Bicycle Art Project

A few months ago I decided I wanted to make a bicycle out of metal. It was originally intended to be put on a laptop bag I had made, and this was the rough layout:

My friend Alex has all the soldering, welding, etc. tools you can imagine to help connect the random pieces of metal I found at Home Depot.

Playing with fire! I did not burn the garage down...

We just added the seat here - it's still red hot.

Hot chain rings. The cranks were actually the hardest part to get on - since they were two pieces we didn't want them coming off the chain rings at different angles (because really, that would not be a realistic bike at all!!)

Cleaning up the frame. This is actually some sort of acid in a ziplock bag. I have no idea where Alex gets all this stuff - but it works good for cleaning miniature bicycles!

About this time we decided the bike was too cool to go on the laptop bag, so we made a stand for the bike, and then decided to make wheels with spokes. Alex is cutting a large pipe here, that would become my bike wheels.

Final product. We ended up cutting four pieces of wire and welding each inside the wheels for the spokes.

Bicycle art project complete.

People always ask me what I like to do when I'm not training and racing - art ranks right up there. I've never build anything out of metal before, so this was pretty fun for me. Typically my art projects involve paint or changing something in our house. And now that the bicycle is complete, I'm off for a long run...