When you live in Montreal you experience Canadian winters. When you experience Canadian winters you realize it’s important to stay busy and fight cabin fever. A lengthy and satisfying project is a bike rebuild, specifically stripping the frame of a Bianchi from 1986 and sanding the hell out of it and starting over. Start your Bianchi rebuild.

If you ride bicycles you love them. If you have ridden a bicycle for any amount of time in your life you may have gone through this procedure yourself at least once. The appealing thing about this whole process is two-fold. First you get to customize your bike the way you want to see it, from colour to component. Second, your bike is clean again, and you’ve learned a few things along the way. It’s an education.

My partner has been riding her bike for seven years in the streets of Winnipeg, to the hills of Vancouver Island, and now in city of Montreal. It has been through many kilometres, the majority of them being wet and salty due to our Canadian winters. Before coming into her hands it belonged to who knows who and ridden who knows where. It was time to give it some attention.

Below are a few pictures detailing the process of the Bianchi rebuild. As of now, we have only to clear coat the frame and replace the components. The first picture gives you an idea of how bad the rust was on the frame. Many hours of sanding took place to get down to the bare metal which you can start to see in the second photo. A grinder was necessary for the rusty spots.

The particular thing about this bike was also the colour. It couldn’t be found by any Bianchi experts and so an alternate route was taken. We made contact with an autobody shop who said they could colour match the paint colour and put it into aerosol form. That is exactly what we did. The colour was achieved by applying a layer of mauve underneath a layer of pearl.

The final touch was the addition of a 2″ hand-painted Whale Shark. Measuring up to 40ft long it is the worlds largest fish. Unfortunately it is also classified as a threatened species. See what you can do here to help save the whale shark.