1981 RaceLine Rainier

[bloo]

Well Cabers, I haven't posted anything about the 41 Schwinn lately because I have been a little distracted. You see, I bought a pile of parts on ebay. This is what's left of a 1981 RaceLine Rainier 26 inch "Trail Cruiser".

I had a new one back in 81. It looked like this.

This was a private label bike for Schucks Auto Supply of Seattle WA. All frame stampings point to Huffy as the manufacturer.

Sometime in the early 90s I loaned it to a friend, and he broke the frame. That was the end of it, but I saved the wheels because the Sun Metals rims look an awful lot like Lobdell flats, and I thought I might lace them up on the 41 someday. The real Lobdells were getting really ratty.

I cleaned the wheels up and trued them, cleaned out and regreased the freewheel, and put on some new tires.

Cheng Shin snakebellies. They still make them! Who knew? That's an original one from 81 on the right.

Now I am trolling the Internet for more parts. I wont be making this quite original, as some the original parts were of horrible quality and didn't make it through the first year. I have been trying to collect the same stuff more or less that I had on it from 82 forward, except I will probably add indexed shifting at some point. I wanted to do that back in 84 or so when it was introduced, but never got around to it.

 

[Chuck S]

Looks like a cool project. I bet you will get a kick out of riding it when done.

 

[bloo]

Thanks to some helpful cabers, some people on bmxmuseum, and Ebay the parts pile now looks like this. It is time to put it together.

 

[bloo]

One problem that faces me is the headset. The head tube is not standard sized, it is about 33.6mm, or about 1mm larger than Schwinn.

Like back in 81, I will be converting to center-pull brakes because the original side-pull calipers, which I do not have, didn't really even try to stop the bike. They were also constantly dragging one pad.

Center pulls require a cable stop up at the top of the steerer tube. The original setup used a top cup that is extremely wide and flat, and fouls the cable stop. There is not enough thread to just add a spacer. In 81 I solved the problem by using the top half of a 60s-70s style Schwinn deluxe headset. The upside-down top cup has concave sides, and allows plenty of clearance without adding any spacers. I had to shim the inside race to fit the oversize headtube. This time around, the original crown race on the fork is all rusty and brinelled, so I will be using the Schwinn deluxe lower half too.

The fork race was an interesting dilemma. The Schwinn part did not just fit, because the original race did not sit on a flat area like any other normal bike. It was clearanced or radiused on the inside, and sat on a tapered area at the outside edge. It looked even as though maybe the fork had a built-in race that had not been used (some tubular forks have that). I looked into machining the Schwinn crown race for clearance, but the material was too hard.

On closer inspection of the fork, it looked as though maybe it needed some attention first. The steerer tube was bent. After straightening the tube so that the fork ran true in the lathe, it became obvious that the radiused area that looked like a built in race was not a radiused area at all, but a booger from brazing, and a fairly uneven one at that. Also, the little tapered edge the old race had been using for support was not square to the tube. Gee. No wonder the tube bent. In the end I just had to machine the fork race area. I tried to keep a little of the radius for strength, but the braze was so much thinner on one side there wasn't much radius left. I took "before" pictures, but I can't find them.

Here is what it looked like after machining. The fork appears to have been brazed with... copper? Weird. The frame is brazed with brass as you would expect. This 1" fork never had the 1mm raised area that is supposed to lock the fork race in place, and the original just spun loose. I will make a shim to mimic the missing raised area, so the Schwinn race will fit tightly.

 

[bloo]

Here's the shim that makes the lower race fit. While I was at it, I made a little trapezoidal shim to go underneath the radiused alloy block the brake caliper mounts on. The shim was to make the surface even where the block was hitting the weld. I forgot to get a picture of that one.

Here are a couple more shims to make the headset races fit the non-standard head tube. They were made of .020" pallet strapping, then dremel sanded and filed down to fit.

The bottom bracket didn't need shims, but had this problem. Apparently when they made it, they stuck the tubes through holes, brazed and then beat the tubes out of the way. Not quite out of the way enough though. The cups were hitting, and I doubt they were ever parallel.

Back in 81, the crank broke on the first day, about 3 or four hours after the picture in the first post was taken. It snapped off at the pedal hole. I replaced it with an Ashtabula BMX crank, chrome moly and longer than what came with the bike. It was 28tpi, so I had to put in a Schwinn bottom bracket set to get it in there. I did the same thing this time around. Here's the Schwinn cups clearanced to miss those chainstay tubes.

In those days 9 bearing bottom bracket cages only fit Schwinns with 28tpi cranks, and everything else with a one piece crank, including this bike, had a 24tpi crank and took a 10 bearing cage that was slightly larger.

Apparently that has changed, nearly all one-piece-cranks are 24tpi now, but current one-piece-crank bottom bracket sets all seem to take the smaller Schwinn-size bearing. You can also get those cages with 12 balls instead of 9. I picked up a set.

I got it assembled last night, and took it out for a shakedown cruise this afternoon to adjust the brakes and derailleurs. It rode pretty good, but the seatpost wasn't tight enough and kept slipping down, and I only had screwdrivers...