It's been a rainy, windy, cold weekend up here... but we got lucky on Sunday with several hours of decent weather which gave me a great opportunity to start a new project!
We were gifted an old bike by my mother, who found it being given away by someone in her town. The tires are pretty old and won't hold air, it lacks grips for the handlebars, and the chain is so rusted as to be unusable. We also want to re-paint the bike, so I've got a few cans of spray paint for that effort.
My little helper wanted to remove the tires with me, which thanks to a bit of WD40 was easy enough to do.
We'll be replacing these with new ones in the next day or two once I can pop out to a hardware store.
The efforts yesterday were mostly to see what all actually needed replacing and to get things cleaned up enough to work on. Turns out the chain is an older style that doesn't have any quick-release mechanisms, so I've purchased a handy tool on Amazon which will help me pop one of the rivets out and thus unlink the chain.
Once I have the old chain off, I've already got a new chain just waiting to be put on. The bike is a single speed/fixed speed kids bike so I don't have to worry about gear changers or anything like that, which makes this fairly simple. The gears / teeth themselves seem fine despite the rusted chain, I don't see any damage on them so thankfully that's one less thing to replace, and everything spins nicely so that also gives me confidence that this should be a fairly quick and cheap repair job.
My boy wants the bike to be black and red like Miles Morales Spider-Man, which is easy enough to do. I bought a can of clear-coat spray paint as well, so if I can find a few Miles Morales stickers, I may apply them after the main paint has dried, then give the whole thing a dose of clear-coat to seal them in.
I unfortunately didn't get further than disassembling the tires and the chain guard thingy, so I expect I'll do a follow-up post once we've made more progress on it!
Until next time friends, I hope you're all doing well.