After building a lightweight urban commuter out of pieced-together secondhand components, I purchased a lighter weight, used, and inexpensive single ring crankset for it. After installing the bright and shiny new crankset, I realized that the bike was actually starting to look like it might be worth something (despite the fact that I retained the 10 year old plastic MTB platform pedals). To fix this, I hit the laser engraved brand name (ProWheel OUNCE, not exactly an expensive brand, but your average bike thief may not know that) with a steel file. While I had the file out I decided to remove all of the other possibly expensive sounding brands from the bike, which mostly consisted of logo filling and decal scraping. In addition to hiding the brand, filling the metal parts instantly drops the potential resale value, and may even save you a few grams of weight depending upon how vigorously you file things down. This is more “urban stealth” than full on urban camouflage, but I may go buy some faux rust antiquing paint for the full effect later.

After removing a lot of decals and filling off the logo from my rear brake (If you look closely at the front fork photo you’ll see why I didn’t need to modify my front brake), I decided to pry out the plastic logo cap on the Cinteli stem and replace it with a glob of silicon sealant (which nicely complements the hose clamp holding on my LED light). I also decided to remove the nice Shimano shift levers (saving a whopping 72g) because I had decided against using a 3 speed hub. I couldn’t get the bosses to unscrew, but I figure that only adds to the effect.