Bike Building Adventures: Turning Spare Parts into Adventure Machines

I had a huge collection of old bike parts and I had a todo item on my list to sell them on eBay for a couple of years. However, I never got round to it and after fixing up one bike which I then sold on Facebook Marketplace, I thought, maybe I’ll use my spare bike parts to build up full bikes instead. Then I can either ride them or sell them.

So with this somewhat functional approach, I spent a portion of some spare time I had waiting for a new job to start building up bike by bike. This include old racing bikes that were my dads’, building up my old Kona touring bike into a mountain bike and creating a positively Frankinstein gravel bike out of an old mountain bike frame with turned out to be a fun bike to ride!

I bought a few extra bits off eBay to finish the bikes, like brake pads and cables, but mostly had all the required components.

The unforeseen joy experienced in working on the bikes was a welcome surprise. In addition, by working on the bikes I also tidied out my workshop and tools and acquired a few new skills, such as building my own headset press, researching old campagnolo brake levers and the set up of centre pull brakes.

I highly recommend, if you have loads of bike parts hanging about and can’t be bothered to individually set them, that you build them up into bike if possible and then ride them or sell them. There is little more depressing than a pile of bike parts that aren’t being used, possibly because every bike part projects a vision of a possible bike that it could be used on and also a possible riding experience that could therefore be had.