Beach Cruiser...

My grandpa had an old Murray Westport single speed cruiser bicycle in his garage. Nobody else wanted it as the house was getting cleaned up after he passed away, so I went ahead and took it. Why?? Beach cruisers are fricken cool!!! Do I have too many bikes?? Probably. I now have two mountain bikes, a road bike, a path cruiser, and a beach cruiser. That's five bikes, not including Cathy's hybrid that hangs in the garage. To be fair, though, I'm giving Cathy the old mountain bike to ride with me, so really I've only got four. And I MAY seriously think about selling the road bike this summer...but who knows.

Anyways, here's a picture of the Murray as it is...flat tires, dirt, dust, spider webs, and all.

See, it's in pretty darn good shape. A great place to start customizing a beach cruiser.

The first change that needed to be made, obviously, is the handlebars. I don't understand why the bike has such awesome swooping lines, but the handlebars have squared off edges and angles that just clash with the smoothness of the rest of the bike. So they will be removed and replaced with a set of Nirve Chrome Kandy bars. They are wider, and much swoopier looking. Perfect beach cruiser bars. This is what they look like:


Now with some new bars, clearly some new hand grips need to be put on. The ones that are on the current bars can't be removed without destroying them anyways, so the new grips are a necessity. I will be going with some Nirve Switchblade grips for the handlebars. This is what they will look like.


Next, you can't really have flashy brown grips and leave the black seat on there, can you?? Of course not. So I'll be replacing the standard seat with a matching Nirve Switchblade seat. Here's that.


So that will be a complete new handlebar setup and a matching seat. A pretty good start. But wait...the bike doesn't have any easy way to mount a water bottle. What's the solution for that?? Oh yah...an awesome coconut Tiki cup holder that mounts to the handlebars, like this one...


His look is absolutely perfect for a beach cruiser, because he clearly looks like he came from the beach...or at the very least somewhere that has a beach right near by.

So now we've gotten all of that taken care of, we need to get to work on those flat tires. While we're doing new tires, maybe we'll just go ahead and get some custom wheels for it. The chrome on the wheels is in great shape, but the steel spokes aren't exactly the nicest. I'll try to clean them up as best I can, but if they can't clean up then I'll be getting some 26" Nirve Black cruiser wheels, like these here.


And those flat tires need to definitely be replaced, so those will be going in the trash and these Nirve BadAss tires will be taking their spot on the wheels.


I'll be getting started on it on Wednesday, because that's when the bars, grips, and seat are all supposed to arrive. I'll be ordering the wheels and tires when I get enough extra money, because it's not really a pressing issue.

I think it's going to be fun to do this bike up the way I've planned. I think it will end up looking great, and be a blast to ride just around the neighborhood.