It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.

May 22, 2010 4:05 PM

Scraper bikes (previously) are featured in a new 7 min 32 s documentary.

In order to become a member of the Original Scraper Bike Team, you must: Be a resident of Oakland, CA. Be at least 7y/o or older. Retain A 3.0 Grade Point Average (GPA), Create your own Scraper Bike…(It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.). They are going to be appearing at Maker Faire this year.

via boingboing

posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth (12 comments total)

I love this dude.
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew at 5:01 PM on May 22, 2010

I live in east Oakland and I fucking love scraper bikes. It seems like every kid in my neighborhood has one, they travel around in packs blasting radios and having fun. Some parts of Oakland are pretty bleak, and these kids make these bikes out of trash with no support or help from anyone.
posted by bradbane at 5:18 PM on May 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

you must: Be a resident of Oakland, CA. Be at least 7y/o or older. Retain A 3.0 Grade Point Average (GPA), Create your own Scraper Bike…(It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.) A single-file line when riding.

Take that, Critical Mass!

But seriously, as someone who wanted to make crazy futuristic-looking cardboard wheel covers and put them on his bike, I wholeheartedly approve of scraper bikes. I want to go back in time and tell my seven-year-old self that people won't laugh at me if I deck out my bike in corrugated cardboard—or at least if they do, I can tell them it'll totally be cool in, like, two decades, man.
posted by chrominance at 5:34 PM on May 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

God, I love Oakland.

One of my happiest moments on my bike so far was one night when Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey and I were riding home along Lakeshore beside Lake Merritt (coincidentally enough, on the way home from a party at our local bike shop). It was late, so we had on all our lights, including our Down Low Glows. As we rounded a curve, we passed three kids on scraper bikes rolling the other way who looked at our lights and said, "Aw, cool!" Definitely a warm fuzzy bike-bonding moment.

I sometimes daydream about scraperifying my bike, but I think it would feel uncomfortably like cultural appropriation. (Hi, I'm a 40-year-old white woman with a full-time desk job who grew up in the suburbs and has never lost anyone to violence or seriously worried about putting food on the table. Y'all don't mind if I help myself to this method of bike decorating that's arisen from your community, do you? Thanks awfully. Oog.) At a minimum, though, I do need to add an I ♥ scraper bikes sticker to the ones already on the bike.
posted by Lexica at 6:39 PM on May 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

Thanks, this was awesome. The passion that Champ has for his community is rad.
posted by thylacine at 8:33 PM on May 22, 2010

Thanks for this. Just watched it twice in a row, and I'm sure I'm not done. Best of the web indeed.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 9:11 PM on May 22, 2010

This definition from Urban Dictionary had me LOLing. Or PMLing, or some such.

Scraper Bike: A bike with the front wheel removed, so that the fork scrapes along the ground when the bike is ridden. A bike will typically end up this way if the owner only locks the front wheel and fails to secure the frame.

This mode of transport is popular among young males in the London borough of Southwark.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 10:56 PM on May 22, 2010

That was a great little doc.

I'm amazed that he is able to make the line "Goin Green in the Hood, tell me what's good, supportin' positive just like a boy should" sound kind of cool.
posted by Chuckles at 12:00 AM on May 23, 2010

As a bicycling advocate, I applaud this. I just wish they could add helmets to their repertoire, and decorate those as well.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 1:21 AM on May 23, 2010

My neighborhood is in some of the shots in this video. I'm a transplant and I just fucking love Oakland, and people like this kid is the reason.
posted by smartyboots at 1:45 AM on May 23, 2010

I've watched this an embarrassing number of times already. There's talk on the vimeo thread about a kickstarter profile to help start off a more formal bikeshop - it would be nice if it did get going (no sign yet).
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 7:07 AM on May 23, 2010

One of the folks at the Davis Bike Collective met him at the Maker Faire and they talked about maybe him coming here (Davis, a couple hours from Oakland) to meet our bike community some time and to further spread the scraper bike love. That would be AWESOME.
posted by aniola at 1:27 AM on June 9, 2010