An Unrideable Peugeot HLE
The Peugeot HLE was owned by my brother in law from new, but a few years ago the rear chain stay snapped on it and the bike was ruefully stored in his shed. I sent him the quite striking replacement for it, a repainted frameset with Look decals but likely to be something else. I have never seen a Look bike like this before, the decals are the stick-on types, but it’s definitely French.
Building the Bike
Time passed, my brother in law never got round to building the Look frame, and both the frameset and bike ended up accumulating dust in the shed. So a few weeks ago I asked my brother in law if I could finally take ownership and build it, two years on from when I sent it to him. It’s a cool looking frame ( here is a real Look frame from the ‘90’s ) and as I’ve been without a bike during this lockdown, what could be better than building this machine to get out on the quieter roads?
Problems:
- Seat post size: For some bizarre reason, Peugeot made the seat tube size 24mm, which is really thin. I had to guess the correct size, which ended up being 26.4mm.
- Superbe crankset removal: very difficult!
- Down tube shifter bosses: these were slightly too thick on the Look frame, so I had to file donwn the square bracket that fits on them.
- Down tube shifters loose: tightening these onto the bosses wasn’t possible with the original set of washes; I needed to add an extra washer on each side.
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