Run To The Hills! Check out Pete Scullion’s Iron Maiden inspired custom vinyl wrap!

Pete from Orange Mountain Bikes posted a photo of his pimped Orange Five on Facebook a while back, it looked rather tasty and since we’re partial to a bit of spandex Maiden rock aswell we thought we’d find out a bit more about it.

Pete: The year 2000 was a pivotal year in my existence as a Hobbit.

I’d been to watch my brother Rob at the Specialized Super Series opener at Coney Green. At that race I decided that riding bikes off road fast was officially the best thing ever. That Christmas, the only thing I could have conceivably requested from Saint Nick was a mountain bike. Little has changed how I feel about riding bikes in 12 years and something fairly severe would have to happen to change that now. Riding bikes has gone beyond a hobby for me, it’s a dietary requirement and very beneficial for my mental state.

Iron Maiden also released their “Brave New World’ album and the single ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ had me hooked. That song still gets me beyond stoked and has lead to my music collection starts at Thin Lizzy and delves far into the realms of the heavy metal genre. Again, music has achieved a different status in my mind. It helps me relax when I’m stressed or nervous, and gets me fired up when I need to unleash the fury.

The bike you see here is the culmination of the aforementioned. Sign-writer Davey Mac had offered to wrap the frame as a favour, and is a big Iron Maiden fan as well. All credit to Davey, the first proof was almost bang on the money, with only minor changes in layout that lead to the final draft you see here. Probably the hardest bit was choosing the song title or lyric that would work on the top tube. One idea was to have Christopher Lee’s ominous intro to “The Number of the Beast” in its entirety down the top tube. I’m glad we went for ‘Run to the Hills’ as it works both as a choice of song and what I do whenever I get a spare moment.

Big thanks to Davey Mac for effectively spending a whole day sorting this out for me, it really is an incredible piece of craftsmanship. Every time I ride it I have to stop and take a look at it.

Davey Mac: “So, coming up with a design for Pete’s frame wasn’t to much of a problem. In this case Pete decided he wanted it to be along the lines of an Iron Maiden album cover, so I looked at a few different images online and we ended up choosing “The Number of The Beast” cover. It had a sort of smokey look to the background, so I downloaded a random smoke image to use as our canvas, then I traced round the outline of Eddie (Iron Maiden’s mascot), layed that on top using a program that’s kind of like photo shop but for sign makers. We also decided to put the wording “Run to the Hills” from same album along the top tube, to avoid implying that Five was the number of the beast!”

“I sent quite a few designs back and fourth to Pete, he would let me know what he wanted to change, add or remove. Once we decided on a final proof the design went off to the printers. With Pete’s frame it was a full wrap, I printed the design onto clear vinyl and wrapped pretty much every inch of the frame, leaving a couple parts that are custom heavy to ware and tear.

I then re-wrapped the whole frame again using just clear vinyl so that any scratches wouldn’t damage the print.

It took about about 18 hours in total for Pete’s frame, from starting the design to the finished piece and was an awesome job to do”