It can be a headache. Picking one front gear and one back gear and never changing again..thus a single speed ….is much less trouble
Cross58Crash on
Less of a headache than the French drivetrain that’s probably on it now.
dantez84 on
Depends on your experience; if you know your way around a bike and have tools around, it’s a great project!
Massive_Fudge3066 on
Good place to start. The angled dropout lets you adjust the chain length, sort of, you may even have a screw on block. Grab a spanner, hit up YouTube and have at it
MaksDampf on
It is fairly easy if you have a bit of mechanical experience.
I’d personally not do it, because it is a nice tourmalet in good condition. I’d ride the hell out of it as a road bike, get a dropbar, get some frame cable stops and a shifter clamp to move the shifters to stem mounted. But thats just my personal taste, as i already had singlespeeds ten years ago and i now consider it a fad trend that is beyond its peak and not actually cool anymore.
But if you still wanna do it, go ahead. First remove both the shifters and derailleurs.
Then remove the large chainring from the front crank. The small one should be 42T which is perfect for a singlespeed. Peugeot used some crazy BCDs sometimes (also some nervar cranks afaik) so don’t buy any new chainrings before you measure it precisely.
Don’t get a new crank! Its a can of worms to change cranks on these. You don’t want to source rare french BBs to fit a different crank or get into the differences of JIS vs ISO square taper and axle lengths for chainline correction. If the BB and crank is fine, keep it like that!
If this is a freewheel rearhub, you can remove that with a freewheel nut in a vise and replace it with a singlespeed freewheel which can be had for as low as 5$. It may be a helicomatic hub though, in which case i would just get a new/used rearwheel. Most road rearwheels are now 130 or 135mm, but your frame only takes 126mm wide rearwheels. If you buy a classic shimano cup and cone rearwheel it is possible to modify the spacers and Axle though to make a 126mm rearwheel out of a 135mm one. It is nice to trim down the spacers on both sides by 4.5mm if you have a lathe, but you can also just replace them with a stack of 10mm washers too.
For chain tensioning, you can get a single pulley chain tensioner or just use the old derailleur again and fix it in place by replacing the shifting wire with a piece of spoke. You might be lucky that the chain fits by chance within the dropouts without a tensioner though. Normal chains have 25.4mm segments, so because it goes in a circle, thats just 12,7mm difference back and forth in the dropout. If the dropout has this 12,7mm of space, you might be good to go without a tensioner. Also there are single link chains, but they are heavy af. I’d instead experiment with different toothed frewheels, like a 17T, 18T, 19T. This essentially halves your chain length steps to 12,7mm (6.35 back and forth) the same way as the single link chain does. Always use a new chain.
SpaceThemed on
Do it! Keep the reflectors! Brooks saddle. Tan grips. New tires. Done. Easy. Will be perfect for 20 more years.
6 Comments
It can be a headache. Picking one front gear and one back gear and never changing again..thus a single speed ….is much less trouble
Less of a headache than the French drivetrain that’s probably on it now.
Depends on your experience; if you know your way around a bike and have tools around, it’s a great project!
Good place to start. The angled dropout lets you adjust the chain length, sort of, you may even have a screw on block. Grab a spanner, hit up YouTube and have at it
It is fairly easy if you have a bit of mechanical experience.
I’d personally not do it, because it is a nice tourmalet in good condition. I’d ride the hell out of it as a road bike, get a dropbar, get some frame cable stops and a shifter clamp to move the shifters to stem mounted. But thats just my personal taste, as i already had singlespeeds ten years ago and i now consider it a fad trend that is beyond its peak and not actually cool anymore.
But if you still wanna do it, go ahead. First remove both the shifters and derailleurs.
Then remove the large chainring from the front crank. The small one should be 42T which is perfect for a singlespeed. Peugeot used some crazy BCDs sometimes (also some nervar cranks afaik) so don’t buy any new chainrings before you measure it precisely.
Don’t get a new crank! Its a can of worms to change cranks on these. You don’t want to source rare french BBs to fit a different crank or get into the differences of JIS vs ISO square taper and axle lengths for chainline correction. If the BB and crank is fine, keep it like that!
If this is a freewheel rearhub, you can remove that with a freewheel nut in a vise and replace it with a singlespeed freewheel which can be had for as low as 5$. It may be a helicomatic hub though, in which case i would just get a new/used rearwheel. Most road rearwheels are now 130 or 135mm, but your frame only takes 126mm wide rearwheels. If you buy a classic shimano cup and cone rearwheel it is possible to modify the spacers and Axle though to make a 126mm rearwheel out of a 135mm one. It is nice to trim down the spacers on both sides by 4.5mm if you have a lathe, but you can also just replace them with a stack of 10mm washers too.
For chain tensioning, you can get a single pulley chain tensioner or just use the old derailleur again and fix it in place by replacing the shifting wire with a piece of spoke. You might be lucky that the chain fits by chance within the dropouts without a tensioner though. Normal chains have 25.4mm segments, so because it goes in a circle, thats just 12,7mm difference back and forth in the dropout. If the dropout has this 12,7mm of space, you might be good to go without a tensioner. Also there are single link chains, but they are heavy af. I’d instead experiment with different toothed frewheels, like a 17T, 18T, 19T. This essentially halves your chain length steps to 12,7mm (6.35 back and forth) the same way as the single link chain does. Always use a new chain.
Do it! Keep the reflectors! Brooks saddle. Tan grips. New tires. Done. Easy. Will be perfect for 20 more years.