1963 Huffy Sportsman Restoration

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When I was a kid, we used to visit my grandparents every summer at the beach. I have dim memories of her occasionally riding a bike, but by the time she passed away in 2015, her old bike had been sitting for many years. The above photo from 2015 shows the dirty and rusty mess it had become. When I took the photo, I had no intention of restoring the bike. But as the months passed and as I became more confident working on bikes, I found myself looking back at this photo and wondering if I could save it from the scrap heap. I also became curious about the bike itself, so I started to do some research.

It turns out that my grandmother's Huffy Sportsman bicycle was actually not a Huffy at all. As I found out from Sheldon Brown's website, Huffy was importing and rebranding bikes from Huffy in the 1960's. I later discovered that this bike is a 1963 model, which is when my grandmother bought it. Sheldon Brown's article on English 3-speeds noted that they were built to last, so I decided to find out if that was true.

Roughly a year after I took the first photo, we were back at my grandparents' house for a family holiday. I took advantage of there being a dozen or so babysitters for the kids and quietly escaped to the workshop. Using my grandfather's equally ancient tools and a can of WD40, I started taking the bike apart. The tyres were thoroughly rotten and had to be cut and peeled off the rims. There was rust everywhere, but most of it seemed to be removable using WD40 and combination of steel wool and brass brushes. My priority for that holiday, however, was to get everything apart (without breaking anything) so I could pack it up and bring it home to Germany with me. I was able to cut down a bike box from a local bike store to meet checked luggage dimensions and cram everything into it. Amazingly, United Airlines didn't bat an eye at checkin and treated it like a suitcase. By rights, they could have charged me roughly $200 for transporting it, but fortunately it didn't cost anything.

Once at home, I spent a good deal of my free time working my way through the rust. For smaller parts, I started by soaking them in a container of EvapoRust for a day or two before attacking them with WD40, steel wool, and brass brushes. Some of the parts cleaned up amazingly well. The above photo could have been before and after shots of the brake callipers as they were both completely covered in rust. Others parts, such as the rims, were too big to be soaked in my EvapoRust container, so instead I spent hours with the steel wool and brass brushes, slowly working between the spokes to expose the chromed steel.

For the frame, I did my best to remove the (mostly) light rust without damaging the paint. I previously tried painting a frame and it ended up looking horrible, so instead I simply cleaned up the frame, sprayed it with clear rust converter, and then finished it with a satin clear coat. This kept all the scratches and “character” that the bike had developed after 50+ years of use while providing it with enough protection (hopefully) to last many more. I did decide to respray the mud guards as they were in really rough condition. I managed not to screw it up and was pleased with the result.

As the rust disappeared and the preparation phase approached completion, I was trying to decide whether to simply restore the bike with as many original parts as possible, or whether to modernise it with some newer components. Sheldon Brown’s 3-speed article has a lot of useful information on how these bikes were built, including some warnings about the non-standard sizes and thread counts that were used by Raleigh at the time. Most of my other bike projects used standard sizes, which made swapping in new components more or less painless. My grandmother’s old Huffy/Raleigh was not going to be so simple to upgrade.

The bottom bracket is what made me decide to go down the restoration route. This was a traditional bottom bracket with a cottered crankset. I usually prefer swapping in a sealed bottom bracket, but that would have required swapping out the crankset for a cotterless version. I really liked the way the original crankset looked, so I decided to clean up the original bottom bracket and use some fresh bearings and cotter pins when I reinstalling it. Fortunately, the bottom bracket came out without too much effort and everything cleaned up nicely. The old cotter pins were difficult to remove as usual. I used a combination of WD-40, a C-clamp, and a socket to press them out. 

With all of the old parts cleaned and ready to go, I purchased new bearings, brake cables and housings, Kool Stop brake shoes, shifter cable, chain, tyres, and tubes. I started with the bottom bracket and crankset, then moved on to the forks and headset. Then on went the wheels with the fresh tubes and tyres. Everything came together nicely, with the only real hiccup being the shift cable. The original shift cable had nipples brazed on both ends and I hadn't thought about how I could make the new cable work with the toggle adjuster on the Sturmey Archer hub. While you can buy a new Sturmey Archer cable with the threaded toggle adjuster included, I opted to buy an adjuster shown above that clamps onto the cable.

The final step was to carefully add oil to the Sturmey Archer hub. The hub is what allowed to figure out the age of the bike. Again, thanks to Sheldon Brown's site, I learned that the year was engraved on the outside of the hubs. The 3-speed AW hub is a known to be an extremely reliable model if it's been maintained properly. Other than cleaning it up, replacing the toggle chain, and adding oil, I didn't need to do anything else for it to work properly. 

After months of late nights and weekends, my grandmother's bike was ready for its first ride in probably over a decade. As usual, the brakes needed a bit of adjustment, as did the shift points, but otherwise, it worked well and I was very pleased with the results. I did eventually bring it around to my favourite bike store, Parrots and Crows, to have the wheels trued, but otherwise it has been a reliable workhorse for the last 6+ years and is currently ridden almost daily by my wife. I wish my grandmother could have seen the result. I know she would be happy to know that it's still going strong after 60+ years.