Pandapas: Snowy Weekend Projects

The weather this weekend was pretty bad... You saw the pictures of the "Blizzard of '06!" (I agree with Crayons... every big storm is a blizzard for the media).. Yup. We got about a foot of snow here in the white trash get-toe where the FortyOz2Freedoms live. The snow buried the old tires in my neighbor's front yard.. so I was happy. Mrs Forty and I stocked up on our obligatory milk and bread friday night so we wouldn't have to deal with people on Saturday. I decided to get back to the old Raleigh frame I acquired from the road-side bike shop (I trash-picked it.... Last summer I was riding the old motorcycle down to the beach and a lady was bringing this out to the curb in Richmond. She was surprised anyone would want it.) Most people would have passed it by but I'm always on the lookout for free bikes so I grabbed it.

This is what it looked like when I brought it home (bungied to the back seat of the bike):

I took off the old paint with a seriously *nasty* chemical stripper... (when the instructions say "Wear chemical resistant gloves", they mean it.. I first started using some cheesy latex gloves and felt a wicked burning... omg.. it melted the things to my hands! I went out to the hardware store to get some real gloves).

This is what the lugs looked like when they were almost free from that bland white and yellow paint... I knew this frame was going to be cool.

I spent some time thinking about what to do with this frame.... single speed, fixie, load it up with brazeons to make it a touring frame... hrmmm... I procrastinated for a loooooooooong time. The original bike used clamp- on cable guides/shifters/etc so the frame was bare.

I decided to make it into a fixed gear cruiser and not mess it up too much with braze-ons. I added a single set of water bottle mounts (I hate clamp-on water bottle cages) and that's it. I need a water bottle on my bike.... even on a quick trip to Joyals. (the beer store)

Then the frame sat some more while I thought about how to paint it. I've rattlecanned a few frames... everything from primer gray to stop rust to "fancy" single color rustoleum jobs. On this one I decided to highlight the lugs one color, then the tubes a different color. I picked metallic silver paint for the tubes, then dark blue for the lugs.

I finished the first coats on the fork last week, this weekend I had plenty of time to mask the lugs (took 6 hours!) ... now I know why custom paint jobs are so expensive!