My frame from Taiwan is due today. It swiftly made its way through China to Coventry customs, sat for a few days then got passed through to Parcel Force. Sadly, our incompetent flagship postal system has failed to get my frame from Camden to myself in the time its taken an eBay seller to get it to Camden through customs from Taiwan. Today I mutter to myself, today will be the day.

So the devil has found some work for my idle hands. While I’m not entirely sure I even need to respray the bike, I’m toying with it. My current baby is shiny chrome. I think I want my new one to be essentially black. The frame, as far as I can tell, could be good to go. It’s a black resin which just shows through the 12mm carbon weave. It could be really lovely, it could be really ugly. So in the absence of hard facts I’m doodling away with what I might do.

Spray it black, but it’ll need a little lift somewhere on the frame or it’ll just look heavy and dull. So, scanning google images for retro sports car styles and the like here are my first two thoughts. These are both coupled with dark tan leather seat and grips.

There’s a single-speed racer by Genesis called Day One out at the moment and while it doesn’t look all that in the link, in the flesh the simple white band is a really nice touch that lifts the black just so. Stealing that but doing a retro double racing strip instead of single band:

A slight variation on that is the wider single strip with two narrow strips either side:

Second option is inspired by the burnt orange strip of the Harley racers, I’ve only seen retro ones but believe the white/orange thing remains on their latest racing bikes: