Spare Parts Pre-War Hawthorne Project

I like old Hawthornes. Over the last couple of years I've collected about half-a-dozen of them without really trying. They seem to find me. I definitely have more older Schwinns and a few coveted Elgins but there's something about the Hawthornes that speaks to me. I also really like old cars. I was trying to explain the 'Hawthorne thing' to a car buddy and equated it to someone that liked old Plymouths. There's nothing really flashy about them but they're reliable, respectable and usually pretty cheap.

A few months ago a friend picked up my most recent Hawthorne for me. My friend is a former professional bicycle mechanic of twenty years and a passionate collector of old junk. He is also a wicked enabler of my bicycle hoarding and I couldn't be happier about that. He found this bike at a thrift-type store near Duluth Minnesota for $20. He bought it and hauled it back home for me thinking it was actually an Elgin. Once I gave it a closer look and did a little research I discovered that the bike (at least the frame) is actually a 1941 Hawthorne.

The bicycle was an amazing collection of mis-matched parts. From what I could tell the frame may have been the only original pre-war Hawthorne part on it. Someone thought that the fork was possibly off a Colson? The front wheel has an early Schwinn hub. The sprocket looks to be a '60's Murray built (Hawthorne). The seat is some awful banana seat unit that may have originally accompanied the bars. Who knows? It was a real.....project someone had compiled.

Once I discovered it was actually a pre-war Hawthorne it made me a little sad. I currently have no shortage of bicycle projects but I decided to pick at this one a bit in my spare time to try to give it back of some of its original dignity.

This is the photo my friend sent me the day he bought it.

Good luck with it, anything you do will be an improvement.

Once I made the decision to tear into it I began stripping it down. The first thing I did was to pass of the seat to a friend and to take it down to the bare frameset.



For grins I even tried it with a repop tank I mistakenly purchased but the fit wasn't the greatest.



At that point I began to get a little curious about the paint job. The thick gold paint covering the entire frame was obviously not original to the bike. On a whim I decided to take a little 0000 steel wool dipped in Goof Off to see what I might uncover. Around the steerer tube I started to see remains of some white scallops coming through. I was I intrigued so I made the decision to invest the time and effort into stripping the gold paint from the bike.



Anyone that's done this can attest to what a big job this can be. I think I probably had about six hours into just scrubbing and stripping the paint to get all of the layers off. The weird thing was it looked like it had probably been painted at least three times since it was new. Below the gold it was red and white before hitting the original dark navy paint.

Finally it was done.



Once it was stripped down to what was left of the original paint I hit it with a buffer with some rubbing compound to see what would happen. It really shined up the paint (and bare metal) nicely and I liked the look of it. At this point a friend persuaded me to hit with some glossy clear coat. I was unsure at first but decided to try it as I really loved the freshly buffed shine of it. I regretted it almost immediately and the next day took some 1000 grit and sanded most of it back off.

Alienbaby17 said:

At this point a friend persuaded me to hit with some glossy clear coat. I was unsure at first but decided to try it as I really loved the freshly buffed shine of it. I regretted it almost immediately and the next day took some 1000 grit and sanded most of it back off.

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I'm with you: no clear coat. Had good results with this: Try a buff with Flitz followed by a wax. You'll have to really get after it to remove the Flitz from the rust, so try not to get too much on the areas where the paint is gone as it leaves a residue. Johnson paste wax or similar, let it get good and dry before a vigorous buff with fresh all-cotton towel.

Being a bit of 'junk enthusiast' has some advantages. For one, others of the same breed tend to look out for your interests and occasionally donate to your sickness. I acquired a bit of a score when the owner of my work dropped off a nearly complete, what I presume was a late 50's to mid-60's Huffy ladies bike for me. Because the bike had pretty much no collector value I didn't feel too badly about stripping it for parts. This was good because I needed to find a useable fork for the Hawthorne and I didn't want to spend any money.

In the background of my photos you can see a lot of older cars and trucks. I rent part of an old shop with some friends where we build old cars for fun. Two of the guys I share the shop with are former bicycle mechanics. Both of them have been cleaning house and left me several donations for my bicycle projects including some mystery cruiser bars which I grabbed and threw into the mix.

Although I've allocated pretty much zero budget for this project and am putting it together with mostly spare parts and donations, I still wanted to make it look semi-cohesive. I sandblasted the old Huffy fork and decided to try to match the patina of the original bike. I hit it with some navy blue rattle can and put it onto the bike with the donated cruiser bars to get a feel for it.

Despite my desire to keep this a cheap and quick project I really felt like the bicycle needed to go back to a skip tooth setup. I dropped $15 and bought an original Hawthorne sprocket that was in pretty decent shape. Unfortunately, before I even had a chance to install it I found a complete Hawthorne skip tooth sprocket, crank and pedals in my collection. Oh well. I put the sprocket I bought on the crankset I found in the basement and was good to go once I spent 30 minutes making some minor tweaks to the chainring.