A lot of folks refurbish old bikes in this building—not one of us can fix them all, and we like to fix the ones we like to fix, so we are happy to do some trades. This Raleigh is definitely in the category of ones I like to fix: colorful, practical, sturdy. Room for big tires, strong brakes, good gear range. Mass produced but the capacity to be one of a kind.

In general, there’s not a lot of money in refurbishing a bike like this from the frame back up and selling it for abouts $300, so a neighbor in our space was happy to trade for a more reasonable project.

And the combination of winter slowness in the bike shop and the Cheap Bike Build Off inspired a re-imagining of this very yellow ATB sitting in our friend’s to do pile. The premise of the competition is to take $150 worth of bike+parts, and to make an awesome bicycle. That you would sell it for $300 means the 10 hours spent envisioning, building and dialing in the project yields $15/hour for your time. The most basic shop rate for bike work is $60/hour. I mean, yikes, that’s likely $100 at this point. The competition ended on February 23rd. I remembered the submission was due February 25th, so I was pretty proud of myself for getting it in on the 24th. (It snowed in Portland on 2/20 so we all lost our sense of reality a little). Anyway, I tried so hard and all I got was this sick ass bike.

on the way to see mulholland drive at cinema 21—rip david lynch. honestly i added the frame pump as i was not sure the tires would hold air.

Some highlights to the build. The 3x6 SunTour3000 drive train is a complete time capsule from 1987 or whenever: indexed 6speed thumb shifting with parts that haven’t been made since 1992. I got to use a new old stock FastGrip! 26x1.5 Avocet tire that I’ve been hanging on to for a while to match the one viable slick tire from the bike. The stem is 22.0 which was a fun learning lesson. Who knew?!