Golden Gate Bridge Bike

Some show hometown spirit with a shirt or bumper sticker. Jason Broemmel, on the other hand, built a bike based on San Francisco's most famous landmark. A metal fabricator, Broemmel cut down several different sizes of mild-steel square tubes and some sheet metal (for the bridge deck), then welded them all together in the shape of the iconic bridge. Since the Golden Gate Bridge Bike is built to toy-train scale, Broemmel used perfectly sized cars and people from a local model-train shop. Getting the bridge's authentic color was another story. "I traded a six-pack of beer to a bridge worker for a quart of actual Golden Gate Bridge International Orange paint," he says.