Kyle kindly took a few photos of the finished product for us. . sampling some of the local artwork also.

Here you go Matti. Have fun on it!

BAM. So stoked with how it came up. . the pain of handing it over is realised, definately wish this was mine!

Me wielding drop forged. Bike looking more useful.

Work in progress. . once the wheels were built it only took an evening to put all the bits back together

These are the wheels, halfway through construction.

This is sasha, from Pony Bikes, polishing up the chainring

The Pimp's in the Crib

The pimps are well and truly home to roost. After taking all the pimp-able items to the polisher at work I achieved only a C minus in terms of pimp quality. Not really Matti-worthy. So, back to Sasha. .

I think the word you're looking for is "PHWOOAAR!" Sasha had some decent metal polish at her shop and it took her about 5 hours to get the parts looking like this.

I reckon they're better than new. Don't make em like theyused to, eh?

But again, my lil point and shoot camera doesn't do the shinyness and blingness of these parts justice. So soooo sweet. . I can't wait to build the wheels tonight.

We had the whole frame cleaned up - in that we bogged up bottle cage holes, removed cable guides and mech hangers. It's clean. Very clean.

Got the frame back today. . . The painter's completely rapt with the result, and the finished photos of this bike will be published on his website. The photos don't quite do the colour justice, but it is one beautiful piece of work. The colour oozes Matti.

Here's just a few of the community spirit, a bit o sunday elbow grease. Apparently - Upon more advice from Sasha at Pony Bike, WD40 and the good ol' Scotch Brite are great for removing corrosion off alloy parts, the steel wool scratches the hell out of the metal. Couple Beers and elbow grease. Quality.

After getting some helpful hints from Sasha at Pony Bikes, I've given the hubs their first breath of life with a bit of Scotch Brite, some WD40, and much, much elbow grease. Most of the corrosion has come off, and with some more polishing and some new skewers they'll be right as rain. Still can't get over how smooth they still are.

Stripping the bike last night was a slightly less straight forward matter, as a few of the components and the bike frame had formed a relationship together over the years and definately had no interest in parting ways.

So after a little (much) twisting, wrenching, pushing and shoving, and of course elbow grease, we managed to seperate all but the stem and the forks. Sacrificial was the headset and the stem, which we had to saw off, in an effort to get to the inside of the head tube.

Next was the task of locating the right colour. . Matti has his heart set on Baby Blue, so we set off to find it. But it seems that powder coat simply does not exist in this colour, though we were offered the option to create our own custom powder for this project, for a measly 3500 bucks. But after some to-ing and fro-ing and many phone calls to out local bike engineer, Gripsport(com.au) we found a bloke who will do it in 2 pack. So with our in house architect (M. Bedford Senior) we've come up with the right shade of Matti.

Stay tuned. . I ordered some pimp daddy leather grips today (called 'Dapper Dan'. . sick!) and will be searching for a cool seat too.

here's the frame in it's current state. nice cranks too. They'll live a happy second life.

Alright, so here she is. . . well. . . here are what she'll be made up of. Mike sent us over two sets of wheels. One set with rims we could use, and one with hubs that were still buttery smooth, but rims we couldn't use. So i've cut the spokes out, and now we have front and rear rims and hubs - ready to be built. These items will require a bit of the aforementioned elbow grease, and I've enlisted the assistance of Sasha (ponybikes.blogspot.com) who I met at:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-FjQCI1C6zaV7I1CtYIRVs6V21gH5jqwgiMdgvve2LkoCnkjar0O5mEDjACySAIcCAA8yJlCcDkqLTFBlBr0BsL5OIc-C482WQcpb3M5ar3I6fgyXi3c65f8QsDIetAmEskzfpxw7IA4/s1600-h/Worlds-Greatest-Swapmeet-1.jpg

I'm probably going to do some of the restoration work with Sasha. It looks like she's stoked about what she does, so I'm glad to have bumped into her.

. . . . in the beginning . . . .

So this week Mike's Bike arrived. Looks like we'll have a great platform to work off. . with a little research, it turns out that the gear on this bike was the beez neez back in the day, so with a bit of tender love, steel wool, and a shitload of elbow grease we might be able to use most of what's here.