I bought this late '70s Austro-Daimler mixte on ebay from a local seller. She got stripped down to the frame and rebuilt as a comfort-minded townie. The frame had a couple of interesting peculiarities worth nothing: 1) a really looong wheelbase of 107.5cm, owing mostly to the stretched out effective top tube; 2) a really short head tube that placed the top of the headset something like two inches below the top of the seat lug! The long wheel base didn't bother me at all, but that seat tube-head tube differential meant that I needed a really long stem to bring those handlebars up above saddle height. Nitto Technomic!
One of the nice things about these old frames is that they tend to have ample clearance for (relatively) wide tires. Cream Delta Cruisers!
I thought I'd use this build to try out a Gyes leather saddle. Gyes is a Taiwanese alternative to Brooks. Most Gyes saddles cost about 60 or 70% of what an "equivalent" Brooks costs. This one proved extremely tough. Not at all comfortable after a few miles. Some neats-foot oil helped with that issue, but when I sold the bike, there was still plenty of breaking-in to be done.
The MAFAC Racer brakes I chose not only look cool, they also allowed me to dial in the perfect length of straddle cable so that the yoke clears the seat tube while providing ample braking power. (The original Weinmann brake, like most centerpulls, had a fixed-length straddle cable that was way too long and sapped nearly all the potential braking power from the caliper.) The reach of the brake arms was a tad shy of ideal in the rear but angling the pads downward a little proved to be an acceptable work-around.
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