Monday, September 8, 2008

From the mundane springs... a head badge and a coat of primer

Over the weekend I was working on bringing my Illustrator file for my decals up to spec. This was quite tedious, but with a tremendous amount of help from "No Click Club" member Robert Murray, the goal was achieved. So today I biked out to Noah's shop (formerly known as the Mariposa shop) to bring him the file and get the decal wheels in motion.

I was greeted with two exciting sights. First: the headtube decal, created by Suzanne Carlsen. It's in polished stainless steel and looks really good. It's a nice detail for a handmade bike – a headbadge handmade by a jeweler. And now a paintjob hand-applied, with hand-painted box-lining... well, it's nice.

Noah had also put a coat of primer on my frame. And wow — it looked so much nicer, and more like a bike, that it looked when I dropped it off. Gone was the surface layer of rust and the gleaming filed lugs, replaced with uniform flat green. You could see all the lug-filing work quite well through the primer, and for the most part it looked really good. Noah assured me things would look even nicer with the actual paint and some clear coat.

As for the awful pictures – I'm actually pretty impressed with what my cell phone is capable of!

1 comment:

Andrew said...

Can't wait to see the finished frame!