Oh boy was this bike a lot of work! By far the hardest out of all my projects so far. I went into this build highly determined to avoid all the mistakes I did last time, so I spent an ungodly amount of time wet-sanding the old paint down to the bare metal. The hard to reach areas I assaulted chemically with a paint...

I painted a bike! For a long time I’ve wanted to introduce painting to my restoration process, but I was always held back by not having a well-ventilated area to do it in. I kept putting it off until later this year when I’ll move into a proper house with a yard, but then this bike came along, with its cracked and...

Have you ever tried taking your hands off the handlebars while riding your bike? Scary, innit? The bars start wobbling all over the place, and images of the front wheel suddenly becoming perpendicular to the rest of the bike–followed immediately by you making like the payload of a catapult–start flashing through...

When I was a child, growing up in post-communist Romania, very few people owned cars1, and those that did usually had some real clunkers2. Every single weekend some neighbor would be outside from dawn to dusk, banging and fixing on his car for the umpteenth time, trying to get it road-worthy for the week ahead. This...

I briefly mentioned this bike before, when I talked about how I got into bike repair. The bike was “analog” back then, but my wife has meanwhile developed some problems with the tendons on one of her feet, which have impeded her ability to climb hills on the bike. So I’ve built her an e-bike!

I don’t know if this is a new trend or if I’m just noticing it now, but more and more the popular wisdom seems to be that you shouldn’t monetize your hobby. That if you do, it turns it into a job, a hustle1; that it sucks all the fun out of it. Putting aside for now the fact that some people might want to turn their...

Serendipity the first When I was fifteen, I scored badly on my high-school placement exam. Not terribly bad, but just enough so that I didn’t make the cut-off point for the specific high-school that I wanted to go to. My mom (who had been a teacher for decades at that point) pulled some strings, and the high-school...

This bike was in a very sorry state when I picked it up. The rear derailleur had gotten caught into the wheel at some point in the past, ripping the derailleur body in half and severely damaging some of the spokes on that side of the wheel. The tires were dry and brittle, the saddle was torn to shreds, and most of...

This bike is as old as I am! In a time when everything is made to be disposable, and half-obsolete by the time it leaves the factory door, bicycles are truly one of the last bastions of future-proof design that we can still rely on. This particular model also happens to be a small piece of Austrian history; it was...

Ah, my trusty steed. This bike will forever hold a special place in my heart as the first bike I built for myself. I bought it last year off the local marketplace for €50, which was a steal at that price for how well the frame had been kept (I uploaded some “before” photos here). Only the frameset is left of that...

What is it exactly that’s so great about riding a singlespeed? What draws people to it, and what makes them abuse their own knees like that? I’ve built and ridden a couple of singlespeeds recently, and I’ve been thinking about what makes them so much fun. Part of it has to be nostalgia, of course. Most of us have...

A user of /r/bicla (a Romanian cycling subreddit) generously gave me this bike for free after they saw one of my previous projects and enjoyed it. I gave the bike a complete overhaul and a well-deserved facelift. The word “singlespeed” is in quotes in the title because the bike technically has two speeds. It’s...