Let No Good Part Go to Waste
Posted on: April 8, 2012 at 9:41am — By: Kyle
I found this bike leaning against a wall in Kisumu, Kenya, which is a port city on Lake Victoria at the south-west corner of the country. The bike is welded together out of cannibalized parts—blue tubes, yellow stays, green and silver rims. No usable bike parts go to waste in Kenya.
This bike is a nice metaphor for the continent: sturdy and utilitarian, cobbled together by talented hands out of cast-off parts.
Comments
Do you really mean that someone did welding on this frame??
That seems unlikely. Perhaps the rear triangle came from a different frame, and they welded it at the bearing brackets.
But the front triangle is clearly aluminum, while the rear (if it’s a homemade replacement) is steel.
Yes the wheels are different. The bike looks like it was *built* out of cannibalized parts, not *welded* out of cannibalized parts.
AFAIK, there is no cheap method for welding steel to aluminum. And it would be really difficult to jig those brackets correctly.
Also, you can tell that no one did any third world welding because both sections of the two-piece frame are a single color. Which means they were painted at the factory.
No one in the third world would brush all the paint, weld the joint, AND REPAINT THE FRAME if they were going to repair that sort of thing. Painting is non-functional step in that process, so it would get left out (bike frames don’t rust fast enough for corrosion to matter). If anyone had welded on that bike you’d be able to see burnt paint and bare metal on the frame.
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