This is the first chopper bicycle that I’ve built — it’s an old JC Higgins pre-war bicycle frame, and the front fork has been extended by welding a longer steerer tube in place. One interesting feature is the beehive spring on the front fork, which was an early style of shock absorber. This bike is quite heavy — about 60 pounds fully loaded — which necessitated custom built wheels for extra strength. It also has a 1000 watt stereo system and a tuned subwoofer mounted on it. This can set off car alarms when playing music at full volume!
Why “ARP Syntesthesia”? Each bicycle in SCUL has a bicycle name, and every member of SCUL has a wing name which applies to all the bicycles they build. The wing name “ARP” stands for “Agglomerated Recycled Parts” and is also a computer nerd joke because ARP is a networking protocol. I chose Synesthesia because of the audio and visual overload this bike creates when passing by.
There are many more construction details in these old blog posts.
