Thursday, August 16, 2007

Bike of the Week : Buffalo Soldier

"If you know your history..."


This is a bike that I almost threw away. I almost didn't even take it, but now I'm glad I did. I use a Yahoo group called Freecycle to get bikes for free. It is too cool of a way to get what you want from people who don't want what they have! You simply join the freecycle group in your area and post that you want peoples' old XYZ (in this case BIKES!) and they will respond where they are and what they have. So I got this bike from a lady in Nevada who listed it as a "Nice bike if you know about bikes." So I respond to her post, get the address, and drive to Nevada to pick up the goods. I pull up and there sits a black Huffy with aqua and purple graphics, rusted-ass chain, hard as hell seat, and an old clapped out seat bag. I cuss myself for wasting gas to pick up a pile of scrap metal, throw it in back of the Volvo, and boogie to work. Not until many weeks later did I dig in to this bike and change up a few things. Cut off the graphics with a razor blade. Next the rusty one piece crank was replaced with a 5 spoke that I salvaged off of a dumpster find. Wooled it to a shine, add grease, install. Now for the bars. Flip and clip, stretch some bar ends around them and re-tape with 50 cent hockey stick tape. (I will do a redneck-tech post on this later.) Not minding the reach on the stem, but hating the shifters sitting there, I creatively re-assigned the rear shifter to the seat post and ditched the front shifter since the der. was no longer needed on a single chain ring. Add older, harder black seat, and VOILA, a decent farting -around- on- bike! Just about to toss the old seat bag but had to look inside to see if there was anything in it. To my shock and delight there were the liner notes from a Bob Marley cassette tape in there! Ratted out and barely legible. So I added some Rasta colored tape bands around the bars for the classy touch it needed. Front brake only. Blast to ride, JAH!

"...Then you would know where you're coming from!"

1 comment:

Travel Gravel said...

Don't know why but the after pic won't pull up larger. I'll put up some pics in my redneck-tech post. Later!