Beach Cruiser Renovation

Over the weekend, Lee Worley and I renovated an old Mike's Hard Lemonade Beach Cruiser. We replaced the yellow flames over glossy black paint job with a simple flat black and cleaned and polished the chrome hardware.

This is how we did it:

Here is the bike in all of its original glory. Notice the sweet custom Mike's Hard Lemonade paint job. I especially hated the yellow flames on the front and rear fenders.

The first step was dismantling the bicycle and removing all of the wheels, chains, saddle, and fenders.
-This was not a difficult task. With a lag wrench, some pliers, a screwdriver, and a an allen wrench it was broken down in no time. (Was the lag wrench an over kill? Maybe, but power tools make the job feel so much more legit.)

Next we used a fine grit sandpaper (120-200) to sand off the clear coat of the existing (hideous) paint job. This was done with much joy. We used a Milwaukee power sander for the large portions and touched it up by hand.

After taping up the handlebars, gears, pedals, and remaining chrome accents we applied the first coat of flat black paint. At this point it started to look really good, and so we got inspired to sand and apply two more coats.

After two more coats of flat black we cleaned the chrome using a fine grit steel wool pad and citric acid (lemon juice). We hit the white walls with a couple S.O.S. pads, used some armor all on the leather seat and put the thing back together. (Reassembly was a bit of a hassle with a few of the nuts and bolts rusted and a few stripped out. I went to Ace Hardware in Park Road Shopping center and picked up replacements for all of the hardware. This added a cool cosmetic feature with all of the hardware bright silver against the flat black frame.

Here is the finished project. All I am going to add now is a rear rack and some new handle bar grips. (The foam pad originals kinda bum me out.) I was tossing around the idea of leaving the rear fender off, but with the rack added I think I will put it on for the vintage, large fender, fat tire look.


Thats how we did it. I think it turned out good for our first restoration. If I were to do it again, there are definitely some things I would do differently and now that Lee is looking at old bikes on Ebay, my opportunity may come sooner than expected.