I've had this, almost complete, but not quite original, Hawthorne in my bike shop for almost a year and decided to do somehthing with it. When I bought this it had already been converted to 26 inch. Which was fine, since I would have done that anyway. I had no intended direction when I started this little project. The first thing was to replace the tires. I had these basically NOS Carlisle tires that I've always wanted to use. After putting them on, the bike told me it wanted to be a klunker. With the knobby tread, what else could it be. The rest was easy and fell into place a little too well. I had the stem and bars from an old schwinn mountain bike, the Brooks seat from my Sears fixie build (which my wife rides and didn't like the Brooks seat, which is why it was available), and some new pedals. I replaced the original 7 seat post with a straight one, mainly because of a conflict with the seat. I also replaced the original sprocket with a smaller one. The original was huge and with the larger tires, could have reached 50 mph going down hill, but wasn't practical for everyday riding. Other than shining it up, it was probably the simplest, most relaxing, and enjoyable build I've done so far.
