This year, Misspent Summers turns 10.
A decade of recording mountain biking’s history in our yearbooks.
More than 30 major projects and dozens of smaller print and online ones.
Many good times along the way.
Backstory
In 2016 we published our first downhill yearbook, Hurly Burly. A leap of faith.
Great photography, writing and design deserves the highest quality print, and a long season of racing has many storylines.
Producing and distributing a book like Hurly Burly, to put it bluntly, costs a lot of money.
Thankfully, several bike brands believed in our idea and got behind us from the very start.
One of those was Marin Bikes, a company rooted in the sport’s history and from the birthplace of modern mountain biking in Marin County, California.
We literally wouldn’t be here today without Marin Bikes – their support as the very first brand to take an advert with us meant we could afford to print Hurly Burly.
How we customised the bike – a 100-hour headache
Our company is rooted in print media, so when Marin asked if we’d like to customise a Quake, straight away we thought the most fitting way would be to dip into our archives.
Then, we realised the most fun and real way to celebrate all our print projects, the people and events that made them possible, would be to take cuttings from the books themselves.
Misspent Summers’ Jon Gregory and Flat White Paintworks’ John Parkin, a longtime contributor to our projects, got to work going through the roughly 10,000 pages we’ve published across our 30+ books and zines in the last 10 years.
The duo cut out words, patterns and photos then fitted them like an annoying 3D jigsaw onto the tubes of the Quake frame, holding them in place with masking tape. The sticking started at 8am and finished at midnight.
Next, Parkin took the frame back to his paint studio where he began deconstructing the cuttings and sealing each individual piece of paper so it would be durable and wouldn’t soak up any of the clear coat he’d use to finish the bike.
Then, he stuck those many, many, oh so many cuttings back in place with a strong but not paper-destructive adhesive so they’d stay flush and tidy.
It was all topped off with some 10 layers of clear coating, each layer sanded back and polished for a perfect, beautiful finish.
Saying this was a lengthy process is an understatement – Parkin estimates he spent 100 hours in total from painting the bike’s white base coat to the cuttings session with Gregory to sealing and finishing the job.
Result
The final bike, we hope you agree, is a thing of beauty. Something a bit different to typical custom spray jobs and wraps.
A bit weird, in the best of ways.
A celebration of a decade of recording mountain biking’s history and hopefully inspiring people to ride.
A final note
This year, Marin Bikes is also celebrating a landmark as the company turns 40.
That’s why we’ve called it the 10 x 40 bike: 10 years of Misspent Summers, 40 years of Marin Bikes.
Two companies getting along nicely, hoping to inspire people to ride.
In the works
Below you’ll find a gallery of in-the-works photos as the bike was being customised.
