Sometime in the 80’s my Dad bought a custom Davidson (even though he just needed a 54 square road bike) and had it built up with Shimano 600 everything (drivetrain, brakes, brake levers, hubs, headset). The bike has been around the garage most of my life, though I don’t think it has been ridden regularly since the early 90’s.
At this point, my dad can’t really ride it anymore because of his back, so he wants it to go to someone who will ride it. He doesn’t particularly care about getting money for it as long as whoever gets it isn’t going to flip it. Which rules out most of the bike nerds I know from the shoprat days.
My brother and I both can’t use it because it’s in between our sizes (I ride a 50, he rides a 58) otherwise one of us would have a sweet new road bike.
Would anyone on Tarck be interested in a 54 square Davidson in basically perfect condition? You just have to tell me you’ll keep the bike and ride it and enjoy it. This thing would probably be cool with the right parts hanging off of it.
I’ll try to snap a couple of photos tonight and confirm the measurements.
Anyone local who can just come get it from me so I don’t have to pack it up would be ideal, but that’s not a strict requirement.
Well that is my size and i am local. So maybe. Kinda depends i guess. Bike money is not abundant at the moment. I have the room but i also have a vintage trek road bike. I can promise i wont flip it but cant promise I’d ride it much as i dont ride much right now.
I’d ride the shit out of it but you’d have to ship it to me. One of my bike mentors painted at Davidson in the 80s and 90s so that’d be cool to show up next time I see him and be like hey did you paint this.
Probably not. It has something dumb on there now, like 20mm tires or something. I can’t imagine it fitting more than a 25, but I’ll try to put some air in the tires and eyeball the clearance when I am over there this evening.
Is this the thread where I can ask where Davidson went wrong?
My friend has a beautiful steel davidson dead-ender randosled that clears 28s with fenders and feels like a feather. It’s perfect, if you want rim brakes and a quill stem.
but every new Davidson I see (mostly Ti, plastic forks) just seem kind of weirdly proportioned.
Did the clientele just age and now require weird fits?
Or maybe the aesthetics don’t jive with plastic forks and disc brakes as well? But so many other people have figured out how to make nice looking Ti disc brake bieks.
From going in to the shop regularly about a decade ago, the kind of people buying those bikes are old and not flexible and they get what they want. There were some really nice looking bikes they made too but, like rodriguez, they make the bike the customer wants not the one they need. Back in the 80s the bikes were road motherfucking bikes and if you wanted something with higher bars, that’s what a quill was for.
Some bike makers get so ingrained, in my head at least, with skinny tube 70s/80s/90s style road bikes that anything deviating like fat headtubes, racks, discs, thick carbon forks, just doesn’t make sense. English and a few others bring enough personal touches that no matter what they make its definitely theirs, but those Davidsons just look like every road/gravel bike on the radavist.
