DONE

EL wire

El wire is deceptively easy to do. The online instructions make it seem very complicated, but my friend Michael (a very clever guy with an Architecture degree) was able to do it no problemo. He brought his soldering iron over, and we used it to attach the wire to the battery packs. The way soldering works is to heat up a piece of soft metal that drips onto two wires to join them together. Once all the wires were connected to the battery packs, we attached them with zip ties to the bike. Each pack has an on/off switch and uses one AA battery. It's all done now, I'm just waiting for the darkness of night to take a picture of it lit up. I have a little bit of paint touch ups to do, but otherwise, this bike is ready for the Playa!

Setback #1

This is why I don't do projects. I'm impatient. Yesterday I touched up the bike with some white paint, then tried to spray paint the glow-in-the-dark stuff. But it's so light that you want to get real close with it..bad idea. It immediately started wrinkling. Shit. So today I scraped off the wrinkles, and repainted the entire bike white. Screw the glow in the dark, I'll just return it to Fred Meyer. It looked weird anyway.