Building a better guide bike

A good town bike for the river guides at work needs to do three things:

1: Be mechanically sound enough to complete about 20 trips per day from town to the store.

2: Survive drunken crashes.

3: Be cool enough to keep dirt-bag employees off of the nicer rentals.

With those things in mind, I grabbed a can of truck-bed liner and used it to hose down an old cruiser frame.

The bedliner should keep the frame from rusting, and be durable enough to be dropped and kicked across the pavement everyday. Since the bike is going to be left outside in the rain all summer, I used a KMC Rustbuster chain. I'm not sure how much rust it's going to bust, but it sure looks classy:

After I put the chain on and trued the wheels, it was testing time. Just to make sure everything worked, I threw down some phat skidz with the coaster brake.



Then the coaster brake broke, and the wheel fell off. I had to postpone the skidding.



A chain link and a few turns of the wrench later, the bike was ready to shred again. I tried some more destructive skids, and nothing exploded. Success.



The dangerously bent fork just makes the handling livelier. It's a feature, not a problem (until somebody hits the rail road crossing too fast, snaps the fork, and shatters their face)