Garbage 80's Huffy Mountain Bike Gets All Dolled Up

My neighbor sees me puttering around with shitty old bikes all summer, so he brings on over this old thing for me to do with as I please.  He must really hate me.

It is an 80's or 90's vintage (I think) Huffy 10-speed MTB with rust, dry rotted tires, and a horrendous battleship gray with white sprinkles paint job.

At first, I was gonna leave the paintjob because it was in pretty good condition.  But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give it an eye-popping makeover.  I had already done a drab camo bike, and I wanted to do this one up nice and give it to my new daughter-in-law.

Mechanically I was again gonna go with simplicity and relative cheapness...replace the multi-gear rear wheel with a single-speed coaster brake, and eliminate all the hand brake bullshit.  I like a clean, simple design.

To do this I was gonna have to close up the rear dropouts because the original setup was too wide for a single speed wheel set.

I fabricated a tool with threaded rod, nuts, and washers, and got things squared away and aligned so that my single speed wheelset would work.

The original double geared front sprocket I would swap out to an old Huffy single gear sprocket and one piece crankset I had in my stash.  With this part of the resto-mod figured out, I stripped this turd in preparation for paint.

Sanded down, and with a coat of primer, and it's just about time for the magic to begin!

Lower portion of frame painted with satin creamy vanilla type color.

Upper frame painted a delicious, mouth watering, tangerine/orange hue, with a groovy fade job between the colors because it's cool!

Then I hose the whole mess down with several coats of a satin clear.

A few weeks later to let the paint cure a little, and it's time for reassembly.

I'm using the original front wheel.  It gets a good de-rusting, bearings get cleaned and repacked with grease, and new tube and tire.

The new Husky coaster brake rear wheel gets a new tube and tire.

Repurposed crankset, pedals, and chain installed, as well as original fork, repurposed handlebars and stem, cleaned and repacked original bearings, and slid on some new bitchin' orange Oury grips.

I have some sick orange Fooker pedals on order, but I install some old pedals just so I can test drive the bike and sort it out.

I think it turned out really nice.  It rides smooth and quiet with no apparent problems so far.

I'll test drive it intermittently for a week and then turn it over to its new owner. 

I almost hate to give this thing away, but I need another bike like I need a hole in my head. 

I hope my new daughter-in-law likes it! 

New daughter-in-law happily receives her bike, while her cute-as-a-button twin nieces look on!