Dear Harry,
Many thanks for giving your old bicycle to Hannah and myself. We appreciated you thinking of us and we were certainly interested in a winter restoration project.
Unfortunately things have not gone to plan. As you know you kindly gave us the bike in bits. There was the frame, with handlebars, seat post, saddle and derailleurs. Separate were the wheels (without tyres) and the chainset. We left it alongside our house, not thinking there was any risk of it disappearing as we live in a low-crime area.
You will know what I am coming to here. Some light fingered scallywag of a thief removed it! In other words someone stole it, lifted it, pilfered it and ran off with it (certainly couldn’t ride off on it). Clearly a thief of taste, recognising the fine heritage of a Reynolds 531 frame and nice wheels with their double butted spokes and Mavic rims.
You might be wondering what we had in mind for the bike. Well, as you suggested it was probably not cost effective to get it back on the road, especially as we were not sure it was the right size for Hannah. Instead I was thinking of being creative and turning it into some kind of garden sculpture. There’s quite a few examples on the internet:
bicycle sculptures screenshot
Hey ho. It does not look like we’ll be doing anything like that then.
I can tell you we also thought of having some other fun. My other friend Dee, who recently paid us a visit from California has a few nice pairs of wheels including one with only 14 spokes per wheel! We could try doing something like that by removing some of the spokes, although not sure we could go down quite that low and still be confident of a wheel taking the strain. We could drill loads of 10mm holes in the frame, we could do the most amazing paint job, we thought of burying half the bike in the ground, we thought of vertically cutting it in half and fixing it onto a wall and making it look like it was disappearing into the bricks. In fact there’s no shortage of things we could have done.
Alas we can’t do any of those things because some scallywag of a ne’er-do-well. Now that’s not an excuse for someone else to dump a load of rubbish on our driveway either!
Once again, we thank you Harry for your thoughtfulness.
Yours sincerely
Doug & Hannah
RSS – Posts