Homemade headbadge

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned an idea of sticking a beer label on the trashbike's headtube as a badge of sorts. It actually took me a while to get a label off the bottle clean, and when I did, it was too big - part of it would be laying over a lug. So back to the drawing board.

Then today, while I was stumbling around on the web after work, I came onto this little gem of an image.

I like it, but something about it just isn't Sheldon - I don't think he'd have wanted anyone to OBEY him. So scratch that one. But, on the blog that came from, the owner signed out "Sheldon Brown, you have a posse", so I partnered up with google and hunted the next image down.

Usually, the "Posse" sticker has a little blurb with some fact about who ever it is that's posse'ed up. The first one I found for Sheldon didn't have that, so I googled a little more and found one that had 1944-2008 on it. The image quality was down, but the font was right, so I copied just the date text out and pasted it into the other image. Viola, I have my headbadge art:

I was so tickled with myself, I printed one out real quick and went to the garage ... but it was way too wide, just like the beer label was. I knew the lugwork would be no more than 1/2 the circumference of the tube, so I did a little math; c equals 2 pi radius, the radius is 1/2" since the bike has a 1" headtube, so c= pi. Half that is 1.57, so I rounded it down to an inch and a half. That width helps with the taping too, because my tape is 1-3/4 inch wide, so I get a nice border around the image using one width of tape. Next I fired the image up in Irfanview and scaled it to 1-1/2" wide while preserving the aspect ratio, which gave me a size of 150 x 184 pixels. After printing that version, I headed back out to the garage again.

After I'd trimmed the image off the page, and was sure it'd fit this time, I cut a length of clear packing tape at least double the height of the trimmed out image. Using what was left of the page I'd cut the image out of, I stuck the tape to it, sticky side up, with the ends looped back under it so they were stuck. That held the tape good and firm, and it was easy to line the image up straight and centered with the tape. Being sure to stick the image to the tape printed side down so it'll be visible, I stuck the image down to the tape. Then it was easy to just slip a pair of scissors between the tape and paper and trim the tape off so it left an equal border all the way around. All that's left to do now, is to place it on the headtube like so:

The only thing I did wrong, was I didn't clean the headtube before sticking the "decal" on. When that happens, the tape doesn't stick, and if you look real close at the bottom center of the photo, you'll see that mine didn't. Must have been a greasy fingerprint.

... but having said that, another thing I did wrong was to not ask the permission of the person that made the original image ... please forgive me but it's just so danged appropriate.

To make your own sticker like mine, click this image to full size, then print it, to make 4 stickers that will fit a 1" headtube

Obviously, this isn't limited to just Sheldon Brown posse stickers, you can use the same method to make whatever you can print into a new headtube sticker for your bike. Knock yourselves out with it kids.