“An Airstream is a lot like a first love: you are lured by her charm, seduced by her beauty, and once bitten, you are forever chasing after her mystique.”
― Bruce Littlefield, Airstream Living
Tag Archives: steel
Stripped to Bare Steel
I want a new bicycle but I simply can’t afford one. So I’m making do.
I’ve been riding my old Technium and it’s doing well. It’s a road bike and a lot of fun. Still, one of my long-term goals is to integrate biking with my daily life and I want a commuting/shopping/bombing around the neighborhood bike. I want a bike that can go anywhere, anytime – and I don’t really care how long it takes to get there.
So I’m rebuilding my old Yokota Yosemite steel mountain bike. I’ve scrounged up a set of fenders, front and back racks, and a cheap lighting system. I found bargains on new shifters, brake levers, and more modern V-brakes to replace the squealing cantilevers.
My old bike. I bought it for sixty bucks at a pawn shop over fifteen years ago.
Looking at the bike, though, I realized the paint was really messed up. It was white, and showed every scratch and scrape… and twenty years of tough riding left a lot of scratches and scrapes.
I decided to paint the thing. If nothing else, this gave me an excuse to remove every little piece and part. One of the few good things about doing your own maintenance is that it teaches you about your bike and gives you a connection – the inanimate, mechanical object of metal, plastic, and rubber – becomes almost a living thing in your mind, and extension of your own body, so to speak.
The only problem is that stripping all the paint off the old steel frame was a ton of work. Paint stripper, flat bladed scrapers, and sandpaper… combined with helpings of time and elbow grease took the thing down to stripped bare steel. I don’t know what kind of paint they used, but it was tough.
I have become enamored of steel framed bikes. Nowadays, of course, it’s all aluminum and/or carbon fiber. Anything to shave off a few more ounces.
But now that I see the gleaming steel that was under that paint – I’ll take the toughness, versatility, and smooth ride of that steel even if I have to push around a couple more pounds.
I never noticed the Yosemite engraved on the seat tube until I removed the old paint.
A lot of tubes, a lot of paint to scrape off.
The bare steel flash rusts almost immediately without any paint protecting it. I’ll have to give it a final sanding right before I prime it.
Now I’m ready. We have this little plastic outbuilding that I need to clean out and convert into a temporary paint booth. I’ll have to slot out the time and I’ll need a final sanding to clean the flash rust off the frame; then it’s primer-color-clear.
I thought about colors – I want something really simple that won’t show dirt. It looks like it’ll be Charleston Green. – which is almost black, but is supposed to show a green tint when the sun hits it right. That’s darker than I was thinking originally (I was looking for a dark British Racing Green) but the more I thought about it, and the more I read about the history of the color, Charleston Green it is.
Harrow
The other day I came across an article: 5 landmarks you probably didn’t know about in Downtown Dallas. I knew four of the landmarks well, but had never heard of or been to Lubben Plaza outside the Belo building in downtown.
Last Saturday, after I did a group bike ride on Exposition Avenue and Deep Ellum that visited a number of fashion boutiques in the area (but before I came across the car fire) I wanted to ride a few more miles so I crossed downtown Dallas along the Sharrows on Main Street and jumped over to the park.
There were three cool sculptures there:
LUBBEN PLAZA
Belo Corp. developed Lubben Plaza in 1985 to commemorate the centennial of The Dallas Morning News. It was given to the City of Dallas in honor of Belo’s long-time employees, past and present.
It is named for John F. Lubben and his son Joseph A. Lubben, who together completed 101 years of combined service to the Company.
Belo commissioned three Texas artists to produce the sculptures installed here. “Harrow” by Linnea Glatt and “Journey to Sirius” by George Smith were installed in 1992 in commemoration of Belo’s sesquicentannial. “Gateway Stele” by Jesus Bautista Moroles was installed in 1994, when Belo developed the current Lubben East parking lot.
The most obvious piece was “Harrow”. It’s a giant steel spiral that rotates slowly around a circular bed of sand, cutting a series of concentric eponymous harrows and it goes.
The Harrow, in Lubben Park, Dallas, Texas
HARROW
1992
by Linnea Glatt
Dallas, TX
Combining elements of time, motion and place, “Harrow” is an installation of many materials and elements. The motorized cone of Cor-Ten steel turns on a circular track completing one revolution in 24 hours. As the cone turns, its bands travel through a bed of sand forming concentric rings, Seats of Cor-Ten and wood are placed in informal groups amidst trees outside the circle of sand.
James Cinquemani designed and produced the mechanical elements of “Harrow”.
Linnea Glatt:
“I am interested in the idea of placemaking, of which this is my most obvious manifestation. Of my works, ‘Harrow’ is the most active and on the contrary the most serene and contemplative. The repetition and constancy of the bands of the cone drawing in the sand symbolize for me the cyclical nature of life and the balancing of life’s events. The gesture is meant to embrace, to settle and to provoke thought. As with my previous pieces, ‘Harrow’ implies a human presence and dialogue.”
A distant, out of focus skateboarder jumps across the street from The Harrow.
The Harrow, by Linnea Glatt
I sat and looked at it for a while, but it didn’t seem to be moving. Maybe they shut it off on the weekends. I’ll have to check it out again, see if I can see it roll.
Bill Chance 