It felt like we had the place to ourselves at times. The end of December is the off season so the weather was just ok by Aruba standards (high 80s with low humidity) but felt perfect compared to Detroit winter. I guess most people stay over in the high rise area of island in one of the big hotels. We stopped over there for an hour and hated it. It was filled with chain restaurants like you would find in the US near a shopping mall. The Eagle Beach area was much nicer in our opinion.

Like other parts of the Caribbean, Aruba has a lot of jewelry stores including Little Switzerland which is one of my clients. It was really helpful to see the stores in person. I now have a better understanding of the brand. Little Switzerland seems to be the leader in Caribbean jewelry stores and I am proud to be associated with them.

I know a lot of people think that 70s custom vans are lame or creepy but I have wanted one since I was a kid. TV shows like the A-Team are probably to blame. I found this riteous specimen on craigslist Sunday night and bought it Monday afternoon. It is a 1977 Chevy Van originally from Nevada. The body is solid and it is in pretty good running condition. It needs a lot of work but I only paid $1000. It has a good running Chevy 350 engine and trans and a lot of new parts; Edelbrock carb and intake, headers, flowmaster exhaust and quite a few other things.  I might be in over my head on this project but that hasn’t stopped me before.

I am working on three bike builds this spring. One of them is a 1940s Goodyear brand bike I bought last fall from my buddy Dave. It is a straight bar cruiser frame and I want to build it in sort of a late 70s mountain bike/BMX style. In my head it looks really cool. We shall see. I bought a Nexus three speed wheelset from a Nirve. I am stoked that the back wheel seems to clear the rear dropouts even with the roller brake installed. So far so good. I plan to add photos of the project to this project log on flickr.

I have been wanting to learn how to build up bike wheels for a while. Today I finally got all the parts together to give it a shot. While I was waiting for parts I read about how to do it so today went pretty smooth. It took most of the afternoon trialling and erroring but I am happy with the results. I used a 3 leading, 3 trailing pattern to try to be fancy.

I bought Maritoni a 1975 Schwinn Breeze for Valentine’s Day.  It needs some work but that is cool because I am going to strip it down and rebuild it for her. She wants it to be pink. It is still in the planning stage. It was hard to find a cool old bike to fit her her diminutive stature. I will post more pics in this project log on flickr.

This is my new bass. I put it together from parts I bought on ebay. I also refinished the body. I really like it so far. It is a Precision bass body with a P/J pickup set, wilkinson bridge standard jazz bass wiring and controls. The neck is a standard Jazz bass neck with Schaller tuning machines. I like the gold sparkle/metalflake paint and black pickguard.

Here is the body before. You can see some more before pics and stuff in my flickr account.