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Also, I would REALLY love to save these pedals, but they're pretty rough. Both axles are bent; one is bad and the other is worse. I will try to use the tips that @The Renaissance Man shared when he rejuvenated his X-53 pedals.

Home today for a doctor's appointment, so I decided to work on the bent fork. I made a homebrew fork straightening apparatus a few years ago and tried it on a Stingray Junior and it worked great. But this bike is a little more special than a Stingray Junior, so I was a little apprehensive about...

Things have changed. Today I swapped most of the parts off the girls' bike onto the boys' frame. I am pretty thrilled that everything fit. I know for that some brands (Schwinn?) some pieces don't work that way... rear fender? chainguard, maybe? But in this case, everything was a direct...

This is all great too. I have some more chrome to clean up on this same bike project and will be trying brass/copper wool on some of it, and an oxalic acid bath on other parts. I did aluminum foil on the chrome part of the guard and it seemed to work well; I also sealed the chrome/paint on the...

Thank you. Saving this for future reference.

now that you mention it, I have seen signs for a place near me that does soda blasting. I will look them up. Thanks!

So I've got this X-53 boys' bike with horrible homebrew paint and lots of wrong parts, and I just stumbled upon a complete X-53 girls' bike with fair to good paint. At the moment my plan is to paint the boys frame and tank to match the two-tone blue paint scheme of the girls bike and switch the...

cleaned some more

started picking away

CAN NOT believe my luck on this one. Will be combining these two on the boys’ frame.

This rear fender brace has been bugging me since I started tinkering with this thing. Based on pictures I've seen of originals, that light blue painted strap across the fender is supposed to go INSIDE the fender. But I had no idea if this was the original part or something the previous owner...

paint for the front fender turned out to be a pretty good match... just gotta dirty it up now so it blends with the rest of the bike

At first I thought the paint coming off with the stencil ruined the look, but now I kinda like it.

ok so... didja ever do a test shot of something that came out SO GOOD that you just knew you'd never be able to replicate it for the real thing? well, that's kinda what happened here, except not really. I have been thinking I'd use my diecut stencil technique to fake together some graphics for...

UPS got the fender here a day early. After adding a couple of dimples, it fits up in the Spaceliner fork perfectly, and it clears the tire with the suspension bottomed out. Now I just have to shorten the front support struts. Then we'll see how well that spray bomb really matches the rear...

All this talk of bikes getting stolen at college... too real. I gave my son a Murray BeachComber cruiser to use at college and it got stolen. Then his buddy saw it parked in front of an academic building and called him. The buddy waited around for backup and my son ran over and stole it back...

Got my Amazon package yesterday with a 20t rear sprocket for this thing, so I spent an hour juggling cranksets, sprockets, and bottom bracket pieces. This is what I ended up with. I got it with a 46 tooth sprocket and 18 tooth rear cog, which was geared higher than I like. I stripped this 44t...

So since I picked up this bike and started tinkering with it, the garage has been deteriorating. This one came with a girls' Murray-built something-or-other middleweight that was painted the same shade of pool-liner blue and accessorized in a similarly horrific fashion. The guy wanted them both...

It's changed some since that last picture... I haven't ridden it in a while. Now I want to drag it out and take it for a spin.

Just noticed the discussion of this bike between here and the CABE. Only tangentially related, but I had an older Columbia-built Higgins that was difficult for me to pin down a year/model for: https://ratrodbikes.com/threads/higgins-tank-bike.110399/ The stars/graphics on the fork of yours is...