Pictures Fresh From The Powder Coater – Serotta Project

I got new pictures in yesterday; the powder coating and paint is now complete. Also the pictures are better quality, and now include the fork as well:

This shot is linked direct to photobucket and looks good:

The next two shots I had to download via facebook and are not as good, but they do illustrate the whole “blue from the front, red from the rear” aspect of the scheme:

Not only is it patriotic, but there is a physics joke in it as well. I’m curious to see if anyone gets it

@TwoWheelsDC 38407 wrote:

ooooh, couplers! I was wondering what the tape was covering in the first set of pics. Can you explain how you had those done?

And I’m guessing the joke is about redshift…clearly I watch too much Big Bang Theory.

This has been a long project. I first bought the frame used locally on CL, and it looked like:

[IMG]http://www.cornbread.com/~pedrick/images/serotta_C3S.JPG[/IMG]

I sent it off to Bilenky Cycle Works to have the BTCs retrofitted, and opted to leave it “raw” with just primer covering the brazed areas. Did some test riding and some test travelling with it, and Bilenky had done a fantastic job. Having BTCs and the travel case is great but it is no panacea; the first time I packed it I definitely had that 2am-night-before-a-flight feeling of trying to pack the darn thing in the box, and really not knowing how it was all going to fit. But it did somehow. My recommendation is pack a day in advance especially if it is your first time

One thing I wasn’t crazy about were some of the existing braze-ons such as the downtube cable stops which you can see here:

[IMG]http://www.cornbread.com/~pedrick/images/Serotta_C3S_HT.JPG[/IMG]

You can see them on the headtube lug (not the rusted ones on the top tube) and that they are rather “slight”, to put it nicely. When the BTCs were installed Bilenky cut slots in the cable stops so the cables could be removed. Well I really didn’t like that at all so I sent it back to Bilenky to have them removed and have traditional downtube stops installed. My thinking was that since this is a travel bike, if I ever damage an STI lever I can find a downtube shifter almost anywhere in the world.

After Bilenky was done with it I brought it to a local powder coater for finishing. This, my friends is where our story takes a sad turn. I have no bad blood with the person who tried to do the work, but in the end the original fork got damaged, they had the frame for a very long time and were not very responsive, and in the end they couldn’t do the work and had to bow out. Out of fairness I would rather not name the company nor say anything about my experience with them without telling the whole story. Save that for another time. Suffice to say they tried their best to make a bad situation right.

Now we move on to the happy part of the story where I had the frame sent to Spectrum Powderworks. That was only 4 weeks ago, and they went from raw steel to what you see in the pics. I am thrilled, and I cannot wait to ride it.

Hi forum! So, now that the holidays are over and I actually have this frame in my hot little mitts, it is time to build it up.

However, I could really use some style input. The central question is, how far do I want to take this leading-blue/trailing-red color scheme? Do I want to keep it simple and let it shine with a few well placed touches or do I continue it with every possible component?

I love silver components on a classic road bike; I don’t want anything black on this bike except tires. Every component if possible will be either red, blue, silver or white. I am going with a silver seatpost and stem, silver BB cups, silver f/r derailleurs and silver crank. Handlebar is white, saddle is white and bar tape will be either silver (Cinelli “carbon” tape; I have a ton of that stuff) or white.

As far as red/blue, I have a Thomson dress-up kit that includes a blue faceplate/clamp and a red stem cap (a nice gift from Thomson…cool!). I will be doing, when I can source them, blue/red front and rear brakes, as well as a blue front hub and red rear hub.

Here is where I am not sure how far to go:

• Rims – should I do red/blue or just do them silver? Will silver rims look strange with the red/blue hubs?
• Headset – Since technically the bottom bearing is “leading” and the top bearing is “trailing”, do I go with red/blue? Or is that absurd and I should just do silver?
• Tires – Red stripe/blue stripe or just black?
• Cable housing (yes, getting that ridiculous) – should all of the housing visible from the rear be red and all visible from the front blue, or go with white? Or silver?
• Shift lever hood covers, “hudz” – blue or white?

I can’t think of anything else. Ideas?

P.S. One awesome side-benefit of refinishing is that after the frame is stripped, it looks like new on the inside! And trust me, this thing looked like crud on the inside when I first bought it, and there was a little bit of pitting on the outside as well which proved to be just on the surface and is now gone. This should be of comfort to all steel bike owners, that even though you may open up your bottom bracket to find what looks like a soupy orange mineral garden, in all but the most profoundly corroded frames what really lies underneath is probably this:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2224[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]2225[/ATTACH]