What I did to my artistic bike

Quite a few people showed an interest in this bike after I'd won it on ebay, so I thought I'd update for you guys.

I don't have the original photos from the ebay auction but for those that saw it will know the bike had upright cowhorn bars on it, these came quite far back towards the body making it hard to bar-spin...so I wanted to replace them, they were however one piece bar and stem with no bolt on the top, they had to be undone from underneath the crown of the fork and I had to buy a special box spanner to do this.

I replaced them with a pair of GB Maes steel bars, turned upside down, which I also got on ebay, these resemble the type of bar used on modern artistic bikes (which are very expensive) I used a second-hand, steel dutch-bike stem which I picked up at Bikeworks.

The wheels it was delivered with had wooden tubular rims, I'd really like to restore these, but as I wanted to get the bike up and running asap I decided to get some wheels built, also the specialist tubs for artisitc bikes are for indoor use and I wanted clinchers so I could use for all sorts of terrain....well the street outside my house actually. So a pair of 36-hole generic track hubs from SJS laced 3-cross front and back onto a bog-standard mountain bike rim, with Specialized fatboys for low rolling resistance with comfort and reasonably high tyre pressures and can be used on a variety of surfaces.

I haven't been able to get the 24 tooth 3/16th!!! sprocket off yet, but managed to get a 22 tooth 1/8th sprocket from SJS which seems to run smooth enough with the fat chain.

I had to adjust bottom bracket and replace cotter pins, I also made mini foot pegs using axle extenders intended for attaching stabilisers and filling them out with nuts with a dome-headed nut at the end:

I've had a couple of hours on it, it's great fun.....don't think I'll ever be a great trick rider but can already do 540 bar-spins, can occasionally do a complete backward circle, steer bike with feet on bars and riding backwards sitting on the bars is easy. Wheelies are too easy...I keep coming off the back, so practice needed.
Here's how it looks now:

If I swap out the bars with the chopped ones below, maybe take off the mini foot pegs, then I should have a great polo bike (geometry is not too dissimilar to the polo bikes at HH), also there's enough clearance for some reasonably chunky knobblys so even grass court polo???

Hope to bring this down to polo soon if anyone wants to have a go on it.

Looks cool Winston, I'd love to have ago. Hope you don't have to ride too far with that gearing.

Good training for the rollers, commuting on that thing.

hipster

yeah bring it to polo... looks fun!

whut is that sadle???

it's an artistic cycling specific saddle that the bike came with, pretty heavy duty, has a metal plate underneath to keep the leather in that shape, guess it's that shape so you don't slip off the back when doing tricks or wheelies....when freewheeling with feet on the bars it really works! researched replacements from Germany which come in at about 200 quid...

That bike is awesome...

The seat cleaned up well from the original photo.

all I did was polish it with my arse.

Awesome!!!

hipster

racist

really nice indeed!!

Forget polo. You need to start up some http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO8xBlkumYM
with that.

RAD! really RAD.....

I'm going to have to get one so I can piss my girlfriend off even more!.....that and a cyclocross bike. Does anyone have one of them up for sale BTW?