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I love these old bikes! If you haven't tried The CABE yet, they're generally not as friendly, but there are a lot of knowledgeable people on there. Too bad about the repaint as there was likely some nice pinstriping on there originally (whatever might have been left of it).

You can also use pedals like these and substitute wood blocks. For making new rubber blocks, all you need is originals to make a mold from, then mix the proper durometer rubber to get the correct pedal block feel (which might take some experimentation). You can also make them in different...

Are they red lights? From what I've read, sea turtles don't see over 700nm, but we do, so that would be a color range that shouldn't bother them. How do I know this? Research on animals for a series of (older) kid's books. I might be overthinking them.

If you can braze or weld yourself, you could try replacing the steering tube or cut an intact one off an otherwise junk fork and weld that onto the old one (I would cut the tube on the fork you want pretty low down so that you could sleeve the inside where you put the new extension tube without...

I had a Cardiff B17 imitation (I believe the Velo Orange and several other brands are the same mfg., but I could be wrong) on Retro Rocket because it was on sale for about $50 and I wanted a turquoise seat to match and didn't want to experiment with leather painting a real Brooks. The frame is...

I think it varies with the item. I was always told 100 years for an antique for things like furniture, but 25 for cars. Don't know where bicycles fall, but just from that small sample, it appears that it might depend upon the likelihood that the item will survive the term. Furniture...

Definitely, but that's a lot more than I'd want to spend.

I think wood was a fairly popular early material. Here's an 1898 Chilion:

The TRM tanks are bolt on (thick) fiberglass, so steel could definitely be stronger, especially if welded on. The old American style head tubes are a different diameter compared to typical newer bikes. I don't know which fork you're looking at, but I would imagine a triple tree kind of fork or...

I'm not saying it would break, just be prepared to have a high tolerance for a lack of torsional rigidity or you might want to reinforce it. I have a step-through Sears Spaceliner and Columbia Firebolt (basically the same thing, just Columbia's version). The Spaceliner was stiffened considerably...

I thought I'd do a quick post about the Retro Rocket's shifters as, though I doubt this is likely to be imitated, there may be some helpful things for anyone contemplating a suicide shifter from grip shifters for the first time. This is Retro Rocket: The challenge here was fitting everything...

A lot of people buy Huffys to use the wheels for a build of something else. The ones on there look pretty rusty, but are they solid metal and can the spoke nipples still be turned to true it? If so, it would mostly just cost you time. If you know someone who can sandblast them for you, that...

The Spaceliner trike with the added tubes might have been done for stiffness—these are really floppy frames and a trike would put more torsional loads on it.

I assume the tires are missing so you can't read the sidewall, but I believe those are 630 ISO and there's plenty of them still being made. You won't have the selection of more common and modern sizes, but you'll have a decent number of choices available. Unfortunately, a lot of bike shops hate...

I can see a swan in that frame profile. You're going to cover it in swan body work?!

Whoa, we usually we get the wussy pines that fall over. They can still do damage, of course, but it's almost expected. Definitely would have been a bad day if that hit the house. I like the mangled stop sign pic, though—like nature showing it cares not for our rules or something.

Your daughter's bike is awesome! I tried to get my nephew into building a bike, but it doesn't come with an LCD screen, so he wasn't interested. Maybe the nieces in a few years—they seem more interested in mechanical stuff, anyway.

I tried to keep the vote down to 10. I got it to 11, but I just got a skin graft and it is unpleasant, so that's my excuse for not having it in me to whittle it down further! Got caught up in an electric kayak project (I hope that the remote trim mechanism 3.2 finally works out!) and several...

There are no prefixes for car names, so people assume Duchess refers to myself instead of a real car (now deceased) and various fictional other vehicles (except, strangely, a bicycle). I loved your build—classy and elegant. I especially liked the copper bird fender ornament. I would love to...

I think that's a great idea! But, yeah, there's probably not much money in it and then you still have to police the patent yourself and it's only valid in whatever country it's issued, there all kinds of ways around them, and Chinese manufacturers won't care, anyway. If it was cheap, the plaque...