My weekend ride: ~Early 90's~ Sakae Litage Prism





SR Prism Litage on top of Twin Peaks, San Francisco October 19, 2010

   On the weekends I put away the Tempo--which is a great bike--and usually spin around on my "shiny bike".  It's a Sakae Ringyo butted aluminum frame back from way back.  I picked it up off Craigslist a few years ago, last time I learned the hard way how not to lock my bike.  You can see in the picture above that this awesome light-weight frame is here burdened with a U-lock.  It's a necessary evil if I plan to run errands in the city in the background. 

So this frame is really light for an old bike and it's got beautiful lugging.  It really stands out.  I bought it as a frame-and-fork only and have built it up Campagnolo Veloce... now I am slowly upgrading it to a Chorus group.  This is taking a long time, though, because it doesn't make a lot of sense to discard perfectly good and functioning components.

As you can see I don't have integrated shifting--parts of this bike are still in the early 90's. 

The bike was--I'm guessing--probably originally all-Suntour.  If my memory serves, these SR bikes were made by Suntour so it seems to stand to reason.  It's a guess, though and it doesn't matter at this point.

I have two of these bikes--the other one is mostly Shimano 600-Ultegra with old-time integrated shifters.  The bikes fit me pretty well and I haven't seen anything else that looks so slick and weighs so little for under $500. 

Someday I might get a new road bike, but I'm not sure of that.  I never have had a new road bike and there are so many wonderful old frames out there--we can buy high-end 70's racing frames now for comparative peanuts--that I may not ever.  I believe in recycling and I really enjoy building up old bikes. 

I will admit to having just bought a new mountain bike... I'll feature that one one day not too far off in the future.

I introduce these bikes so that "strangers" in the photographs can be recognized as family.  These Litages are great climbers and so they often get photographed at the top of hills.