The Bocchi Bike
Background
One day I was looking at pictures of Itasha cars and ended up daydreaming about wrapping my own car at some point. However since I did not have a car at the time I thought: "I wonder if there is something similar but with bikes" and turns out there is! They are called Itachari and can be considered a smaller offshoot of the more well known Itasha community. Typically these bikes will have a custom wrap or paint job on the frame, a custom printed rear (and occasionally also front) disc wheels and be accessorized with anime motives. But unlike Itashas, the Itachari movement never saw mainstream appeal and never really managed to gather a community outside of Japan.
This made research particularly hard, as most of the sources I found (of which there were not a lot) were from the early 2000s and in japanese. Beside a few inspiration images I did not manage to find any tutorials or explanations of how these bikes were typically setup, so I knew I had to come up with my own solution.
The theme I decided on for my build was the anime Bocchi The Rock, a fun show, with an amazing soundtrack about a girl with social anxiety that decides playing guitar and joining a band would be her ticket to having friends.
The build:
For the frame I was initially planning on spray painting it, using multiple colors to represent each of the characters, but since I did not have a workshop to spray paint safely (and not wanting to subject my neighbors to tons of fumes by spraying in the communal courtyard) I decided a better approach was just using the same methods itashas use. Namely printed vinyl foil. The process was simple enough: Measure the frame dimensions, make a concept for the design and lastly create it in a vector format. After that all you need to do is print it and wrap the frame. To keep it simple i decided to just do the top tube so both the design process and the application was very simple.
The disc wheel was a different story however. Not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a disc wheel I had to find another way of imitating the look of them. Fortunately I was not the only one who wanted to convert their regular spoke wheel to a disc wheel. I found these two tutorials (1, 2) which served as inspiration for my build.
I ended up getting ABS plates to serve as the discs which I cut to size and then bent to a conical shape. I used a special purpose glue to connect both sides using a scrap piece on the inner side for better adhesion. This was a very cumbersome process, as I did not know the exact conical shape of the wheel (which is not the same on both sides due to the cassette), so I had to recut the gap multiple times to get the exact angle I needed.
Once both discs were dried it was time to wrap the discs. I made sure to clean the surface of the discs so that the adhesion would be as good as possible and then started applying the vinyl. For the flatter disc this process was quite simple as there was very little stretching necessary to get the vinyl onto the disc without distortions in the image. Simply peel it of bit by bit and apply it, making sure to avoid creases or bubbles. The more conical side was a different story however. Due to the non flat shape of the disc and the flat shape of the vinyl I had to heat & stretch the vinyl during the application to ensure the art would not end up looking warped at the end. Because this was my first time applying vinyl in general and not having the optimal setup this side ended up with many creases along one end of the disc. Luckily this is not really visible from afar but definitely something I would need to consider more if I were to do this again.
Results:
Below are some pictures of the finished build. Personally I think the end result looks great even with the minor issues. Unfortunately after fitting everything I found a rather annoying problem with one side of the disc. Due to the fact that the discs lay on top of the spokes there is now less clearance with the other bike components. This doesnt matter for the most part except the disc brake, which sits so close to the wheel that it now rubs against the disc and causes the print to get rubbed off. If I were to do this again I would just use a bike with rim brakes or use a thinner wheel as a base, as to avoid this problem.
The discs themselves are completely removable from the regular wheel although attaching and detaching them is a bit of a hassle. The process involves having to remove the cassette, adding/removing 1 sprocket, using tape to keep the disc from spinning and carefully fitting a rubber ring between the disc and the disc brake to increase the clearance.
