Pop a wheelie

Cleaning the rusty wheels wasn't very difficult once they were disassembled. There was a LOT of surface rust, so I took out all the spokes, cleaned them individually with steel wool, and sprayed them black. They will look nice contrasting against he chrome rims.

The rims were also cleaned with a combination of degreasing spray, steel wool, and finished off with chrome polish before lacing with the freshly painted spokes. New DURO whitewall tires were purchased online from a bike shop in California called Junky Rusty Bikes. They were $10 a piece (tire size: 26" x 1 3/8"). Shipping to Ontario was reasonable, although still more than the cost of the tires (~$25).

They look great installed on the rebuilt rims!

Working with a stripper

It came time to start removing all the old paint from the bicycle and preparing the frame, fenders and chain guard for a fresh coat of paint (or 5)...I used lacquer stripper available at Home Depot for this. It works great, but it will eat your skin, so wear protective gloves, work in a well ventilated area, and have a few old toothbrushes handy for application of the stripper...it will eat those too. The chain gaurd was the first to be cleaned, followed by the frame and the fenders.

Someone decided to brush paint the original white fenders with black paint, while they were still mounted on the bike. This was done very poorly, and meant that every component had globs of paint that required stripping.

The fenders had many little dimples in the sheet metal that have accumulated over the years of use that were much too difficult to hammer out because of the many contours on the fender. Instead, I opted to fill them in with a little auto body filler. The pictures below show the fender after stripping, sanding, priming (with red-oxide primer), spraying with black Tremclad, sanding again, and touching up with auto body filler (white stuff on the fenders in the picture). I sprayed the fenders first with primer, then with black Tremclad prior to sanding. Then, I sanded them and was easily able to see the exact size and shape of the indentations (some are still visible here). This was a very long and tedious process because after filling, I had to spray and sand again to verify the fenders were smooth. The work is definitely worth it because when it is sprayed with gloss black paint, and has a mirror smooth finish, the last thing you want to see is a glaring dent.

Seat is finished!

Ok, so I got really busy with putting the bike together, AND I got a job, and that means I didn't have the time to post anything new to the blog. A comment posted by a visitor to my blog reminded me that I should in fact post pictures of the remainder of the build. So the time stamps on the posts will be wrong (The complete bike was completed in time for my girlfriends birthday in July 2010). Anyways....

I got the seat back from the local tailor who used his industrial sewing maching to stitch the vinyl seat cover to the plastic seat form. He did not do a great job of it, although admittedly he was trying to stitch through plastic. Anyways, in order to cover up the ugly stitch marks (they were truly ugly), I had to glue on a fabric strip over top. This is the result...not bad for a first seat rebuild!