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.

Costume planning

I bought these two items online early this week, they should be here tomorrow or Monday. I actually had to get the men's shirt, because they don't have a mock neck HeatGear in women's. If I don't like the fit, I'll go with a V-neck women's. I also got the men's leggings because they don't carry white in women's.


I just drew this to figure out where the wire will be attached to the outer shell and what shapes to make the shell. Nice butt, huh?

Paint day #1

I spent about two hours cleaning and taping the bike yesterday, and two hours painting it today. It needs glow in the dark paint tomorrow, and I still need to paint most of the wheels.


I started to get intimidated by the number of screws I had to take off in order to get the fenders and wheels off, so I took pictures of them beforehand. I couldn't move the handlebars or seat myself, I guess I'm a weakling. So I'm just going to tape them off with plastic bags before I spray paint.

Tron Costume

So that was the bike plan. For the costume, I'm going to go for a white costume with more of a futuristic/minimalist look like the new movie, which has both black and white costumes. Here's the main chick from the new movie, Quorra, played by Olivia Wilde:





Here's the original movie's main chick, Yori, played by Cindy Morgan:


Not sure if this is really from the movie, but it's close:


And here's some general desert costume inspiration:


So my plan for the costume is to wear white Under Armour shirt and leggings, with white cowboy boots and motorcycle helmet, then make a outerpiece made from white nylon which is like imitation leather, to sew the EL wire to. And put EL wire in the helmet. I need to design that leather outerpiece soon and start experimenting with layout of EL wire. Oh, and I'm also going to store the battery packs for the costume's EL wire in a white belt kinda like Luke Skywalker had.