The Christmas Project

As a Christmas present for my colleague and his girlfriend who both have a penchant for most things vintage I decided to get them a tradesman's bicycle for display and hopefully use around their village. I purchased the bicycle from Beaulieu auto jumble in September and spent the following months up to Christmas making it road worthy and adorning it with a new sign written center board, basket and lamp bracket and lamp. The bicycle was in fairly good nick it has had a hard life and bears the scars of this but I knew the recipients would love it all the more for that so I decided to do a minim amount to the original paint work but concentrate on personalising it and most importantly fitting some brakes and repairing puntures. The bicycle has no makers marks apart from a Phillips stamp on the crank case so at a guess it's probably a Phillips circa Late 1930's to mid 1940's.

Some pics below of the project apologies for missing out some bits, I forgot to take shots of some bits.



Straight from the autojumble.



Lets make a start at making it stop.



Cardboard Template for sign writing practice.



Hooray! found a basket that fits at the local Ironmongers.





First attempt of sign writing, I was fairly pleased however further practices really helped and some invaluable advice from a good friend who is a bit of a dab hand when it comes to sign writing.



Here we go metal board cut painted and final sign writing begining heart in mouth time, boy I was worried about mucking it up however thanks to some white spirit most mistakes were erased and made good.



Both sides finished at last, I was delighted and left a bit dizzy from the white spirit fumes!



Christmas Eve ready for delivery to unknowing recepient.



A happy man zipping around the village on his new bicycle.



At rest at its new home.