Bike finished...

If you recall about a month & half ago Hubby started a project called "A Bike for Sam", in which he was building a bicycle for a 3yo boy in Illinois with cerebral palsy... his daddy wanted to be able to take him for bike rides where he could sit in the front of the bike. So Hubby stepped up to the challenge and custom built the bike for them. The whole story and progress and photos of each step of the build are here on the Broncos Orange Mane website... ("Falconer" is the boy's father and "bronco610" is Hubby)


Here is the bike when it was completely finished and assembled last night. The boy has very little motor skills, so there is a harness in the front seat to hold him.

Here was the bike the previous day in the sunlight where you can actually see it, minus the seat. Pretty sharp huh? Enamel car paint and clear-coated.

This is a side view of the seat with the stickers that were applied on the side. You remember in the Broncos Super Bowl where Pat Bolen held up the Lombardi trophy and said "This one's for John" (Elway)... well that's why he put "This bike's for Sam".

Vinyl reflective stickers are everywhere. Also, check out the steering mechanism, it was one of the engineering dilemmas during the build but what he made works wonderfully... it's a bad view, but turning the handlebars comes down and swivels a lever in the front attached to the fork.

More stickers... it's clear-coated over the top of the vinyl stickers so they won't come off.


Since Hubby was burning plastic for the seat, he also molded this football-style helmet. (He used a bowling ball for the shape, haha) The boy he's doing this for has a tiny head and normal child-sized helmets aren't small enough. But here it's being modeled by Ashton our neighbor's 6-mo old... ain't he cute? He even has his mouthpiece in place...

So now as I write this Hubby's driving the bike up to Oklahoma City... from there another guy from the Orange Mane is going to meet up with him and drive the bike the rest of the way to Illinois to give it to the father. A LOT of folks from the website pitched in to help, mostly with donations to the project to offset the cost and some purchased a few items themselves and mailed them to us. Without their help it couldn't have been done.

But yay, it's finally finished!!!

Oh yeah...

But I did take the time this busy weekend to watch the Preakness. Once again Andy Beyer gave his commentary on ESPN about why Curlin wouldn't run well in this one... all the more better that the horse won. :)

And one more thing on the Preakness coverage... you know you have too much time alloted for a live program and are scrambling for time-fillers when they're resorting to interviewing the TRASHMEN. Whose bonehead idea what that??? The poor announcer doing the interview was really struggling to keep the guy from saying dumb things, but didn't quite succeed... the college party crowd was in the track's infield and the trashman got a bit crass discussing things people were doing... you could just see the announcer dancing around trying to change the topic, hehe.