Here’s an old brochure showing the Chopper and some other Raleigh bikes. The bike seen here is missing the seat strap. I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but hopefully one of you will know. This bike is from California and the seller talks about how Great Britain didn’t get the ten-speed Choppers, just the three-speed. are you sitting down? £2,850 ($4,129)! This is a very rare bike, the ten-speed models are few and far between so if that’s what you’ve been looking for to relive your childhood, this could be an auction to check out. It’s on eBay in Crewe, Cheshire, United Kingdom with a current bid price of. The last of the Mark 2 Choppers rolled on to the streets in 1985, with Raleigh having sold over 1.5 million of them over the years and very much saving themselves from liquidation.Get your playing card and clothes pin out, this is one cool bike! This 1971 Raleigh Chopper is all original and it’s a rare one. It was allegedly tweaked to meet safety concerns raised by the government over the Mark 1 being used by more than one person at a time… a backie? No, surely not! The slightly revised Mark 2 version came out in late 1972, with a slightly shorter saddle, different gear knob and new colour schemes. Like so many pre-internet things, the exact anthology of the Chopper is a little blurry in places.įirst launched in the US, the original Mark 1 was then released in the UK in April 1969.
> Tales of a 10-speed racer: how getting a Raleigh for Christmas changed my life The Chopper anthology My original version was, after way too many years, forced out of my raised arms and traded in for a ‘more appropriate’ Raleigh Europa racing bike, and I occasionally wonder what would have happened had that not of been the case. I did pedal Mark 2 on occasion (and it did make me grin), but sadly both of these relics were lost to the evil that is a musty shed rust. Steve on a Raleigh Chopper he salvaged in the 1990sīack in the 1990s I did manage to get hold of both an old Mark 1 and a Mark 2 Chopper, which were in a state of disrepair.
It was an instant hit with young Brits, providing an ideal Christmas morning escape from the eternal replays of Rolf Harris’ Two Little Boys, Benny Hill’s Ernie & Jimmy Osmond’s Long Haired Lover from Liverpool, chants that would blight the festive mornings of the era. The Chopper first went on sale for the princely sum of £34, which is a tad over £500 in today’s money. However it came around, that mattered not to us devotees of those high-rise bars, and in April 1969 the first Mark 1 Chopper was unleashed into the post-psychedelia era when glam rock was evolving in the UK. However, Tom Karen of the OGLE Design Company has since been credited with creating the Chopper under request from Raleigh in 1968. It was long said that Raleigh’s chief designer, Alan Oakley, went to the US in search of inspiration in 1967, and that on the flight home he sketched the outline of a bike that would become the Chopper. Just how the Chopper actually came to be is still a matter of controversy. Searching for a saviour, the top brass in Nottingham had looked west to the USA and had noticed that the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a chopper-like bike, was really taking off, and so they decided to produce a rival model. That’s when the Chopper came to their rescue, and effectively those huge handlebars, the long-sprung saddle and private part-crushing gear stick would save their bacon and put Raleigh well and truly back on track.
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