Puppy Update : #1

Over the past 3 weeks or so I have become road puppy obsessed! An interesting aspect of these bikes is that people repeatedly state in their posts "...not a lot is known about these bikes..." Or they think they were a form of Japanese paratrooper bikes in the war that got rebranded and sold post war.

I was searching through the internet and found a handful of these for sale and a few advertisements. 99% of the puppies for sale seem to be of an original style and I have found two occurrences of a version that has a different folding mechanism. I bought one. :) Since then I found another alternative folder with original paint. Really nice.

So how is the restore coming...

I am at the 90% mark of the restoration. All of the big improvements have been completed( major derusting, cleaning of all the components [minus the crank], regressing the ball bearings, trying to save the grips ) and I completed the final stages of re greasing the bearings and just finished reassembling the whole thing! [ pix below ]

I'm going to put up a very large update which will give more information on how the restoration was done with at least 50-70 pics. I am not done with it yet! Check back in a week.

Now if anyone has tires that fit this little beast I would be very happy!

 

Folding a Japanese Puppy

... no animals were injured in the writing of this blog

I am new to the world of vintage bicycle restoring, collecting, finding, "picking" and now i am a newb at blogging. One thing i am not new at is having my own opinion and enjoying writing about things that I do. :)

Since my background is engineering and computers I tend to like to classify, record, track everything. I may be a slob at home, but my virtual world is in order.

Shimura Seiki Co. Road Puppy folding bicycle
So my first blog is going to be about one of my favorite countries bicycle's. I recently purchased off of a bicycle forum [ thecabe.com ] a "Road Puppy". I really don't know too much information about the said bicycle, but i plan to gather as much as humanly possible.

I found an old ebay post that gave a description below:

You are purchasing a vintage Shimura Seiki Co. Road Puppy folding bicycle.  Unfortunately very little seems to be known about the Shimura Seiki Co. these days however we've been able to decipher that this was a civilian version of the WWII Japanese paratrooper military bike.  A very rare and unique folding bicycle, it sports dual 14" wheels, folding at the both the center of the main tube and at the handlebars (very cool design).  This model is a single speed, freewheeling bike with a coaster brake to provide the stopping power (coaster brake is still functional)....

 Two pics from the ebay posting

When I flipped through all of the pix the bike was pretty much spotless. Chrome was great, everything looked good.

So getting back to my pile of rust work in progress. Here are the before pix. As you can see, quite the bit of rust on my little runt. However, if you look closely at the side view you can see some potential red paint coming through.

So I took my little guy out of the box and set to work, cleaning, oiling, #0000 steel wool cleaning. 30-45 mins later I was able to reveal some original coloring. 

and finally one f the guys over at the vintage bicycle forum I spend way too much time in posted a pic of a puppy in what seems to be a Russian museum. I did take Russian for 3 years, but the only words i can translate are "compact velocipede"

Ad from the 1950s

Would love to hear if anyone has any information on this fine piece of folding bike machinery.