Brave New Velo is a journal documenting the progress of building a new Soma Smoothie bicycle and the experience of such an endeavor for the first time. Thoughts, discoveries, trials and tribulations will be shared.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

One Piece at a Time

That is how it is for the opportunistic auto factory worker in the Johnny Cash song of the same name who can't afford to buy a whole Cadillac so he builds one by stealing parts from his employer one by one over many years. And so goes my bicycle, coming together component by component, one piece at a time. Although I am doing it in a much quicker fashion (one year versus 24), the parts are actually compatible with another, and I am paying for them rather than sneaking them away from a General Motors assembly line. Over the course of this process I have not been able to help myself from associating the song with my experience and I hear Johnny's voice in my head singing, "I got it one piece at a tiiiime." It has become the theme of this build. Who would've thought there'd be a link between The Man in Black and bicycles?