Followup: Tow behind bike. Bike related without the old-man rant this time.

First of all – my blog post from 10 weeks ago is a must-read before this one.

For starters, I figured out what I was dealing with name wise – it was a Kent Trail A Bike – an early model back when it had the crappy attachment setup.

I messaged Kent asking just what the heck I was dealing with headset wise, the joint between the main section and the seat attachment section was NOT a 1” headset – so I didn’t get to replace that. I found some smaller headsets that are meant for things like Walmart kids bikes and I’m assuming it’s one of those, but honestly the bearings that came with the thing weren’t that bad so I left it alone. Kent hasn’t replied other than the automated “we got your message” email. That was November 19th from something called “hulkapps” so it’s an outsourced something or another they may not even maintain anymore.

Even though I got it more than ridable the first weekend, I continued to work on the thing. Stripping the original paint took a lot of time with a drill and brush attachments. More than one slip made my left hand (I’m right handed obviously) look like hamburger, but I kept at it and eventually rubbed a couple of brain-cells together and started wearing a leather glove on that hand.

I went with the Van Halen paint job like I said I intended to. I intended to leave the very back section white from the start. When I got to the forward tubes of the “main frame” I realized I was running out of white and red, and instead of buying more I was tired of giving up all of my weekends to working on it, and I thought the black and white looked good anyways. FYI – I had to start over multiple times on the two front attachment components. I’m new to doing spray-paint art and I screwed up many times. It built a lot of frustration in me, but I powered through.

First – a shout-out to the lesser known Chinese tire manufacturer Cheng Shin. Despite being old, weather rotted, and rather suspect the tire that was already on the bike survived multiple removals, reinstallations, and even miles of riding without failing. I noticed when I changed the tire, the tube I still have in there is also Cheng Shin. I have new tubes on standby, Goodyear I think they are, but I’m not changing the tube until I need it.

That being said, it was old, weather rotted and rather suspect. I went tire shopping online and found a Kenda with white-walls. This bike TOTALLY needed white walls and Kenda is the brand I have on all of my personal BMX’s, so yeah, that’s on there now.

Before even changing the tire the family went on a Seawall Ride in Galveston on a cold weekend, the first weekend of December . My older boy – in the green up there – is the tow-behind rider, my wife towed the trailer for my younger son with her bike that you can just see the front tire of. My daughter was the only one “biking solo”. My older boy declared he wanted to come back every day and ride the seawall. I think we have a victory here, except Gavleston is just a little too far and loading up all the bikes on the rack on the van is just a little too tedious for a daily thing. Interesting note – this is the way my wife’s phone took the picture. It has a “portrait mode” and it automatically blurs the non-subject areas. As you can see she was coming after me already so I didn’t get to take another picture with it right, so almost perfect for a web post, bad for the personal photo album.

My wife overheard commentary by some dudes we past saying "that kid looks cool".  I'm not sure if it was the dinosaur jacket, the spiked helmet, or the Van Halen tow behind, but yeah.

Despite saying I was going to in the last post – I still haven’t bought bar-ends.

This was mostly a follow-up post simply so I could show off a bit. I’m a bit proud of the project and I think I could probably imitate the Van Halen paint job even better if I were to give it another try. Not sure I want to if it’s going to take that much work though.

Afterthought

My wife is big on “Love Languages”, mine is “acts of service”. I do things for those I care about. Giving my time on a project to someone is one of the ways I best show them I care. This bike was an example, in other cases it’s been building computers – especially when I do custom software configs, custom art (I’m reasonable with a computer and the Gimp) or fixing things for people (when I’m not charging of course – that’s professional).