Could you re-build a bike from scratch?

[TopHatFox]

My translation of the Video: 'Yeah, so my original bike's frame broke, so I bought a similar bike on Craigslist, cleaned and stripped both bikes down to their frames in a parking lot, painted the new frame at a local park, added my own decals, and put all the pieces of the old frame on the new one, with custom parts." Love this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU9VsUMrIoI

[vexed87]

To answer thread title, I would need some new tools, particularly to get to the bottom bracket, but yeah I'd have a go, I am too much of a perfectionist to attmept a paint job myself though.

[Sclass]

duplicate post deleted.

[Sclass]

Powder coating service can be had cheap if you look around. The trick is to speak to a vendor who is doing a volume product and piggy back your bike frame on their run. You don't get to pick the color or texture but it can be free depending on who you socially engineer to do it.

The key is to be cool to the coaster and make it easy for them to rack your bike frame with all the other widgets and just shoot it. You clean and mask of course.

Big manufacturers have a lot of leverage on their vendors and they can encourage a vendor to slip your job in. My custom car and motorcycle had part colors from my various products during my big manufacturing years. What's $100 of coating when I'm doing $250k a quarter in business with a paint shop.

The key is finding someone who is doing a lot of parts.

[JL13]

My custom car and motorcycle

Do tell us more

[Ego]

Optionality. I can (and will) do more using my pre-scratched and dinged bike than I will using a bike with perfect paint. One small example where imperfection is actually an improvement. For some reason I find that I have to continually relearn this lesson in each new domain. I wish I were smarter than that.

Way back in the early 90s I did my first Rosarito-Ensenada Bike Ride. After the ride they piled the bikes in the trailer for transport back to Rosarito. It looked something like this.



The poor people with four thousand dollar bikes had to hire a taxi.

WRT building a bike.... I find that the most interesting things occur when kludging together two different bikes. It demands creative solutions like the plate he created for the rack. Good life lesson there.

[C40]

I can and I have. Well - everything except pressing in the headset bearings. I never felt it was worth buying the tool for this. I suppose I might be able to fabricate something instead of buying.

[Sclass]

My custom car and motorcycle

Do tell us more

A biodiesel Mercedes. A Harley. I can give more details offline if you're into that stuff. Google will out me if I put up photos.

[enigmaT120]

I could.

When I read the thread title I thought it meant really from scratch, and I don't think I could make a chain.