After a good time at Lars Anderson’s bike show and swap meet last Sunday I had to get down to business prepping some bikes for paint. Stripping the parts off of the really big bike, the really small bike (that I can be seen here trackstanding) and the average american male sized cross bikes both needed to be stripped of parts and paint, #3 in for repair needed some final touches and prep for paint and my track bike needed the scale resultant of riding it for months sans paint removed all while still trying to get my mtb frame finished.
- frame stack
It was a busy week of skipping out of the 9 to 5 paid job to go down to the basement and do the kind of thankless labor that I always forget to account for in the building of a frame. Paint prep takes forever, is dirty, and tedious but by friday I had 5 frames ready to ship down to my powder coater that I use in NJ and a problem. The transportation help I’d been counting on fell through and I have no car. Pondering my dilemma I realized that all of the frames I had were of dramatically different enough sizes that they kind of nested together at the rear triangle allowing them to take up a minimum of space, the 44cm frame fit into the 50, fit into the 56, fit into the 60, fit into the 64 so I got to work making a custom box for my custom frames
- trackstand on a tiny bike
- Lars Anderson Lounging
. Even packed as tightly as possible the UPS charge for my 5 frames would have been $120 so I did what any ex messenger/engineer/ psychopath would do. I used some nylon webbing to make shoulder straps and rode my ass from medford to south station with a ridiculously huge box on my back and got on the fung wah bus and took a nap to wake up and ride it again to Penn Station in NYC from ChinaTown. The fact that I could walk into penn station, sweating and looking like a madman with a package that looked like an improvised dwarf coffin is pretty disconcerting but I am glad not to have been asked any questions as I boarded a train for my folks house on the jersey/pa border. Now I am finally off to get the frames dropped at paint for delivery at the end of the week.
