Marisol, part 1

It was a long time ago but if I remember correctly I got this bike way back from Mum and Dad. I used it for years, but one night I was going home on my bike in the middle of the night, profoundly drunk, and I rode it straight into a parked car. I wasn't hurt and the bike worked (the car probably got a bump, though) so I rode home. The next day I thought that the bike was unusually unstable - I had always been able to ride it quite long, no hands on the handlebar, but when I tried to do that now the bike began to sway. I couldn't understand why until I explained what had happened to a friend of mine. He took one look at the bike, began to laugh and said "Well, look at the fork!" The fork was completely bent backward from the crash the night before.

At this time I had seen some cool films and clips with mountain bikes and I had wanted one for some time, so I decided to get one now. That mountain bike got stolen a couple of years later, as did the next one, but this bicycle had been used a while by my friend and then been standing in my friend's mother's shed for some years, collecting dust. Since he worked in a bike shop he had gotten a new fork for it. When my second mountain bike got stolen I couldn't afford to get a new one, so I asked my friend if I could get it back.

When I got it back I cleaned off all the dust, decided that the bike looked boring and decided to paint it. All white. Since I was still kind of new to bikes, I just took off the saddle and the wheels. It wasn't only the bike itself that was painted white but also the crankset, the pedals and the chain. I thought that it looked cool... for about a year or so, but by then I had moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, and mistreatment, endless rain and salt water began to take its toll on it, and about a year ago it just looked sad.

I decided to take the bicycle apart completely and renovate it, this time right. And that's where we start.

(And yes, I wish that I had taken some photos of the bike before I renovated it but unfortunately I didn't.)

In this picture at least you get an idea of what the bike looked like before. White-rust coloured-grey-brown-ish. The white paint was severly chipped as well. The colour was scraped off with a spatula and sandpaper.

After a while I had gotten almost all the colour off. There is something special about raw steel...

Look at the massacred ball bearing, to the left above the crankset. A bike repair guy said he had fixed that. Yeah, right...

A close up. It took about a day's work to get all the parts off, and about a week to get all the paint off.