get this bike into shape for yourself to enjoy (which really should be the goal here), then there’s no reason why you can’t modernize and get shifters that are more comfortable for you. you’ll just have to learn to ignore the vintage purist snobs giving you side-eye when you’re on the road.
i personally would love to make this frame a single speed build, but that’s just me.
Shifters like that seem intimidating, but they’re actually pretty easy to use–the shift lever is right where you hand goes if you lower your arm from the bars. It shouldn’t be a big movement that makes the bike feel unstable. Like anything new, you’ll have to do it a few times to get used to it, but you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly.