I painted my bike

One of my hardest endeavors, who knew drawing on tubes would be this difficult.

My main idea for the bike was to mimic 16th century etchings, an old process that has influenced a lot of my artwork in my artist career. I didn't want to draw on the entire bike because I felt that from a distance it wouldn't be too clear, so I went for more of a gradient with heavy contrast towards the back of the bike.

As I could talk about the art process all day, I think the most impressive part of this bike is I built all of this just shy under $2500. I was scouting Facebook marketplace for bikes like we always do and came across an all black road frame covered in random stickers for $300 and didn't think much of it, until I caught a faint glimpse of "SLR 01" on the downtube. Turns out the guy who posted that listing had a pro team from Canada "Automatic Racing" donate their old seasons frames… like almost 15 of them, some brand new some crashed. I Almost wanted to buy all of them off of him, but I knew how excited I was to find a deal like that, other people would also be happy. As for the wheel set, I could have thrown a better pair on the bike, but I first got heavy into cycling in early 2020 when Team Bahrain Victorious was riding those orange Merida Reactos with these wheels and I fell in love with the look. I found them online for $600 for the wheel set. Got a used Sram red groupset for $1000 which came with an enve handlebar which I flipped for the new Sram Force 160mm cranks. A few hundred dollars on tires, rotors. and had some extra money to splurge on the BMC Aero one piece handlebar for $350.

This bike might not be optimal for many, but I couldn't come any closer to perfection for myself and thats what building bikes is all about.