Eddie Merckx Corsa – original team 7-11 colors

merckx_sidefull

Here’s my latest two-wheeled acquisition, an Eddie Merckx Corsa, in the colors of the famous 7-11 cycling team.  It is an “original model” made of Columbus TSX tubing and features the distinctive flat-topped fork bridge, instead of the sloped fork found on the 2007 re-issue of the bike.  It is not the “Extra” model which had a chrome fork and internal routing for the brake cable, however.  It has a Shimano Ultegra group on it currently, although that is most likely not the original group, based on details in the 1990 Eddie Merckx catalog.

The previous owner has already set up a Velospace page for this bike, as well as a Flickr stream.  Check out Diablo Scott’s blog for a timeline of bikes used by the 7-11 team, including some cool scans of 1989-90 era magazine articles and ads for this bike.

My first custom single-speed bike build

side view

This bike started out as a rusty old Royce Union 10-speed, a steel frame Japanese bike from the early 1970’s.  I picked it up on Craigslist as a project to learn how to work on bikes.

I joined Time’s Up, an environmental action bike co-op in NYC, who offer free lessons and a workspace with tools and instructors.  Over the course of 2 months, I put a lot of sweat and even some blood into this build.  I learned a lot (thank you Mark, Luke, and Izumi) and now the finished product rides like a dream!  The steel frame is pretty forgiving of the rough NYC streets, and the mountain-bike style handlebars give it great handling in traffic.

Full story and pics after the jump…

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