Well as I am intending of entering the Nudie Jeans Wear and Tear competition, I thought I should probably get some more pictures. And while I was at that – I may as well have put them on Flickr. Which is what I did—so here they are. I reckon they’re from 3/4 weeks of almost constant wear (except for work that is—Starbucks isn’t a jeans fan). They’re mainly just creased in most places and definitely softer and not as rigid as when I first got them. There’s really not all that much wear patches yet. Maybe give it a few more weeks. In parts there is some more wear – front top and back pockets – especially with my wallet. But it’ll be a lot more accentuated in a wee while. Stay tuned.

As for the bike making etc, the sanding and stripping of the main part of the frame is taking a long arduous time – and hopefully should be done sometime this coming week. We’ll see!

I had a little more time to take some more pictures and upload them of the whole build and so on – and so I thought I should probably take the opportunity to add some up here and maybe annotate a few…

I have the frame almost completely stripped down – to the extent where all there is left is the bottom bracket (as I don’t have a large enough spanner!) And I’m not sure whether to go ahead and replace it anyway with a new sealed cartridge one… I am tempted to, but then again, why do it if it currently works fine and just could use a few more bearings and some greasy times? Hmm, we’ll see! On the topic of bearing I might replace the headset too as that’s a little buggered, but I think I found a nice 1″ bearing cup so that might do.

As part of all the rebuilding and so on, I’m stripping down the whole frame and removing rust and sanding and painting and everything – which is long and laborious, but the results are generally pretty self evident, so there’s a fair amount of almost immediate satisfaction. And so I have a few pictures from after removing the first amount of rust (which was luckily just surface stuff!).

As for the wheels, here’s some pictures of the rear wheel – which was originally a Shimano disc front wheel -h this should make for an interesting conversion. I currently need to retrue the wheel—a few spokes are loose, and replace the axel and bearings with a longer solid one.

For the front wheel, I have a fairly thin and light Mavic X139 wheel, which is probably sufficient. I only really need to get a thin (1.5″ is the thinnest) tyre.

The almost finished front forks. I have just put a couple coats of the main coat on. I need to (wet) sand it a bit to get rid of some lumps, but it’s looking pretty hot as of the moment.

And that’s all of the pictures for now. I should probably get on with truing the wheel more and sanding and so on, but watch this space.

Well I mentioned earlier that I had the whole bike thing going and that I was/am planning on doing up a couple bikes and building them etc. over the Summer just to have some fun/get my engineering side out/pass time. Well over the past few weeks I have been hard at it… Building and tinkering and buying and so on – and as a result I have a few pictures… (yay!)

FYI, I am building 2 bikes. Originally (like back on the Easter hols) I really wanted to build a fixie (with one gear and two way drive (i.e. forwards and backwards to and from the pedals to the back wheel), but after lots of careful research about the project, it seemed hard and expensive in that I need certain (track) wheels and a certain old skool frame. Well cut forward to now, I found a nice old slightly rusty Ridgeback frame in one of the sheds that was part of a pretty old mountain bike like thing with (ghastly!) slick tyres. So I figured I should take it apart (fun times) and then build it back up again (looking much better) in a single speed configuration and a bright new colour! I used a whole bunch of information and parts from velosolo to get a mountain bike front wheel with a fixed cog attached to the disc brake attachment as the back wheel, and then a pretty thin front wheel (with hopefully some pretty slick tyres (soon to be purchased). At the moment, I’ve stripped it all down, bought some wheels and have begun sanding and painting. Enjoy some of the pictures as there will be a LOT more on their way.

The other bike that I am building was a result of some cheap eBay purchasing and a slightly lack of hope of building a singlespeed. I really wanted to build a bike – especially a singlespeed, and when I realised that it could be too expensive and difficult, I thought that building a mountain bike would work just as well and be a similarly good fun idea. Indeed it is. So, I got this Giant frame and handlebars and such for a tenner on eBay and began doing it from there. I don’t have any pictures at the moment – and it’s raining like crazy outside,

Well I probably spoil myself or something, but anyway, I bought some more Nudie jeans mainly because they’re so awesome. My previous pair was a total impulse buy (Average Joe 32/34) and hence they’re slightly big – but awesome nonetheless. This time I had more time – so I went for Slim Jim 30/32 – a more melike size. The only problem with having 2 pairs is that I now have to decide which ones to wear and which ones to wear (and hence wear down) more…. Hmmm. Difficult times. In the meantime, I do have some more pictures from week 2 of the Average Joe’s. Take a look:

I just also took a couple of shots from week 3/4 and some of my new Slim Jim’s, so I’ll try and get them up pretty soon…