Knocked out my digital mockups for this Schwinn over the past week. Even after my last physical mockup of this bike, I was still rather ho-hum about building this Schwinn, but as soon as I traced over it in Photoshop and got everything "painted" one solid color, I was kind of knocked out by the newfound potential this Schwinn had! I ended up coming up with over 60 different paint schemes and color combos that I liked! I'm not going to show every one of them, as most of the differences are just down to colors, but I'll share some of my favorites.
As much as I love all the other ideas I came up with for this Schwinn, there was one idea I came up with early on that I loved better than the rest.
See, I have 2 cans of Rust-Oleum Hunter Green and 1 can of Rust-Oleum Almond spray paint I've been itching to use on a project. Not only that, but I had this idea for lightning bolt scallops for a while, and I figured it'd be fun to try it on this bike. And to top it off, that Hunter Green paint reminds me of the green Park Tool bearing grease I use on all my bikes. Add that all up, and you get...
Greased Lightning!
...And I'm not going to call it that. For starters, I've never seen any version of the movie or play that song's from, and more importantly, after looking up the song on YouTube and a summary of the story on Wikipedia, I
really don't want to make any references to anything that raunchy. That's just not my style.
Still, I loved the initial concept and paint scheme, so I toyed around with it some more and came up with a better name that still had a bit of an edge:
SHOCK THERAPY.
Building these vintage bicycles has been some of the best therapy I've ever had to help me get through these last few years, and sometimes it's shocking how much potential some of these bikes have! I was almost ready to pull the plug on this project and just trade it at an upcoming swap meet, but after this last round of mockups, I've found the energy I need to bring this Schwinn back to life once more!