Prepping the bike for paint means working on your core – the steel frame manufactured 50 years ago at CCM’s Weston plant.

After all the bike’s parts have been removed, and scattered about the kinrosscordless workshop in various stages of repair, you arrive at a 7.2-pound frame.

You determine the weight the same way you weighed your cat before a trip to the veterinarian – by stepping on the bathroom scale with and without the object to be weighed.

In the case of the CCM frame, the math works out as follows:

The bike mechanic, fully clothed and clutching the bike frame, at 192.6 pounds

LESS  The bike mechanic alone (and still fully clothed) at 185.4 pounds

= a net weight of 7.2 pounds for the frame.

Your British dad would have described that as “half a stone.”

The bike’s core is a thing of beauty. Most of the paint has been removed. You used a combination of paint stripper, putty knives, 300-grit sandpaper, a dust mask, and elbow grease. Some of the bike’s war wounds take extra effort to sand down, and some, especially on the forks, are beyond remediation so will remain as part of the bike’s DNA.

The non-original red paint is gone, and the gold-coloured hand-welds of the tube joins have emerged.

You needed extreme measures to remove the front fork, with assistance from your father-in-law’s vice, some WD-40 and occasional primal screams.

But once the fork was off, a pristine strip of the bike’s original true-blue paint was revealed. This can be matched later to restore the bike to its original paint colour.

You took an Earl Grey tea break to watch some YouTube videos of the pros painting bikes. One features an almost ballet-like sequence of the painter twirling the bike as it is suspended from the seat tube by rope. He patiently puts on light coats of paint from a spray bomb. Another series on YouTube called Locked-In offers great primers (no pun intended) on bike painting and all aspects of bike repair.

You are refreshed and have your inspiration, but working on your core will require on final step before paint – sanding the vintage CCM with 800-grit paper for a smooth finish. You are planning to watch a rerun of Downton Abbey’s season 1, episode 5, as there is no Leafs’ game on this evening, but the night is young.