BMX I loved the most…

I bought this in around 2017.

It was purchased new for a young kid in 2012, who then got bored of it, and it had been stuffed in the back of his dad’s shed ever since.

It was in a bad way in terms of neglect, but was otherwise fine in terms of frame and forks integrity. It had badly chipped and scratched Matt Black factory paint, and a lot of shed stuff had been spilled on it over the years. It was a mess. I paid about 30 for it.

I stripped it down, stripped the paint off the frame and forks back to bare metal, and resprayed it in my friends pro paint workshop where we used to build hot rods.

I had been experimenting with laying on chemically incompatible paints via two paint guns simultaneously, and this paint combo had a thinned down signwriter’s gold enamel mixed in with the black.

During the curing process the black cured to the surface and the gold cured to the primer. End result, pure black frame. Total failure…

:/

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…Until I finally wheeled it out of the workshop into the sunshine and the entire things was just glowing sparkling gold in weird swirly patterns. It actually looked like a gold frame in sunlight, and the swirls of paint seemed like they were moving.

It could never be captured on video or photos but in dull light on a cloudy day this bike just looked black. Pure gloss black. A video shows how it looked out of direct sunlight shortly after painting… [https://vimeo.com/873901529?share=copy](https://vimeo.com/873901529?share=copy)

It was the weirdest thing. When I was experimenting with mixing the paints they kind of fought against each other and just swirled around constantly under their own steam, and even when cured hard they still seemed to be doing that (they weren’t but that was the effect). Video of both paints writhing around together under their own steam… [https://vimeo.com/913407479?share=copy](https://vimeo.com/913407479?share=copy)

I used a compound paste to take the black back a few microns and let more of the gold through, but it always had a crazy all black vs brilliant gold kind of effect.

So then I started building it up with gold toned parts, tyres etc. This was by a very long way the BMX I was the most capable on. I could ride this thing like it was a magic carpet. Rode it for about 3 years before I sold it on. I REALLY regret selling it.

It was a 2012 Cult, but that’s all I knew. The frame number had CR at the end and when I wrote to Cult to ask if they could identify it, they said it was one of the final 200 CC02s which were made in full Cromoly, and it was Cult’s first full Cromoly frame apparently. I don’t know how true that is, but most CC02s were Hi-Ten.

I miss this bike badly. It went to live in Brazil with its new owner who was studying in the UK at the time.

Stem: Upside down on purpose (edit oh no, it’s not in these pics) .Seatpost: actually is a laid back seatpost by CultChicago bars: What can I say, I like my bars upright.

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by Awkward_Importance49