The Glen Esk Ballroom: Moonshining & Ratrodding

I’ve been making a concentrated effort to do more productive stuff in the weekends and finish some projects. I also committed to doing more exercise and drinking less. Meh. The first project is the old trike that’s been rusting under the house. I wanna rat-rod it – flat black, bare metal and some bright red, kinda like this:

(There’s heaps more salty goodness like this from Bonneville here at jonesblog. Well worth a visit, great pics.)

PROJEKT 1

I stripped it down a while ago and pulled it apart then left it. Lazy bastard. You get an idea of the condition in the first pic. She’d been a seaside bike so she had a few rust bites before I abandoned it. Those are my assistants/apprentices/test pilots. Vinnie has his own drill and wire brush – he’s four. I didn’t get one till I was 22. I stripped the top of the frame back to bare metal last weekend, but left it outside, so after getting some surface rust off I gave it a few coats in clean, mean Matt Black. The metal is pretty badly pitted but you don’t notice so much. I likey.

I also stripped down the front guard. It’s a real nice shape and I decided after wire-brushing it down that it looked real good just like that. So I clear lacquered it.

I left this bit of the original paint on with a hint of the original pin-striping. Originally when I got it, my plan was to restore it to this kind of graceful state but then it just didn’t seem right, and the rat-rod thing seemed heaps cooler. And it’s a boys bike. My boys, and they like rock’n’roll and Falcon’s and Hot Rods. So this stays bare-metal and has a NZHRA sticker on the back. Looks like it was always there. I've stripped the spokes out of the rim, didn’t even break any. The rim is going to be white, the spokes red, pseudo-whitewall styles. Schmart. Pitted as fuck, three layers of primer and then some ‘Appliance White’ which undid my hard work. The cheap paint at The Warehouse is cheap for a reason. I’ll let it dry and redo it next weekend.

Also finished cleaning up the tray and coated it in grey primer. It’ll get the black treatment later, I just wanted to seal it and see how it looked. It looks good.

The spokes were all pitty and shitty, so they got the wire-brush and Theo polished them up a bit with some 1200. Then I devised this guru little painting rig – cardboard. They got primer then the shiniest Spraykote red I ever did see…

PROJEKT DUECE
So I put that aside to dry and moved my attentions to Project 2: Ethanol Production. Top quality drinking alckyhol, moonshine styles. I decided to do a double batch coz I can, which was lucky really coz one of the 24hr turbo yeasts wasn’t a 24hr one. So it was a gentle trickly kind of evening as the 70% spirit boiled off. I got litres and litres and litres. 8 litres to be exact. That’ll result in about 13 litres in the end. Nearly a dozen 40oz. For $40ish. Plus power – it does seem to take a while. I don’t even drink it. Here’s the rig in action…

PROJEKT THREE
So in keeping with the spirit (ba-fucking-ha) of this post, ladies and gentlemen, Moonshine Music, good honest hillbilly/rockabilly/cockabullyinarockpooly kinds of sounds, with a cover even. I didn’t post the files, I just lassoed the links…