The Bike Build continued....

Time for some paint. Enough of that pee yellow/gold/rust tone. Now, I don't really know what I'm doing, so odds are it turns out pretty hideous. However, hideous would be an improvement, so here goes.


Step one: Primer

I just used plain ol' Rustoleum gray primer. I even painted right over the old paint after smoothing it out with some sand paper. Like I said, the bike was a piece of junk, so anything I do will make it better. Just leaving it a nice primer tone would have been an improvement, but I kept going.


Step two: Base coat

Nothing spectacular here. I just put a white base coat on the frame so the blue paint would show up and look better. The prettiest things in those to pics are the front end of my Trek 1000 and the back end of my friend's (who is crashing at my house for a month) mountain bike. He's got a pretty sweet ride for a mountain bike, though I'm partial to road. Speed is so much more fun than branches in your face and mud. Anyway, I flipped the stem down and really tilted the handle bars down on that trek. I feel like Dave Stoller with a lot more gears. It's great for hitting the drop bars and outrunning really fast dogs. But back to the painting.


Step three: Color

Basic Rustoleum Metallic Blue. The can said is was good for bike frames, so who was I to argue. Now you may notice the crank and pedals are still on the bike (and wrapped in electrical tape). Well, I broke a socket wrench and a socket trying to loosen the screws into the crank, plus until recently I didn't have a crank puller tool or whatever it's called. Basically, I couldn't get the crank out, so I covered it up. The pedals and crank still turned really well, so I figured I'd just leave them alone. This bike is being re-done to simply go 5-10 miles per ride on a very flat beach front rode with a bike lane. So no reason to get fancy.


That's all for now. Waiting for all the new parts to get here, then it should be some serious fun or frustration. Probably both.


Anyway, being Sunday, the Versus network showed today's Giro stage and it was amazing. Two Saunier-Duval riders finished one/two and Mazzoleni (sp) had a hell of a stage. He was in postion to take the Maglia Rosa from DiLuca, but Killer stepped it up and held on. Cunego (my pre-race pick) is hanging with DiLuca, but at this point in time it doesn't look like Killer wants to let go of that jersey without a huge fight. Good times in Italy, which is good to see considering all the doping stuff that's going on right now. It's gotten pretty bad, and Masiguy (see the link) has been posting some good opinions on the whole deal. Plus, he knows more than I do a million times over about all this stuff. I'm still a noob. (But I'm a noob with a sweet ass Masi.)