Chirada

Let me introduce you to Chirada. She is a lovely lady, despite some imperfections. She is also somewhat my creation.

 This is her, close to final form.

She's a bit of a mesh of parts. See, we, that being my friend Chris and I, decided about a month ago (which, if you've been keeping track, is about exactly when I got here) that having bikes would be a really cool thing. Additionally, we reasoned that having bikes for free would be a super really cool thing. So we started looking for alternatives to the traditional buying process. What we found was quite interesting. 

Welcome, my friends, to the bike graveyard.

You see, this college has a rather unique situation. Every single student here will go abroad at some point, whether they're leaving on an exchange or returning home from an exchange program here. What this means is that there are a lot of bikes that get left over the winter months. And Akita gets snow. LOTS of snow. Some of the chains on these things are rusted solid from the moisture exposure. Most of them appear to have been stationary for years.

Figuring that these bikes were probably not going to be used again without some serious time investment on their owners' parts, we decided that it would likely be alright to grab a few. We found a couple frames with gear-switching abilities (this was a requirement- Akita has hills and we wanted to be as mobile as we could manage), pilfered some other parts, and got to work. Lots of work. It paid off though, and was actually quite fun. Over the course of several weeks we have managed to cobble together two usable, albeit rather finicky, bikes. Here I shall attempt to document the process:

The Choosing- this took us several days of surveying and nitpicking, as we wanted the best specimens we could find to start with.

The final selections.

Fortunately, we had lots of sunny days to work on them. 

The mid-process bike ride to the mall. They held up, but still needed work.

Same bike ride: The "I made it this far without my vehicle collapsing under me!" smiles.

While we were at the mall, we hit up Daiso (the dollar store) and discovered that it has a motherload of tinkering tools, and a strangely large amount of bike-specific things. We grabbed a bunch and put them in the only bag we had (it was previously being used as my coin purse).

A little more tinkering. We still need to fix some things (on our ride today Chris's chain jumped the gears at little to no provocation, and I simply cannot shift to first gear for currently unknown reasons), but everything's looking pretty good and working well enough. 

At current count, I believe my franken-bike has parts from 7 bikes attached to it: 

1. Frame
2. Water-bottle holder
3. Back wheel (this is also why I currently have two rather different sorts of tires- my front is much better equipped for rough terrain than my back).
4. Inner-tube for back wheel
5. Bike light
6. Back rack (zip-tied on because my bike did not support this function).
7. Front basket masquerading as a back basket

As for the name, Chirada is an alternate name for Garuda, a Hindu divinity. He (for it is usually a he, but my bike was most definitely a she so I chose to ignore this detail) is typically the mount of Lord Vishnu, and is depicted as being a cross between an eagle and a man. This seemed fitting to me, as my bike is a bit of a chimera herself, and also most certainly a mount. Garuda apparently has quite a few alternate titles, so I chose the one that seemed most pleasing to me. I think I'm probably going to stick with it. I've already grown quite attached to my Chirada.