Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Gary Fisher Lanikai Express

All roads lead to the beach.
At least on this bike.
Kinda sorta.
If you've been following along at home, you know that I got my Gary Fisher HKII from KVIBE, a bicycle co-op of sorts.
I had to do a bit of work to get it going, mostly work involving oil and grease.
Here's what it looked like:



Well, there was a lot of rust on it, rust that I just couldn't live with. The bottom bracket was also loose and when I took that apart, well the whole bike just sort of came apart.
Here it is in it's reassembled glory:



Please excuse this image.
I had to Photoshop a pregnant lady out of the picture.
Anyways, I didn't want to spend too much(any) money fixing this bike up. Two cans of spray paint and a lot of elbow grease went into this project.
Here's the cranks and new/old front derailleur:



Notice the Deore pedals.
The cranks themselves polished up real nice but the rings were stained by corrosion. The chain ring bolts were toast so I just painted them.
Same with the brakes. The levers were okay, but the hardware needed to be painted also:



I still need to paint the boss bolts.
The rear derailleur came out okay, although it was dinged in a couple of places. The cassette cleaned up surprisingly well:



The hubs took some shine too, but I wasn't able to clean the flanges too well:



In a way, I'm sort of lucky the frame was in such bad shape. Lucky for if it was nice, I would have been tempted to go out and powder coat it and do a full on restoration.
I get caught up in things like this don't you know.
I'm still waiting on some GF stickers and I'm going to do some hand lettering on the top tube.
A handlebar change is probably in the future as well as the original bar has some deep rust problems.
The seat is surprisingly comfortable if a little torn, and the seatpost slips a bit. I have to do something about that.
All told, so far I got about forty bucks in this which includes new brake cables and the front derailleur.
I also ordered a new cartridge bottom bracket, but am undecided about using it as it weighs like a GAGALLION pounds.
There you go.
The Lanikai Express.
I have to admit, I'm sort of looking forward to doing this again. This time, I'll look out for a more suitable subject. I also learned a lot doing this, about older bikes, and about newer bikes.
Fixing up an old steel bike, Flat Tire Recommended!

No comments: