$40 Recumbent Bicycle

I recently came across a listing on Facebook Marketplace for a Cruzbike recumbent conversion kit for $40, which I never even knew existed! I've long admired Cruzbike recumbents, but the cheapest model is well over $2k. It turns out they got their start selling these kits for the Y-frame bicycles that were pretty ubiqitous at the time, more than a decade ago. This kit came attached to an old Mongoose XR-75 which was in fairly rough shape, but fixable. My original plan was to find a nicer donor bike for the kit, but after reading that this style was what it was designed for, I decided to just fix it up. I stripped the damaged stickers and gave it a quick coat of flat white Rustoleum over the original, dinged-up, gloss white. I put on a new chain (it was missing one altogether) and fixed the front brake cable, which somewhat horrifyingly had a shifter cable. The rear brake also used a shifter cable, but I didn't have a long enough brake cable on hand in my parts bin, so I just left it disconnected for practicing in the driveway. Definitely a learning curve, but it wasn't long before I was doing figure eights around the car and boat. I look forward to trying it for more serious mileage once I finish fixing it. I do plan to replace the suspension fork with a rigid one at some point; it just adds extra weight and complexity, plus the fork bridge was cut and rebuilt with bolted aluminum angles, I'm guessing for tire clearance reasons resulting from the shifted axle position necessitated by the kit. I'll keep the simple rear suspension for comfort though.