8th AF WW2 Tribute Bike

Not that old, but I thought I'd post my 1993 Giant Innova, originally MC Hammer-time purple with silver streaks. My first attempt at customizing a bike (excepting all the bikes I made from discarded parts when I was a kid) and I use it as my general beater.



Here are the shifters I made from some downtube shifters to sort of resemble something that might be found in an old fighter or bomber cockpit. The green twine didn't look right, so that's been replaced by brown.



Needs a pinup girl! I like this one because it reminds me of my ex and I think it's funny because she's not a bike person (we are still friends). The other fork has a different girl with a less funny name.



General use. This was actually just an experiment as there's too much traffic and a big hill coming back from a day paddling to get this to the ocean from my house, plus the plastic boat isn't so good in the ocean and there's no way I'd risk my wood boats like this!

Looks good!

I rigged up a 12V lighting system and did some other work to the old beater. The headlight is a LED motorcycle unit running off a li-ion battery pack sitting inside the frame bag. The tail light is a trailer brake light running off a smaller li-ion pack inside the ugly pack under the fender. I still need to build a couple of side "wings" on the fender to fill that gap above the wheel and cover the ugliness, but everything works pretty well. The headlight would be weak for a motorcycle (listed as "offroad use only" for a reason), but it's plenty bright for a bicycle traveling under 20 mph. Also made some oak block pedals out of some cheap plastic block cruiser pedals so they look a little more correct for the period.

That is a nice machine. Well balanced with the new lights!