This bike started life as a late 1950’s Firestone Cruiser, but thanks to Jake‘s mad-scientist building skills, and with a healthy influence from Mone bikes builds it’s now a rad 27.5″ clunker with equal parts “patina” and “shredability”.

Jake began by strengthening and stiffening the frame. Adding additional weld to all of the joints that were a light braze. He then went through and added plate steel to reinforce the chainstays and head tube.

The frame had enough wall thickness that the head tube could be machined out to 1-1/8″ (previously 1″ threaded) so it could run a modern threadless headset and fork. In light of the now thinner headtube Jake then added some reinforcing rings to help prevent the soft steel of the headtube from ovalizing too quickly.

Since so much of the bike already had a pretty compelling patina a lot of the welds were left intentionally “rough and ready” to give it all a scrappy feel while still being structurally sound.

Next up for the drivetrain he ordered a cheap bottom bracket converter which allowed the american BB shell to accept a threaded bottom bracket and then dug into his stash of bike parts to unearth a classic Raceface crankset and E*Thirteen “Guide Ring”.

The pedals have a fun ’80s BMX flair, and required a lot of reshaping to the cages, and straightening of the spindles to get back into a useable condition. The spindles are better. Not perfect, but definitely better than they were…

A modern rigid fork was found and painted to give it a false patina to match the rest of the frame. The fork has straight aluminum lowers for a tougher look and a steel steerer. The aluminum lowers actually helps drop several pounds from the build. The fork clearance, coupled with the fact that the frame originally was made to clear 26″ balloon tires with fenders meant that there was room to set it all up with 27.5″ wheels with 2.0″ tires.

The front wheel is a disc rim laced to a rim-brake hub making for a clean brakeless look on the front of the bike. The fork does allow for the option of running a disc brake at some point. But to keep with the simple look of the bike the rear wheel was built up with a singlespeed coaster brake.

Yes, that is JUST a singlespeed. Sturmey Archers uses the same hub shell for their singlespeed coasters as they use for their three-speed.

A lot of these old bikes have a short, largely useless seatpost. So a new, much longer chromoly one was sourced and adorned with a Brooks C-19 saddle.

Because the bike has a coaster brake the cockpit was left to be very simplified. Vans grips atop 820mm wide Surly Sunrise bars (both dug out of Jake’s parts bin), and a classy Box stem that a customer brought in for consignment.

When it’s all said and done you’re left with blast of a bike sporting a “devil may care” look. It’s a ton of fun to get up to speed and whip around corners. Somehow the geometry and stiffened frame make it easy to get airborne. While it’s not much of a bike for slowing or stopping, it’s definitely made to go.

Jake put together a whole video of the making of this bike which is definitely worth a look!