2023 New Raleigh Chopper: Iconic Bike Relaunched!

I do hope that the white strip on the saddle still says ‘This bicycle is not designed to carry passengers’ 🙂

I bought a Mk2 for about £25 in 1993, before they were cool, but it got stolen from outside a pub in Bath… These look pretty good, though I wonder what the upper inseam length is for them? And how long until the e-Chopper launches, eh?

This is my mate Lou’s fully restored original Chopper. Her dad bought it her for her birthday as a kid in the 70’s and after she’d ridden it for years it was left to gather dust and slowly rust away in their shed over the decades.

Unbeknown to her, her dad had taken it upon himself to strip it down, completely restore it to essentially brand new condition and he wheeled this absolutely pristine beauty into the pub as her present on her 50th birthday. Theres a lot of love gone into this. 🙂

BBC Breakfast this morning – a proper pisstake of a report: “boy’s toys” and all that nonsense. Quite pathetic piece of journalism I thought

I lived/worked in Morocco for a few years – I was in the middle of absolutely nowhere driving past a few ‘houses’ when I saw a kid on an absolute mint Mk1 chopper. I tried buying it but my Berber/Arabic wasn’t good enough. Very few bike shops and rarely saw any decent bikes let alone a random 40+ year old chopper in good condition.

I see they’ve kept the weight of the original as well – 40lbs. Chopper and Grifters (especially) were always “stout”

Weren’t Grifters made out of leftover bits of railway bridges?

£950! They’ll sell them all though, mainly to insufferable buffoons.

I expect you’ll find them all in Hoxton and Shoreditch 😉

I do wish Raleigh would move on from their desperate “look, we were really cool on the 70’s” throwback stuff and actually concentrate on making some half decent bikes.

They’ve properly lost their way. It’s a microcosm of Britain encapsulated right there – look, we were cool and edgy and did some good stuff but now we’re a bit lost and don’t know where we stand in the world.

That said, their e-cargo bikes are very good. 🙂

Tomahawks were where the real front wheel wobble was at.

No mention of the remake (with twist shifter?) from a few years back?

@crazy-legs

Very much this. I’m sure they do all right out of these nostalgia runs for people who want ornaments but I wonder if there is any realisation that because they produced a series of daft BSOs like the Chopper, vektar, etc. they contributed to the idea that bikes are kids toys and not serious grown up modes of transport?

Perfect example of fashion over function. My cousin lent me their’s BITD and I nearly couped the thing. I was used to a Puch Mini Sprint that actually went round corners. First corner on the Chopper and it washed out as there’s hee haw weight on the tiny front wheel. Clearly designed for wheelies and not much else. Weighed a ton too. Dreadful things, best avoided.

Kids of the 70s didn’t give a shit about handling – wheelies and skids where the top priority!!!

Longest skid and longest wheelies gave you bragging rights.

We were rock ‘ard back then!! 🙂

@chipps – The battery could take the form of the saddle. Nice wee heated seat. What could go wrong?

No mention of the remake (with twist shifter?) from a few years back?

That would be because they were shockingly bad. I remember grown men drooling over them in the bike shop I worked at when they announced them, we had a display one to gather rup pre-orders. Had a few who wanted them left in the box, unopened presumably as an investment. All I really remember of them though is that people were disappointed it had a twist shift rather than the ball-destroyer of the original and that the seat was a two-piece design. We had many issues with poor chrome flaking off and really poor quality paint on them too. There’s a reason the re-release models don’t command anywhere near the price of the original ones.

I blame having a Tomahawk for my inability to ride a bike until I was about eight…

I never had any of the above. I had a Commando. For some reason I was always envious of my mate with his gloss black and hologram graphic grifter.

EDIT – just googled, don’t know why, the Grifter looks shite now, having said that the Commando looks more shite.

I do wish Raleigh would move on from their desperate “look, we were really cool on the 70’s” throwback stuff and actually concentrate on making some half decent bikes.

They make a rather good range of ebikes, which aren’t too expensive and sell very well. You may have missed them because they aren’t MTBs or gravel or whatever, just normal bikes. (That sounds judgemental – it’s not meant to be, but I think that Raleigh are quietly doing a decent job at the moment.)

https://www.raleigh.co.uk/gb/en/electric-bikes/

Its a no from me, pointless bike. As above though, they’ll sell them all though….

Soon to be seen adorning air cooled VW campers on hard shoulders and AA recovery trucks across the land!

My Tomahawk was the cause of my first broken bone (in my left hand) as it wheelied up and I couldn’t stop it.

I went from that to a bright orange Mk.1 Chopper and absolutely loved it. All my mates were envious and it kept me going for years, even had one of those cable speedos running off the front wheel. It was an absolute death trap, seeing how fast you were going while trying to steer it.
Then the handlebars snapped at the clamp (that was a little painful) and it got replaced with a Sun GT10XL 10 speed racer, in metallic blue. I went everywhere for years on that racer, from school to mates houses and onto the new experience of visiting girlfriends and it never put a foot wrong. Then some scumbag stole it 🙁

Didn’t seem to matter at the time as I had discovered girls instead and they kept me occupied for a while. 🙂