Once upon a time, there was a kid with a dream...lol. Just kidding. Seriously though, I've always been a biker (the kind that you have to power yourself). I got this Redline bike when I was younger and I loved that bike. When I went off to college, I inherited my dad's mountain bike because I wanted to have a means to get around campus quickly. Little did I know that I would spend the next four years living on that bike. We went everywhere on those things and trashed them on the trails. The bike was originally a yellow Schwinn (not my favorite color). So, I decided to change the color. This was my first stab at doing anything maintainance related on a bike. It amounted to taking off the wheels and taping plastic bags over the pedals handlebars and chain and spray painting straight onto the original paint with no clear coat(yeah...lesson learned).
Anyway, after all the use and absue I put that bike through it ended up looking like a confetti bike (bright blue topcoat, bright yellow original coat, and a black base coat). Needless to say, I decided to redo the paint job. After having to do minor maintainance over the years, I was a little better prepared this time. I took the handlebars/cables, chain and derailleurs off prior to painting. For actually painting, I used a paint stripper to take off all of the coats that had been on there and then sprayed on a few coats of silver, followed by a design I came up with, followed by a few coats of clearcoat. This is my background in bike restoration.
This leads me to the commuter bike. I found the bike abandoned at the apartment complex that my friends lived at so I decided to adopt it and clean it up. I had moved farther away from campus and I was looking for a better way to commute. It was in very bad shape and in need of a lot of tlc which led to my first attempt at restoration.
The bike is an early 1970's Raleigh Rampar R-1. It had dual brake levers and tension shifters. The handlebar tape was dry rotted and the seat was absolutely destroyed. You can see some of this in the top gallery. My initially strategy was to remove the surface rust and clean up the gears, replace the chain and shifter/brake cables, and replace the handlebar tape and seat. It also needed new tires. I was really just interested in getting it running with for the least monetary input. Well, I replaced the cables, tires, and chain, and cleaned the frame up a bit. At this point, the bike was ridable so I took it a few places and absolutely hated how it rode. I wasn't use to the balance on the skinny tires and the tension shifters were pretty crappy. So, I ended up just stashing it behind my apartment and didn't give it another thought.
Well, obviously I did give it a second thought...As dumb as this sounds, I got the urge to take another stab at the bike after watching the movie Premium Rush, which as an aside is a really good flick that you should check out. Anyway, the movie is about a bike messenger in New York. His bike was a fixed gear with no brakes, and something about that caught my interest. As I said most of what I didn't like about the bike in its previous form was the bad shifting and braking control. So, the idea was to build the bike to be like the one from the movie, with my own aesthetic tastes.
My first step was to figure out how I wanted the bike to function. As I mentioned above, I was pretty set on a fixed gear with no external brakes. But other than that, I really didn't know what I wanted. Eventually I decided on a minimalist approach. This bike was going to have exactly everything it needed and nothing it didn't. So, my parts list literally became:
That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. So the next step was to assess what I already had on the old bike that would be salvagable. Obviously the frame was going to be used. I'll get back to the wheels in a minute. The seat was a disaster so I decided to trash it, and the seatpost was designed to work with old seats so it would have to go as well. Again I'll get to the handlebars in just a bit. The bottom bracket was solid (actually very minimalist in and of itself) and finding a replacement for it would have been difficult to impossible anyway, so it made the list. The crankset and crank arms were actually in pretty good condition. They were metal (like almost everything on that bike) so I decided that I could just clean them up and paint them so they too made the cut. The pedals were an old style and very skinny. I had the steel pedals I took off of the Redline bike I mentioned in the backstory so I decided to use those instead of the originals.
So that just leaves the wheels and the handlebars. As you can see in the pics in the old gallery, the handlebars on the bike were traditional drop style. I knew that I didn't like that style from previous experience, so I chose to go with the bullhorn style. I was looking online for different handlebars to buy when I came across an article that mentioned cutting down drop handlebars and flipping them over to create bullhorn bars. So of course I had to try it, and I was completely satisfied with the results. The wheels on the other hand were a tougher beast to tackle. My original plan was to keep the wheels I had and repurpose them. I looked into replacing the back axle but eventually decided that it would be too much extra work to find compatible replacement parts and by that point I could have just bought an entirely new set of wheels. So with that decision made, I looked for new wheels. I chose to go with a flip-flop hub (one side of the axle has a fixed gear sprocket on it and the other has a single speed freewheel). This allows the rider to go with a fixed gear (i.e. the pedals spin no matter what when the back wheel is turning) or with a freewheel (i.e. if you stop pedaling the back wheel keeps spinning). With that, I found a set of Retrospec wheels that had a flip-flop hub and were all black, which would end up defining the style of the whole bike.
In keeping with my minimalist approach, I wanted the design of the bike to be as simple and clean as possible. Since I found the black rims, I decided to go with a black and white design. I chose to make the frame white and everything else, I would paint black. This led to me searching for a black seat / seatpost and figuring out which parts needed to be painted white and which black. Another design choice I made was to keep the chainring guard on the crankset. I figured since I'd be using this as a commuter bike, I didn't want to get my pants messed up. Because the bolts holding the guard on were originally designed to go through three chainrings, I thought I was going to have to replace those, but it turns out that you can still use them, they just stick out a little bit on the inside of the chainring (not a bid deal...). Finally, came time to decide on a logo. As I said, I'd done a logo on my mountain bike before and thought it came out really good, so I wanted to do something similar again. However, this was going to be a relatively simple design compared to that one. Initially, I wanted to do a big logo on both sides of the main tube and then do this signature kind of thing on the rear wheel fork. The big logo would be "NUROTIK" in a bold, clean, sans font while the signature would say "wolftrax" in some fancy script/graffiti style. However, this didn't really come together because the back tube was too small and the design to intricate to deal with easily and the front tube design only ended up on one side (things to maybe improve on next time...).
The deconstruction phase was probably the most difficult part of the project. One plus was knowing that I wasn't going to need many of the parts to put back on the bike so I didn't have to spend as much time trying to document where everything needed to go back. However, lack of specialty tools and "supposed" lack of some regular tools led to some hiccups in the deconstruction. For one thing, I was working with my limited set of tools and thought that I didn't have a socket/open close set small enough to remove some of the cable holders on the frame (obviously I did but they were in my closet forgotten about...). So, I ended up stripping one of the bolts and had to buy a hack saw to cut it off. On the other hand, I ended up using the same hack saw to modify the handlebars so I guess it worked out okay. Another problem I ran into was the dust caps on the ends of the crank arms. Modern bikes usually have caps that snap into the hole and can be pried out with a screwdriver. Attempting this on my bike proved disastrous because the caps it used were threaded into the crank arm. I virtually destroyed the caps attempting to remove them but thankfully didn't do any damage to the threads which would have made removing the crank arms from the axle very hard. Other than that, and forgetting that the left side of the bottom bracket is reverse-threaded, the deconstruction was fairly straightforward.
The most time consuming part of the project was painting. The first step was to strip the original paint and sand the frame. The stripper I used wasn't as effective as ones I've used before. I'm not sure if this was because of the paint that was used on this bike or if it was a lesser grade stripper but it definitely took a lot more work to remove the old paint. The sanding took a very long time because the frame has a lot of difficult places to reach and there was a lot of surface rust on the frame. Eventually, I gave in and bought a dremel to do some of the heavier lifting (again a hardware purchase that foreshadowed later events...see the reconstruction section). Once the frame was finally sanded, I applied a primer coat. The next step was to apply the color coats. This step is what took the most time. Because of school schedules and trying to do the painting in the winter, there was only about a 3 hour window in the afternoon where it was warm enough to paint. And because the paint I was using required a less than 2/ greater than 48 hour recoat time I could only put on a couple coats a week. I eventually chose to go with 5-6 color coats with 4-5 clear coats. However, the logo on the frame added another 4 color coats effectively doubling the time required to finish the frame. The clear coats did not require as much recoat wait time so that went much quicker.
The logo process actually ended up being pretty involved (which is why I chose to only put it on one side). Initially, I taped the tube and then taped the stencil I printed out over that. I tried to cut out the stencil, and thereby cut out the tape as well, with a box cutter. This didn't work at all, and I actually scratched the base coats underneath the tape! After respraying to fix the scratches, I tried a different approach. I cut out the stencil by itself using an exacto knife. Then I layed a piece of tape on a piece of cardboard and traced the design onto the tape. After removing the stencil, I was able to cut out the design in the tape and then move the tape from the cardboard to the frame. I think the stencil came out well, but the paint got under the edges a little which caused the final product to look a little blurry. However this effect gave it a grainy look which actually looks pretty neat so I'm happy with it.
Reconstruction began as a relatively simple process. I did make the mistake of forgetting to take notes/pics of how the fork stack went together, but fortunately they only went one way so it wasn't terribly difficult to put together. Greasing the bearing and not getting grease everywhere was probably the biggest challenge there. The next step was to put the handlebars on. Then, I reconstructed the bottom bracket and crank assembly. One big problem I faced here was the bolts used to hold the chainring guard on were painted and cleared and therefore were significantly bigger than they were originally, so I had to scrape most of the paint off of the actual threads and casings so that they would fit through the slots and into the nuts. Other than that, this sections was pretty easy to finish. The next step was to put the wheels on. This was the biggest hurdle in reassembly for me. So going back for a second, I really didn't have a way to know what size wheels I needed (wheels from the early 1970's are hard to find info on...). So when I bought the wheels I was basically betting on the fact that the tires I bought for the old wheels would fit on the new ones. So, when the wheels came in I tested the rear wheel to see if the wheel would fit (note...i didn't actually put it on the axle just layed it on to see if the gap was large enough). You can probably see where this is going. When I went to put the front wheel on I encountered two problems: 1. the width of the wheel was actually larger than the fork by maybe a centimeter. This I easily adjusted for by pulling the fork legs apart enough to slip on the axle. And 2. the axle diameter was larger than the brackets on the fork. This I fixed by grinding out the brackets with my dremel (Not the most glamorous solution but it worked). I had to do the same thing to the back brackets as well. After that, the rest of the assembly process went pretty straightforward.
I had a lot of fun with this project and I'm sure I could write a whole book on all of the experiences I had doing it. Its been about two weeks since I finished it and I've only had the chance to ride it once because of weather, but it rode really well. I will definitely need to get used to the fixed gear/no brakes thing but hopefully that will just come with time. Otherwise, its a blast to ride and looks great. One concern I have is that the paint chips really easily (including the clear coats). So, I'm thinking next time I'll look into some more involved painting methods (i.e. different paint type, powdercoating, electrostatic coating, etc.). If you have any questions about any of the work I did, send me an email at wolftrax84@yahoo.com. -SGO