When walking by the Groovy Cyclesworks booth it was very hard to miss the zombie themed bike dubbed the “Feat of Flesh.” Rody of Groovy cycles is a one man band. He’s been building frames since the hay day of mountain biking in the early 90’s. The focus of Groovy is to build for the customer, and machine a smile on their face from the first ride. This comes through with the passion and love Rody builds with. He controls every bit of the build process. He starts by making the jig the frame is welded on, and continues all the way through painting the bike.
Hit the jump for a detailed look at how the “Feat of Flesh” bike came together, plus a candy suprise.
We spoke with Rody, the builder / painter of this bike and he filled us in on just how such a fantastic peice of art came to be. The coating on the bike is neither liquid paint, nor powder coat. In fact, it is a ceramic coating that was originally developed for use by the military on sniper rifles. The titanium frame, seat post, and stem were created. Next, the graphics were drawn up by hand in Adobe Illustrator.
Maskings were printed out from the images and placed on the bike. Next the frame was placed into an acetone bath, followed by sand blasting. Due to the very fine details of some of the maskings however, custom screens had to be created in order to keep the maskings from disintegrating. Once cleaned up, the ceramic coating was sprayed. It has a very minimal build up of .001 inches (compared to 2 to 2.5 mm for powder coating). The ceramic layer consists of three parts. There is a carrier, the ceramic coat, and a catalyst harder. This results in a very durable finish for the bike. The green “shotgun blast” took a bit of experimentation. The carrier for the ceramic coat has to be modified so that the coating would sling off the brush to create just the right effect. The entire process took Rody 12 hours. But in that 12 hours, he managed to created on of the best looking bikes on the NAHBS show floor this year.
The candy bike Groovy had on hand was stunning. To achieve the effect, Rody laid a black base coat, followed by a hand brushed silver. Next, a red candy was sprayed at the bottom of the frame, followed by an orange candy in the middle, and a gold candy up top. The Groovy logos were masked off as well, and afterwards were hit with a sparkly silver, with gold for the crown. The end result is a bike that will absolutely pop in the sun.