About Raleigh Twenty Wiki

I ride a Raleigh Twenty. A Unisex folding bike from the nineteen-seventies. They're not exactly a 'cool' bike in the UK; 'Shoppers' were oft derided as a joke when I was in school when a BMX or a Ten-speed Equipe was the cool thing to ride. But since then, they've survived, folded, shopped, caravanned - and in great numbers. Walk along any shopping street in the UK and I defy you not to find at least one.

So why own a folding Raleigh Twenty? One day in October 2004, my brand new 'urban commuter' style bike was stolen after only four days of ownership. I was not best-pleased. Thinking about how to replace it, and clear that I didn't want to get another ‘steal me' bike, I stumbled onto a couple of cool Twenties via Bikeforums.net on the web. They looked cool. utilitarian, adaptable but most importantly not cool to Mr Thief, and not expensive. After a bit of day-dreaming and photoshopping, I opted to embark on the purchase and renovation of one of these classic ‘Shopper’ bikes instead of getting something new. The folding capability, being honest was not the big pull for me; having something unique, fun, and something simple for my first custom bike build was the clincher.

Making the upgrades involved a steep learning curve, and being a tinkerer, the bike is something that’s never really going to be finished—but it's been a whole bundle of fun to build, to ride and I still daydream about future upgrades, wallet permitting. Since it's first 'finished' state, I've been making the occasional upgrade (fixed gear, new saddle(s), bullhorn bars, hand-built track wheels) as well becoming a bit of a regular on the Folding bikes forum (http://www.bikeforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=221), where I've seen a lot of new Twenty projects popping out of the ether (or eBay, or craigslist). With that have come increasing calls from people who've seen my still-unfinished site, asking for me to flesh out the 'missing-through laziness' technical pages.

This Wiki site is hopefully the answer to that hole.

I aim to be adding a fair amount of useful information over the next few (insert realistic sounding amount of) weeks - some technical, some collated from other sources, and some merely anecdotal - but hope that you - the good Twenty fans of the internet will contribute too, adding your own experiences, factoids, hacks, links to good suppliers, experiences, photos and so forth as well as correcting / ammending / appending these pages (to err is human and I guarantee I will accidentally spread the odd nugget of disinformation) so that it can become as useful as I hope for what seems like a growing legion of enthusiasts for this sturdy little pony of a bike from Nottingham.

I've split the information into pages in the most logical way I can; some information is replicated on different pages (for reasons of context), and most internet links on the various pages should replicated and collated by type on the links page. Editing is pretty simple; click edit and you'll see the way the page is 'under the hood' and you shouldn't find it hard to add your own bits. Don't worry if you stuff anything up; the software on my server is clever enough to recall and restore earlier versions. If you want to add, but are having problems, email me and I'll happily help (email link at bottom of page).