A Thanksgiving interlude

So I spent some time in the woodworking shop during the holidays, cobbling up a couple of whimsical bike doodads, because I was bored, or blue, or something, something. I dunno. Do I need a reason for whimsy? Or would a reason render whimsy non-whimsical?

Anyway, here's the first of the projects:

I had some shiny metal Velo Orange fenders on the Rivendell Betty Foy, but they bothered me. To my mind, they just looked too flashy for a bike I've named after my mother (Frances). My mother was not a flashy person.

So I ordered some elegant cherry fenders from Woody's Custom Cycling Fenders:

 

Once I put them on, however, the bike rack looked pretty pedestrian. I decided that the thing that would spice it up (without making it look too flashy; see above) would be a matching cherry deck. So I cut a couple of book matched slices from a chunk of scrap cherry:

Milled and glued them:

Cut an annoying "lip" off the rack (annoying because it was always getting in the way of my seat bag) and added a brace from some aluminum bar stock:

Finished things up by adding some cherry buttons to keep the rain out of the tubes, et voila!

The cherry has a little curl/flame in it, and over time, it will darken into a rich amber, close to the color of the leather saddle. Cherry is magic like that, and magic is good, in a non-flashy way.