Watsonia Bike / Gipps Street Ramp

 

Top of Gipps St ramp, 2025

Ramp, 2025

Steps 2005 - 

a hard slog!

Ramp and Watsonia

Positron gears!

As found

Ice cream lid or similar as chain guard. This proved to be highly deciduous and didn't last long.

Front carrier arrangement

Super aero shelf brackets!

 

 

Note: this was pasted early 2026 about events mid December 2025.

Hi

Late last year I had been working hard at home on some presentations, and hadn’t gone outside the front gate for most of the day. An evening walk was just the thing to cheer me up, and on the way I found an abandoned old bike I quite liked which was a bonus. The bike was a Watsonia stepthrough and looking at it closely, it had some interesting cobbled together features which I quite liked. Recumbent riders aren’t the only ones to bike hack!

One hack was the basket supports, made from steel shelf parts. Certainly very aero, but when you consider the basket as well as its supports it’s not so aero! The other was the chainguard which is an old ice-cream-tub lid or similar. As well the bike had Shimano Positron gears, a system more than 40 years old that uses a push / pull cable instead of the pull and spring return which has become standard. But this example works fine! I ended up taking this one home although I already have way too many bikes and want to sell some.

There are a few Watsonia bikes listed on the net and they seem to come from Watsonia Cycles, a shop which David J is nostalgic about in his blog. Also a Watsonia track bike is revered for its style.

                 Normally it would have taken weeks to get round to fixing this one as I have a queue of bikes to finish. But I felt like getting out and about on something new, and was able to measure up and find a seat post, find a seat, and pump up the tyres all before going to a caf for my regular breakfast meetup with my friend Simon. After the caf, I rode off to inspect the latest and greatest bike infrastructure in our area, the Gipps Street cycling ramp. Despite the age, steel rims, the rear brake not working, lack of maintenance and manky tyres, the Watsonia bike went well. 

The new bike path is quite a revelation for me. To head south along bike paths used to involve a full-stop-and-bike-lift up 2 flights of stairs, and along roads involved riding along and turning right from busy Johnson St. Now it’s easy and safe to use the bike path to head south. The path is gently sloping and wide, and I have now ridden it twice, once to actually get somewhere. I was in some of the early protests about the old steps and local bike activists Yarrabug have written about the history of the new steps here.

                 Now I plan to pass on the Watsonia bike as is but with new 27” tyres and the rear brake fixed. If I upgraded the steel wheels for 700C aluminium ones (the sizes are quite close) I think I could stuff up the Positron gears and nice gear ratios - I’d like to move back to n-1 bicycles fairly soon. See you out there on the Gipps Street ramp!