{This is actually a guest post by Nicki about her ’51 CCM-built Garry.}

My first post on Loop-Frame Love! Very exciting! Hope everyone can put up with me. I’m a complete novice and this whole process is definitely a learning experience for me. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

As you know, I’ve acquired a 1951 CCM! She’s gorgeous and has since been christened “Winnie”.

Last weekend was our bicycling cleaning party. Myself, Deborah, and Angel took on the task of cleaning up Winnie with a little Rust-Cure and investigating her a bit more closely.

We started with some disassembly. We took off her basket (which took a bit of time. Yeesh.) and we also removed the electric-taped wiring from the generator/Miller dynamo light. The wire was pretty much shot and will definitely have to be replaced.

After removing the basket. Better picture of where my missing headbadge should go.

You can see a bit of what Winnie’s original colour is like. Seems that she had a gold colour with burgundy painted over top. My plan is to eventually restore her to the original colours.

Burgundy over gold colour.

[Editorial note from Deborah: you can also see the holes where the headbadge rivets would have been in the photo above – they helped confirm the CCM hypothesis, along with the 1951-era serial number stamped into the frame right under the seat.]

Another exciting discovery: it turns out that there are tiny reflectors in my handles! Upon realizing this, my excitement level hit an all time high – imagine being 6 years old and having streamers in your handles. That’s how I felt!

Handle with clear reflector

Deborah and Angel did some research: we had all originally assumed that the two holes in Winnie’s fender were for a mudflap and a reflector. Turns out that it’s actually for a reflector on a two holed mount. Here’s are my empty holes (look closely at the middle/bottom of my fender):

Finally, here’s a picture of my less dirty chain wheel. Rather than me attempting to elaborate and possibly mix things up, I’m just gonna quote Deborah here:

“Thinking that the lack of iconic CCM chainring means this bike was a CCM-manufactured bike with another headbadge.“

Very cool stuff! And this is only the beginning!