A family thing…

This week, I’ve been working on a few nice older Schwinns, doing major overhauls, in trade for some really awesome (slightly beat up) old 50’s and 60’s Schwinn and Murray Cruisers.  I overhauled his daughter’s two bikes in exchange for 4 bikes.  After meeting up with him this morning at the coffee shop, I found out that he’s going to be giving me two more truck loads of bikes (hopefully) in exchange for overhualing his two bikes and his father’s road bike.  Which is an awesome arrangement.

It doesn’t take me much time to overhaul a bike and make it ride extremely nicely so, I’ve been going that extra mile by scrubbing the bikes completely down, rubbing oil into the leather saddles to soften them, and scrubbing the rust off of the chrome with ajax and a wet rag.  Hopefully this business arrangement continues, because truck loads of bikes mean more people on bikes and one less person in a car.  Hooray, hooray, hooray!

So, two tips for fixing up older bikes or making yours more awesome…

1. Scrubbing surface rust off of chrome with Ajax and a wet rag will get most of the junk off with minor blemishes.
2. Machine oil (we use marvel air machine oil) on leather saddles will soften them up tremendously.

~ by Crank It Up on August 29, 2008.