Happy Holidays!

Woo Hoo! I'm home for the holidays. My family is pretty much the bomb so i'm really looking forward to some R&R. un-lucky for me it was a whopping -20 with windchill yesterday, and it doesn't show promises of warming up much. Lucky for me i got a week trial gym membership, some good books to read, plus all the digital entertainment my heart could desire here @ home, so i'm prepared to weather this out...

On tap for the vacation:
-Quality Time with the Fam
-A family trip to Chicago
-Always some Illinois Basketball games (My dad and brother are HUGE fans)
-some spin classes (to keep my legs in shape)
-Plenty of food for eating
-and a trip to S.C. to watch Walt and Haley get hitched.

I'll be back in CO in the new year, I hope everybody has a restful and meaningful holiday season!
Peace.
mike

P.S. if you're on facebook you should check out our sweet hike we did on Friday

Before and After

Yo blog-o-sphere

So i got this bike off of Craigslist for $20 with the original intention of giving it to my bro for Christmas; but i found out it was too small and it'd be pretty expensive to ship it to Illinois.. So instead i fixed it up for a friend who had her bike stolen a couple of months ago. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. Special thanks to sean for showing me how to re-build the headset and bottom bracket, william for teaching me how to draw flames, and jessie for helping me choose colors, and iris for getting the sweet basket!


I feel like this is where most people can stop reading, but if you ever care to try a project like this here's what I did and what I learned:

1. First i stripped the bike of all its parts and threw them in a big box. You'll need special tools to remove the bottom bracket and headset or you might damage them. My friend sean at the bike shop helped me with this for free.


2. I sanded the frame, primed it, and painted it. I put the flames on my covering the frame in masking tape and then cutting out where i wanted to paint flames. I finished the paint job with a protective enamel clear coat


3. Now comes the rebuild. For a singlespeed or fixed gear, you have two options:
   1. You can try keeping the old wheel, remove the cassette, and put spacers and a single cog on there (i did this on my singlespeed, and it works fine)
   
   
   2. Or you can get a new wheelset, either singlespeed of fixed gear. This is the route i went with this bike because the old wheelset was shot
   
   
   
   
4. It's important that you have good chainline and chain tension. the chain tension on this bike was easy because of the horizontal dropouts. If you don't have horizontal dropouts, you can play with gear ratios and use a "half link" to try to get the tension right. For chainline, you might have to change the bottom bracket you're using. I got lucky and was able to get by by shifting the large chainring from the outside to the inside of the crank bolts.


5. I also replaced some clutch parts (seatpost, grips, added the basket, and threw on a set of old mtn tires i had laying in the garage).

and Whamo, a finished bike! i'm a little jellous i can't cruise around on this baby!