Motors How I wanted to be like GOO and Jumeira_Johnny, but ended up fixing a bicycle instead

Excuse the clever title. I figured after GOO and Jumeira_Johnny shared their automobile build/restoration logs with everyone, I thought I might do the same but on a much (much!) smaller scale.

My daughter's 8th birthday is fast approaching, and we figured it's long past time she learned to ride a bicycle. Her friends are all riding bikes now, so naturally she's expressed an interest in learning. Rather than run out and spend a bunch of money on a shiny new bike, I thought it would be fun to take an older bike, clean it up, and make it hers.

I have an older niece who outgrew her old bike years ago, and it's been sitting behind my parents' garage for the past 5 years or so, soaking up all the weather that Houston has to offer. All it does anymore is collect rust (and a few assorted bugs), so I decided to take it apart and see just how much life I can breath into it.

First thing was to take a look at the bike in its current state. Dirty, but not terribly bad upon first look:



I had already taken off the handlebar grips because they were mostly gone to begin with. Grips are cheap, so I'll replace those anyway. Other wise this is it. It's a cheaper kids bike - nothing fancy, but good enough to last a few years before she gets older and outgrows it. I inflated the tires and after a couple days they were still firm, so the tires and rubber are both in good enough shape to salvage.

Upon closer look, the bike has definitely seen its share of the elements. Anything that's not painted has rust. It will take some work to restore it, but I enjoy getting my hands dirty.

A close-up of the main cog and pedal bar:


The other side of the bike:


And a good look at one of the wheels:


With that, it was time to start taking everything apart.
This is a close-up of the part where the handlebar assembly connects to the lower fork through the frame. You can see it's pretty nasty inside.


I removed the pedals and got the main cog and pedal bar off the frame. The internal pieces were dirty, but not as bad as I expected.


The rear cog and axle assembly was absolutely caked with what I can only assume is years of original grease, dirt, and WD-40 . This was a learning experience for me as I'd always wondered how the breaking mechanism worked on a simple single speed bike. Now I know that it uses a screw mechanism which, when turned in the reverse direction, pushes a conical bushing forward into a couple of small metal plates. The conical bushing pushes the plates outward, and as they expand inside the wheel hub it creates friction which causes the wheel to stop spinning. It's a pretty clever design, even if it is covered in dirty grease.


After taking everything apart, I used a toothbrush and a bowl of gasoline to clean all the pieces. It went quicker than expected, and by the time I was done I had successfully cleaned the old grease from every piece of the bike:


All of the bearings from both wheels and the fork assembly cleaned up perfectly, with no other signs of wear. This made me very happy. A little bit of proper grease will have them spinning freely again. Some of the bolts and washers cleaned up well, but still had varying degrees of rust. I'll probably end up replacing any bolts and washers as needed.

This is the bike in its current state:


Some pieces are beyond simple repair. The pedals are old plastic and in very poor condition. Also, the chain is mostly rust at this point and most of the links don't even move anymore. Chains and pedals are cheap, and for what I'm saving by restoring this bike I can afford to replace those, plus get a basket for my daughter's stuffed animals to ride along.

Next on my to-do list is to take a wire brush and/or a relatively high grit sanding pad to the remaining metal parts and remove as much rust as possible without destroying anything. After that comes the primer and paint, then I'll re-assemble everything using proper grease - no more WD-40 for this bike!

So yeah, it's not as awesome as restoring a classic automobile, and certainly not as mechanically interesting as building an entire car, but there you go.

 

My kind of thing. This makes you even more awesome than GOO and Johnny.

 

This is going to be good. So many people would have just scrapped it. The fact that you would have restored this will make it even more special for your daughter

 

I've never disassembled coaster brakes before, but one-piece cranks are dead easy to rebuild. Get some decent quality grease for the bearings and good luck with the rebuild

 

Not sure if it would be too cost prohibitive but the wheels and other rusty parts could do with media blasting but I've never had anything blasted so have no idea if this is an expensive proposition.

 

I remember doing this with an old BMX with my dad when I was 13/14. It was great fun!

Are you going to give it a lacquer finish?

 

This looks interesting!

I've never heard of coaster brakes before, how do you operate them?

 

Just pedal backwards. You see them all the time on the older bikes still being ridden around The Netherlands. Looks a bit odd to see someone on a bike with no levers on the handlebars.

 

I would not give a child of mine a bike that relies solely on a coaster brake to stop. They are extraordinarily inefficient. With only the rear wheel braked there is no way to stop rapidly in an emergency, the rear wheel will just lock and slide, taking a long time, too long, to stop the bike. Also they can very quickly overheat and fade downhill.

 

That's fair enough, but I don't think she's going to build enough enough speed and momentum that she won't be able to stop. It certainly never prevented me when I was a kid. Nevertheless, I noticed that the frame has holes to attach brakes, so if it gets to be an issue it won't be a problem to retrofit one.

As to your last point - I live in Houston. What the heck is a hill?

 

Which is exactly why kids bikes have them.
Overbrake your rear wheel and it will slide, overbreak your frontwheel and it's picking-up-teeth-time.

Kids are notoriously bad at dosing brakes.

These brakes are used a lot in the Netherlands...where people think the hill is a lie.

 

Although my Raleigh Striker in the late 70's had front brakes, they were never used, I remember only using the peddle back type - great for sliding round corners

 

Bike repair - now with added progress!

It's been a long week - a series of all-day meetings every day, and we've had flooding rain for a couple of weeks now. Life goes on, and so does the bike repair now that I finally made it to the weekend!

I took any metal parts that had significant rust and let them soak overnight in regular household vinegar. Among its near infinite uses is the ability to clean rust. I looked at the bucket this morning and it looked properly gross.



It may have looked a bit on the nasty side, but the vinegar did its trick. Whatever rust was left over came off with very light sanding using 400 grit wet sandpaper. In the above picture, you can see the seat post just left of center, covered in rust. Here is the same seat post after a light touch with a wire brush and sandpaper. It's back to its proper shine.



Some of the parts were a little more intricate, and required more attention. In particular, I took care to work in between the teeth on the two gears. Light sanding was all it took; no flossing necessary.



Houston is notorious for its humidity, and with all the rain we've had recently I didn't want the parts to immediately get rusty after all the work I put into cleaning them. In fact, it was raining while I was cleaning, so I knew I needed to do something to help speed up the drying process.

I decided to bake the pieces for about 4 minutes at 200 degrees (F). I figured the temperature was low enough and the duration short enough that I wouldn't significantly alter the temper on the steel parts. I hope this proves true.



The small parts are done and the parts that will be painted are ready to go. I still have to clean the fork, frame, and wheels, but those are larger and I need to figure out a good way to soak them in vinegar. I may end up just using a commercial rust remover - I'm not sure yet.

I have time to figure that part out. The forecast calls for rain for the next few days, and I don't want to paint with this much water in the air. Perhaps next weekend I'll be ready to prime and paint. In the meantime, my wife is wondering why I haven't finished her bookcase, and I have another woodworking video I desperately need to finish. A guy can only take on so many projects at once!

 

Doesn't putting wet-derusted parts in an oven corrode tham even faster?

 

That's a good question, and I don't really know the answer. I dried the parts as much as possible before I put them in the oven. This was just a short application of some heat to evaporate any remaining moisture away. I left the parts to sit on the kitchen table all weekend, and so far all the bare metal seems stable. I suppose that could be due to the fact that they were wet with vinegar, not water. Or maybe I just got lucky. I expect a small amount of surface rust to form due to the normal oxidation process, but all of the bad rust is still gone.

 

Coaster brakes rule. Big skids are where it's at!

Good on you for getting a proper bike and none of this safety sally non-sense.

I do, however, recommend a cool helmet.

 

I've never heard of them. Not a bad price at all - definitely considering one.

 

A quick update on this project. The past few weeks have not been kind to my time. I had to finish my wife's book case, we had a near miss from Tropical Storm Bill, and summer has begun which means temperatures in the mid 90s (about 34C) with humidity hovering around at least 86%. If it's not raining, it's just too miserable to work outside.

I found some time last weekend to work on the fork and handle bars, but I was interrupted by an afternoon rain shower. Such is life in Houston.

Well, today is a work holiday, and although it's still hot and humid I got a chance to do some more work on the bike.

Today I worked on removing the paint and stickers from the frame, and finishing up any left over work on the fork and handle bars. This did not go as easy as I'd hoped. Some basic research lead me to believe that the stickers could be easily removed with either heat (to soften the adhesive) or nail polish remover (acetone).





This may have been an inexpensive kids bike, but I've come to the conclusion that the company spent most of the budget on some kind of futuristic industrial decal that is made from an as yet undiscovered material that is impervious to all known Earthly solvents. Seriously.

I applied heat via a heat gun. No joy. I used acetone. Nothing. I stepped up to turpenoid (a mixture of petroleum distillates that acts as a substitute for turpentine). Nope. Fine, let's just get this out of the way and hit it with paint stripper. Oddly, while the paint stripper removed the paint from the fork and handle bars, the stickers held fast. In fact, the stickers actually masked off the paint underneath, so the paint stripper had no effect there.

I was dumbfounded, and in the end I resorted to the tried and true method of brute force. Futuristic invincible stickers, meet 80 grit sand paper.





Yep, that worked. It took a couple hours of sanding, but I finally got every last confounded sticker off the bike, and I got just about everything down to bare metal. Interestingly, the paint stripper took the paint right off of the fork and handle bars, but it didn't have any effect on the frame. My guess is that the frame was powder coated, and perhaps the paint stripper doesn't work on powder coating.

Either way, it's just about finished. I still have a tiny bit more paint to remove from the frame, but after sanding for a couple of solid hours in the heat and humidity, I was covered in sweat and paint/metal dust and my hands were starting to get tingly and numb. Now I remember why I prefer working with wood over metal. In the following picture you can see the ground turn a pink hue toward the right hand side. That's dust from the sanding. My arms, legs, and clothing were covered in it. In hindsight I should have worn a face mask, because now my lungs are probably also covered in it.



Almost done. I don't need to get every last bit of paint off the bike. As long as I get the clear coat off and get a decent surface for the primer, then I should be ok.

I also had one of those parental realizations today. In 8 years my daughter will get her driver's license, so this bike's new paint job doesn't have to last very long. Man, where did time go?

 

As long as the frame is smooth, a good self etching primer should be fine. I would recommend the thicker automotive primers, as the fill small nicks and dings. One coat with a 400 grit sanding, followed buy a second coat has proven a fantastic base for me in the past. The old pitted steel wheels were smooth as butter.

 

Don't forget to block up the BB and head tube before you paint!

Chasing paint out of bb threads or press fits is the stuff of bike mechanic nightmares.