The Community Gardener's Mini-Max

This build was for someone involved in community garden projects around London. The Mini-Max makes a lot of sense if you are only carrying tools and supplies upto 40kg, and not too bulky. Plus storing the bike at home, and at work is less intrusive than a larger cargo would be.

But what do you do when neither Paradise, nor Omnium have the colour you want in stock? And production lead times are 3 to 4 months?

Well in this case, it took a bit of luck and bartering. But fortunately for this customer, we had a frameset in a colour no-one wanted left over from last season, so it made sense for us to make a deal on the cost of the frame, so respraying it would be not only quite quick, but also way more affordable.

The build was straight forward:

• 11 speed drivetrain for riding around town
• Simple brakes for light loads
• Puncture proof tyres for use on the road
• Simple dark green and black colours

The interesting thing here is that this was the first time we’d taken a brand new frame and removed the original powder coating using our newly built sand blasting cabinet! It is tricky fitting such a big frame into a typical blasting cabinet, so we built one that is just about big enough to fit an Omnium inside.

For anyone thinking they would also like to respray a cargo, the costs are relatively high, compared with normal bike frames. Sand blasting takes a few hours, so it costs about £120. Then the powder coating on it’s own costs another £150, depending on which colour you choose, and whether you want decals added under lacquer, or just on top as we did here.

Once we’d finished stripping the old paint off, it was a simple 1 week turnaround to get the frame back from Aurum Finishing, then a few days waiting for the local vinyl cutting place to make our replacement OMNIUM DECALS, and that’s pretty much it.