Gary Fisher Bicycle Lamp
I have an affinity for bicycles - most specifically mountain bikes & mountain biking. While purchasing a mountain bike in Asheville, NC off of Facebook Marketplace, the guy selling it to me had A TON of old bikes, frames, parts, etc. - some good, some not so good. He offered me a couple of frames free of charge, one of which was an old carbon fiber Gary Fisher Superfly missing the rear swing arm and hardware. The frame was in rough shape with scratches, chipped clear coat on the carbon, and not to mention the swing arm missing. I have always wanted to make a bike frame lamp for the fun of it but never wanted to sacrifice a good working bike to do so, nor did I want to use a cheap frame simply because half the fun is the era of the bike on display. It instantly hit me that this was the bike to do it with. I had never done this before so it was a great experiment if anything went south.
I got it home and started planning it out and doing some research online of what others have done. I got online and ordered the lamp kit accessories that I thought would work well for this project, looked at the wood that I had on hand for the perfect board, and then headed to Lowe’s to get my hardware that would be needed. I started by prepping the wood and figuring out my cord routing plan, then cut, drilled, stained, etc. Moving to the frame next I lined everything up with hardware through the board to know where I needed to drill through and then got to work. From there it was simple - I ran the lamp cord through the frame, tightened everything down, and cut off the extra length on my bolts, and epoxied the lamp shade to the headset area of the frame. Then I plugged it in and it was MAGIC!
While this project was super fun and a great learning experiment, I personally did not need a bike lamp in the house. I ended up donating it to my local bike shop, Benchmark Bicycles in Greer SC, and they were very willing to accept. If you want to check it out in-person, swing by their location, it is on one of their walls (they like to rearrange from time to time so you’ll just have to poke around!).
