Tall Bike Build: Day 2

I ended up forfeiting 2 hours to the tallbike project last night. It is like a drug habit. It can euphoric and frustrating, it causes pain and joy, and inevitably I end up diving through a dumpster to support my habit. Last night was no different, I waited for the thrift store employee to finish her break--after smoking what must have been an entire pack of cheap cigarettes--before I ventured to the dumpster. I enlisted my roommates' help. Upon arrival, we noticed a man approaching. I greeted the man who was waving his hands strangely and approaching from the dirt road section of the alley. He told me to be quiet because the neighbors often call the cops due to noise. I realized this man has been to this dumpster before so I asked if he lived around here. He replied, "no." A bit confused and impressed, I asked how he knew about the police problem due to the neighbors. As he hurled his body up the nearly 10 foot wall of the giant dumpster He responded, "I come here to get stuff all the time," then his body disappeared into the dumpster. As we pulled some scrap metal from the adjacent dumpster, he reappeared with a glass aquarium. With an eloquent maneuver he slid down the dumpster with the aquarium in hand and slithered off down the alley just as quickly as he had appeared. We maneuvered our scrap metal through a hole in the barbed wire fence heading back home and reminisced about the short encounter we just had. My roommate at one point scolded me, "why didn't you get his number? That guy is a professional. We could have learned a lot about the local dumpster scene from that man."

Ahhh, well back to the bike. First order of business was to break the tack welds holding two frames together, in a less than desirable setup. I figured it would be easy, but apparently my tack welds were better than I suspected. A few minutes later I had two loose frames again. Based on my previous thought that the bike was not tall enough, I eyeballed another mountain bike lounging in my backyard. This one is a Trek bike with flat tires and a tall seat tube. There was no turning back. My mind was already made up. The tall bike is getting another frame.

The trek bike still had wheels on it, which made is convenient to work with. I stacked the girls mountain bike on top of the trek bike, which was seatless and without handlebars at that point. Looking around for something straight to line up the frames I saw some oars leaning against the house. I removed the blades from the three oars I found and attempted to use the remaining aluminum tubes from the oars to square up the bike frames. It seemed like this situation could use some zip ties. I yelled out to my roommate and he promptly dropped a bag of zip ties out the second story window to me. I zipped the oars to the two frames, stacked the third on top and zipped it in place. All of the sudden it started to look like a tallbike, and my neighbor came over to check it out.

30 minutes and a few conversations too devious to share with the general public, I was itching to press on. I began searching for a metal rod to line up the head tubes. My first attempt was to use a broom, but it had too small of a diameter and I was left unsatisfied with the alignment. At this point I went to the dumpster in the outing mentioned above. I then cut up a child's school desk and welded two of the legs together, using the the metal broomstick to hold them in alignment. After they were tacked together I tried to slip the broom shaft out from the chair legs. They were stuck so I started hitting it with a hammer. This approach is useful whenever frustrated. The top of it mushroomed, but I failed to see that until after I pulled on the shaft and cut my finger. The pain was minimal, but the blood was not. Looking at the mushroomed metal in bewilderment, blood ran down my hand and I saw the chunk of flesh that was no longer part of me still on the curled metal end. This wasn't a normal cut; in fact, it was like a small sharp ice cream scoop removed some flesh from my pinkie. To stop the bleeding I applied a bandage with sufficient force to nearly cut off circulation. It seemed like enough excitement for one night, so I switched back to studying for the actuarial exam, a safer and more productive activity, for the remainder of the evening.