SE Stout? Rat Rod 29er!

Yep this is still the SE Stout. Got tired of looking at all that red paint. I also like rat rods... if you know what a rat rod car is, then you'll know what a rat rod bike is! I had to start somewhere. So starting somewhere meant grinding off those gawd-awful rear brake posts... as seen in the pics below.

The paint was actually really thick on this bike... a hassle for feathering the edges between old paint and bare steel. Some thick primer helped as you can see.

The whole bike has a few coats of primer on it as shown above. To get it there, I had to sand the edges of the decals to blend with the paint. There was a lot of clear coat over the decals but with some sanding, sanding, and more sanding, and then a lot of work with some 3M scuff pads, it looked good enough.

You can see here that the removal of the rear brake posts turned out pretty well. Outta sight, outta mind.

In the above pic you can see how I "masked" the head tube to keep excess paint from interfering with reinstallation of the headset. SE did a crap job of that when the bike was originally made but I expected as much so nbd. What you see here is nothing more than some cut-off sections of big wood dowel with a long section of all-thread holding it all together. Worked well. Bottom bracket shell was protected the same way.

Pic below shows the near-final job (head badge added a few days later). After those layers of primer, I sprayed on some satin black hear and there. That was followed up with light scuffing with scuff pads to help get a worn-thru look. In hindsight, I should've used gray paint instead of gray primer, as the gray primer was too easy to sand thru (revealing red) but it was easy to touch up those spots with more gray.

Several coats of satin clear went over the satin black and primer. I was panicking at first because the satin primer was going on cloudy in spots (humidity?) but it dried clear as the label promised.

Got that cool cog from a guy on eBay selling cool cogs that he makes by himself. Search eBay and you'll find him. Not the cheapest, but no worse than some of the other widely-available cogs.

You can see some of the rub-thru look here. What you can't see are the ground-off old brake posts - good riddance!

Same old drivetrain...29 tooth up front, 19t cog in rear, Spot chain guard keeping it on. And yes I know the bottle cage is ugly but hey I do use this bike so the cage stays.

Salsa CroMoto fork is also a carryover. Love it, and love the juxtaposition of old and new on this bike and on most rat rods in general. BTW I get 10 extra points for using "juxtaposition" in a complete sentence.

Love these rotors too... think they're Gators... and they even work.

If you want whitewall 29er mtb tires, you only have one choice... and that's them. And those wheels... the wheels are Velocity P35 single speed wheels. They are a whopping 35mm wide which really spreads the tires out. Sweet. My only concern is that the rims are not eyeletted, so we'll see how they hold up over time. They do use sealed cartridge bearings and - so far - are sweet and smooth. Head badge set me back a whopping $3. Colors match too. Out on the trail, someone said "Cool - I never saw a Flying Goose before!" Well that makes two of us... at least.