Bicycles make a perfect base for a project. They are fairly simple to work with, and parts are readily available through many different channels. All you really need are some tools, some skill to use them.. and an idea.

I’ve wanted to build a “chopper” style bike for a while. Finding myself in possession of a number of older bicycles one summer, I decided to turn them into said project.
As it stands at the time of this post, the bike is actually complete, minor a few small parts I’ll swap out at a later time. I have not yet taken shots of the final product, so I’ll have to follow up later on with some.

It’s always a good idea to start off a project like this with some idea of what you want it to look like in the end, and mocking things up is a good way to get this idea. I cut the frames into pieces in order to organize them the way I wanted. Satisfied with the way it was looking, I could begin tacking it together with welds.

With the parts tacked together, I threw on the rear wheel, seat, forks, etc to make sure everything was still looking alright. I could then continue to add any missing pieces of tubing and throw in more permanent beads of weld.

With welding, like many other things in life, preperatory work is important! To achieve nice clean welds, it really helps to make sure your metal is free of paint, oil and any other contaminants. For this bike, I didn’t mind more of a ratrod look, and went forward without taking such steps for the most part.

After grinding down welds, filling in any pits with body filler, sanding and giving a good rubdown with alcohol to eliminate contaminants, the frame and forks were hung up and painted through use of a paint gun.

At this point, I decided I no longer wanted to use a small 20″ wheel in the back, as I was using a larger 24″ wheel up front.  A friend had a dirtbike at the time that had been through a fire, and was nice enough to give me the front wheel off of it. After mocking it up, I decided there wasn’t any other way to go about it.

First problem was that I had to stretch out and widen the rear dropouts on the frame in order to accommodate the overall larger dirtbike wheel. This turned out to be a fairly simple modification.

Second problem was that there was no way to run the wheel off of a bicycle chain. To overcome this, I took a spare bicycle hub with the threading for a freewheel and cut that end off just after the flange for the spokes. I then centered the modified hub on the hub of the dirtbike wheel and drilled four holes through the flange and directly into the soft aluminum of the larger of the two hubs. After tapping threads into the new holes in the dirtbike hub, I bolted the bicycle hub onto it, using some Loctite to prevent it from later loosening off. The freewheel could now be added, and the wheel was ready for use.

Jumping to a different aspect of this build, I also reupholstered a seat for the bike. After cleaning up and painting the seat pan, I glued on a new layer of foam and finished with a black and gray paisley fabric.

Here’s the finished frame, with a sissy bar welded in place to hold the rear of the banana seat. I had also decided at this point to go with a new color; lime green.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, this bike is actually complete at this point, I just haven’t managed to take any pics of it yet. Part 2 to come-