Turning An Old Tri Spoke Into A Work Of Art

Tristan over at BostonFixed has created this amazing guide to turning an old carbon trispoke into a work of art! The below guide was written by him, and reprinted with permission.

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So I painted my trispoke and made it look all mad phat dope shitzzle, and made a little guide in a bunch of images/how to guide.

Your materials are as follows:

One can of Spray primer
One can of preferred paint (I ended up using Duplicolor Metal Specks, after the can of Metal Effects shown completely fucked up and was sputtering)
Clear coat (Not shown, use an Acrylic)
Multi pack sandpaper (for sanding stuff down)
Cleaning wipe that clears all the shit off
A good x-acto knife for cutting the tape/stickers (also not shown)
Newspapers for spraying
A sponge for wiping
A pail for wet sanding
Stickers
A weekend worth of time.

So yeah, my HED trispoke was about 10 years old and in rough shape, I highly recommend if you want it to look really pretty, to reprime/fill any knicks in the surface, as they’re quite common on the older wheels. Give it a good cloth wipe to prepare the surface for roughing up.

Note: I did this with the tire on, but it’s better to take the tubular off, I just didn’t feel like dismounting and remounting a tubular.

This is how the wheel should look after roughing it up with some 400 grit wet sand paper. THERE IS NO CLEAR COAT on HED/Specialized trispoke wheels. It’s the actual epoxy so DO NOT GO TOO FAR OR USE BELOW 400 GRIT!! You will eat the carbon!

Wipe it down with a slightly damp sponge, then wipe off the water/dust with an old clean t-shirt.

Mask off everything and then start to hate yourself if you want to use the braking surface as it’s a very unfun job coming up…

Taking your knife, follow the brake surface all around the wheel and carefully not fuck up like this. This will make your wheel look like shit. Put more tape on and then recut.

This is a (blurry) shot of how it SHOULD look.

After you do all that, rewipe the wheel down with the prep cloth, and we can start spraying primer.

Go with a few light coats of primer until it looks solid enough. What blows is you now will know exactly how bad the surface of your wheel is pitted (if used). You can use some filler but I didn’t bother. L A Z Y. The primer dries quickly (within an hour).

Wet sand the primer with 400 grit sandpaper. Get it nice and smooooth. Dry it off again and paint some more.

Now I fucked up on this part and there’s no pictures after my spray can decided to fuck up on me and made me resurface and redo everything. That green tape helps out so much as its very waterproof. Just spray maybe two or three coats of your base color, let that dry properly, wipe it down again with the clean t-shirt, and then spray two or three coats of clear on it. It won’t take very long for everything to cure/dry if you’re light enough with your coats.

Applying vinyl graphics. You will learn how much of a pain in the ass lattice work like this is.

Some windex, luck, a credit card, and patience lets you apply the graphics well. Cutting around the braking surface again.

Awrite! All done! Simple enough, but most people can’t/aren’t willing to put in the effort. It’s all about prep time/effort….

More info here

He also did this bit of amazing art work.

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And She Will Be Called Henry: Bike Names

Over at Boston Fixed they are having a rather interesting chat about bike names. Here are some of the better ones.

Gloria
Elizabeth
Zisek
My Pista (der Zorn Gottes)
Sexual Intercourse: The Bike
blue lagoon
death weave (this one had a nasty habit of shaking violently when the rear rack was loaded)
red scare
white out (my current whip, the shogun)
74 Raleigh: Sir Reginald Wordsworth of Nottingham
76 Fuji: Fumio-san
78 Guerciotti: Guiseppe Veloce d’Milano
hector
steegmar
sigi
max
li’l jimmy
japhy
We named my bike Trial and Error, since that is pretty much how we built it
my bike is Svletvana cause she’s a Jamis Sputnik which was mail ordered aka my mail ordered russian bride
Sunday Morning
Mosher
Squishy bike
Fast Bike

Do you name your bike? If so what is it? Is your bike a lady or a gent (or trans)?

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