I need a new bike, because this one is – to put it bluntly – fucked.
I’ve had it for seven or eight years now, and safe to say it’s had a tough paper round. It’s a gravel bike, so has enjoyed a rufty-tufty life and far too often taken down stuff that exceeds its design brief, sometimes even willingly, and has the multiple scars to show for it. Always a Trigger’s Broom of a bike with things being replaced and upgraded as and when necessary everything has now become tired of the abuse at the same time, the gears have gone baggy, the brakes don’t respond to any amount of bleeding and it’s all just about hanging on in there. It’s like a loved but ageing cat that you know is just about to pay for the vets next holiday.
I could easily get a new frame, swap the non terminal hardware over and replace all the knackered bits with new. Gravel bikes have evolved so much since I got this bike with improved geometry, tyre clearances and suchlike that it would be a rational choice, but I like my bike and have an irrational connection to it because we have done Stuff. Not just stuff, but ‘Stuff’.
It’s not a fancy bike at all, and should easily be ditched without too many tears, a Kinesis Tripster AT it’s a no-frills alloy frame with a carbon fork and if it wasn’t for its 90’s flashback paint job wouldn’t get any comments when it rolled up to a cafe stop, it’s no Open or Enve that’s for sure. But it’s my bike, and we’ve done a shitload of Stuff together: the Pyrenees, Slovakia, Tuscany, most everywhere in the UK, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, Finland and countless trips out the front door and straight up the hill, sometimes for just a couple of hours, sometimes for days. Sunshine, rain, dust, mud, lots of laughter, many many many many miles, a few tears.
While it might not be the most glamorous of bikes, it is dependable, and more importantly it’s got me home on more than one occasion by me just holding on and pedalling. As thanks for this it’s covered with an acne of chips, scabs and scrapes, and each one shares a story. There are flakes of paint left behind somewhere in the world to mark my passing as it’s been lent on walls, scraped along immovable things, chucked on the ground, and had rocks ricochet off the downtube.
While bikes may be inanimate objects they are also kinetic so can take us to places, steer us through experiences and dish out joy and pain in equal measure so it’s hard not to get emotionally attached to them in some way. I may be preaching to the choir or you might think I’m being a sentimental fool and I should just get the new bike but it doesn’t feel right to toss all of that away for the sake of something shiny and improved, I was in prime seven year itch territory but I definitely wasn’t looking elsewhere for my fun. There’s also a strong case for not bowing to needless replacement and consumerism.
I’m genuinely quite happy with my bike, it does what it does with boring competency and I don’t actually feel the desperate ache for a new fancier model, I am comfortable with what it does and willing to accept its limitations and ride within them, and then enjoy nudging outside of them too. I’ve never much been bewitched by the faster, lighter and spanglier of things anyway, but mainly because it’s my bike it was long overdue a full on strip and refresh, including a respray.
About now you’re going to need a bit of backstory. My other job when I’m not writing words on here is illustration, more specifically a cartoon sheep on a mountainbike that I’ve been scribbling for MountainBiking UK magazine for nearly 40 years. It’s quite popular amongst middle-aged MTBers, there’s even a book. Bex, who is half of Fatcreations, a high end custom bicycle painting studio, is a big fan of this off-road ungulate, and has extensively and exquisitely decorated her downhill mountain-bike with his likeness as a homage to the sheep. So we’re well aware of each other. Long story short, because I have some artistic chops and they’re admirers of my work, Fatcreations have agreed to let me colour in my frame as part of its refurbishment. This isn’t an option open to their usual customers.
It’s fair to say that it took quite a long while to get to this point, and most of that time was me deciding what colour to have the bike resprayed in. Always the hardest and most fraught decision. There’s a folder on my computer stuffed with pictures of bike frames in colourways I liked for inspiration, and while I knew what I wanted as a jumble of vague ideas, solidifying that into a coherent frame shaped paint job took stupidly long. Years. Then I saw an instagram of Fatcreations painting a frame with a stippled effect, using scrunched up paper to get the effect and that broke the damn of inspiration and the idea arrived fully formed and perfect. Tada.
The frame was to be based around the theme of chalk, I live at the base of the South Downs and a large proportion of my riding has been on the dusty white and flint sprinkled trails so it would be nice to reflect that heritage and show where my soul lies. The graphics were to be pink because I’ve always had some form of pink bike starting with a spangly pink Roberts road bike back in the 90’s.
The first job is to get rid of the scabby old paint so Fatcreations erase the scrapes of history and have the frame blasted and the forks rubbed back to bare so that a coat of primer can be added. The bike has been dragged through so much it’s quite the relief to discover that the process hasn’t revealed any dents, holes or death cracks especially since there was a deep scrape on the seat tube that could have gone either way…
Frame a blank canvas and ready for paint, Bex and I mix up a selection of whites and beiges and blacks to get the colours I’ll need to paint the chalk effect onto the frame. I’ve brought in some lumps of chalk and flint pocketed from just up the hill for reference and Bex combines colours to match, the subtle hues of which would make Farrow & Ball proud, she then reaches into the cupboard for a stock tin of shocking magenta pink with sparkles in that she thinks would be perfect for the contrasting graphics. It absolutely is.
It’s time to put on face masks and get painting and I’m all butterflies. I’ve spent my entire life wielding a paintbrush, pencil and pen and committing them to a piece of flat paper – now I have to use an unpredictable spray gun on a collection of awkward 3D tubes, and this is several levels of scary unfamiliar. I’m also left-handed, which makes using the gun a little unwieldy for me, and it’s not helping. Bex has pinned up a sheet of brown paper for me to practise on, and after a quick tutorial and test spray she’s confident to let me loose on my bike frame. Brave woman.
As I give the bike and fork a coating of off-white base coat it’s tricky to remember which bits of the frame I’ve done and which bits I’ve missed, and the colour’s similarity to the primer makes this hard to differentiate. Bex takes over and covers up my mistakes by going over the frame with an easy fluidity and deftness that comes with doing this sort of thing all day every day.
Then it’s onto the graphics and masking. None of the bikes that come out of Fatcreations have stickers on them, it’s all done with paint, run your finger over any lettering or logo and you won’t feel any ridges. That means a lot of masking and painting, and a lot of skill and time. Bex retrieves the needed graphics on the computer and adjusts them to fit the frame before printing them out on a massive machine that bleeps and whirrs like a deep techno track.
Then whatever graphic has to be weeded out from that solid sticker sheet, which is delicate precise work and takes a 10A scalpel and an expert hand. It’s then applied to the frame in exactly the right place. I leave Bex and Ali’s keen eyes do this bit, because I can’t even get my stem straight first time and there’s a lot of experience on show in getting the frame graphic central to a tapering down tube.
Everything on the frame is masked off apart from the bits that need colour, they get through a lot of masking tape and brown paper here, and it’s back into the spray booth for the sparkly magenta to go on and once again a nervous but smooth but swift hand is required to get an even and non dripping coating of colour.
Sufficiently pink those graphics are masked with corresponding stickers and it’s time for me to get all creative. This is an anxious moment but after 40 odd years of colouring in it’s nice to be challenged and hopefully brain hand eye coordination and a feel for paint will see me through.
I have a go dabbing paint on a Speed Shape (formed shells of plastic that show what a paint looks like on a curved surface) with a bit of sponge and then an offcut of foam and it’s not really working for me so pick up what I know and start using some paintbrushes that Bex has hanging around. These aren’t the 0 and 00 Pro brushes I’m used to but some rough and bristly cheap supermarket jobs that, surprisingly and serendipitously, works in my favour as the organic chalk effect I’m going for doesn’t require any precision and enjoys messy. With a palette of chalk and off-road beige colours I splodge and stipple away mixing and fudging as I go, and it takes time.
While I’m busy doing this Bex is getting on with other jobs. The masking sticker printing machine squarks and clunks at regular intervals, and Ali spends the whole day by finishing off a paint job on an intricately-shaped Trek frame and handlebars by flatting the lacquer with various grades of sandpaper, all by hand, and sends video massages to the client at each stage of the process. For the entire day.
We chat bikes. Ali was a pretty handy mountain biker back in the day until life took hold, while Bex still regularly goes out on her bike and is a demon downhiller who frequently stands on a podium, so there’s a lot to bond over there. We nerdy artist chat about colours, natter about upcoming Fatcreations projects that I can’t mention here, how much weight paint can add to a frame (hint – it can be a lot), some of the manufacturing horrors that be uncovered when a frame is stripped nude, and who in their opinion makes the best constructed carbon frames. It’s probably not who you think it is…
All the while I’m making sure I don’t miss any bits and making doubly sure I don’t mess up. The paintbrushes aren’t really used to this kind of work and they get clogged and even more scraggly, which helps with the organic feel of the painting even further and I happily dab away making sure I decorate all the frame and fork.
To add a bit of nuance and to knock back some of the areas I may have overdone it a bit, Bex suggests that I use the airbrush to paint over certain bits and I agree that it will definitely help. I’ve never used an airbrush before but often wished I could, I’m sure my Airfix modelling career would have progressed a lot further if I’d mastered the art instead of fudging my bedroom ceiling of planes with whatever cheap brushes and Humbrol paints the model shop had.
I’m handed the primed airbrush and once again I feel all wrong handed and manage to significantly add to the paint spills on the floor. Ooops.
It helps that my idea wasn’t a crisp and complicated design as I would have struggled with something even as simple as a fade, so I’m definitely playing to my strengths, and Bex and Ali are doing the tricky bits and nimbly stepping in when it looks like I might fuck up.
I’ve done enough colouring in over the years to trust the process and know that it can take a while for things to develop, and there is usually a dark stretch of self-doubt to wade through at some point – but any concerns I may have had about the whole concept finally make sense when I step away from the frame for a while. When I look back, the small voice in my head says: “That looks like chalk”. Well, that’s a relief.
I proclaim that I think I’m done at least three times before I actually am, which is a fair reflection of my working life in general as I’ll often spend an extra few hours on something that was considered finished. Then I almost derail the whole project in the finishing straight, also a fair reflection of my working life, by asking if I can have a representation of a lump of flint under the down tube by the bottom bracket, almost as a talisman to protect that area from the inevitable rock strike.
Bex agrees and using one of the flints I’ve brought with me as reference marks off a shape and starts to spray a black. She’s doing a good job but I can tell that it’s not up to her standards and it’s starting to make her uneasy. She stops and as it’s not looking quite right we discuss what to do and she goes in again.
There’s a moment where she renders the subtle wavey texture of a flint perfectly but there’s still an issue with it and she hands it over to me to take responsibility and with a few concentrated and considered fiddles with a paint brush I take it to the “That’ll do” stage, and we agree that it’s actually finally finally finally all done.
It has been a pleasure to spend a day in their company. They work hard, efficiently, and with an impressive amount of skill. It’s no wonder that their order books are full for months in advance and their list of clients is a Who’s Who of cycling brands and riders, because their finished product is exquisite, outstanding, and impeccable.
In these times, when it’s too easy to press a few buttons and come up with something that’s just good enough and get away with it, because people’s attention spans are disturbingly short and any extra effort is wasted because no-one really cares that much, mediocrity is wilfully accepted. So it’s an absolute privilege to be with people who show skill, dedication and a flawless eye for detail to deliver a finished product of the highest quality. They take an immense pride in their work, and so they should. I can’t thank them enough for taking the risk of me jeopardising their reputation by letting me loose on a bicycle frame.
Ali takes the frame and fork into the booth and gives them their first coat of lacquer which changes the look of the thing completely. My, ahem, artistic finish it’s quite textured, with thick lumps of paint all over it and an initial shiny layer literally glosses over that, mutes the colours elegantly and gives it a uniformity.
I leave the frame with them while I’m embarking on adventures, and Ali lacquers and flats back the frame multiple times to give it its final polished finish. It looks superb.
After a lifetime of artistic endeavours, it’s incredibly rare that the final result looks exactly like the image that was born inside my head but in this case, it does. If not better. Which is lovely.
The thought, emotion and time invested in this respray is worth a lot more than any monetary cost, and well over and above the joy of any new bike. It’s still my bike, but in a new pretty dress and while I might fret about dropping an Allen key on the top-tube when I’m building it up I won’t be bothered about putting the first scratch in it as that will just be part of the next adventurous chapter. I love my new bike.
Huge thanks to Fatcreations for all their help and patience with this project. Did I say how much I love it?
