Remember that day I was feeling lucky, last weekend when I chanced upon a red Shogun Mixte amongst the South Melbourne nature strip hard rubbish heaps. I felt blessed, I grabbed it straight away. I've had my eyes open for one of these for a while to build up for feride to replace her heavy Indian built Avon bike I bought her last Christmas. The plan is to go single speed with a coaster brake, the good old foot brake. Haven't decided on the colour scheme yet but have decided on chrome plated forks.
So the forks came off on Thursday night and the paint stripper and wet & dry emery paper came out. The fork isn't turning out too bad, a few pock marks and some kind of rough areas that must have happened during the bending of the fork blades. So it's stripped and I'm in the process polishing it up in preparation for the electro-plating. The fork crown looks nice enough though a little crude, also trying to clean it up a bit by evening up its surfaces. I've never had any electro-plating done, fingers crossed it works out well. I'll update with some pictures when the chrome is done.
Here are a few pics of me at work on the forks. Take note of my non-workshop, it's the tiny back yard, courtyard of my little single fronted house in Carlton. Most of the work happens on the paved bricks as you can see, amongst the Autumn leaf and spring blossom debris. The bike junk storage system will also need some serious attention this summer. You might also notice the container of caustic soda and the rim sitting in a paint tray in the background. That's my solution for MDF's hub problem, I'm stripping the anodizing from the rim in order to polish it up. Been having so much trouble tracking down a 36 hole fixed hub to build onto the original rims I've given up and decided to use a new 32 hole rim to match the hubs that are readily available. So in the end the rims will be mismatched, but my theory is that doesn't matter, it's the same on my first fixie, which incidentally MDF referred to when describing what he was after with his yellow machine.
