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Well, here is it, the first posting on the new Bob Brown Cycles blog. Lemme say, thanks for looking, and here's how this is gonna work:
I'll post here as often as I reasonbly can, but don't expect things everyday. might be bike related, might be life related, it's all related to bob brown cycles in some way.
Got comments? have at it...
welcome
bobbrownbikebuilder (bbbb henceforth)
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Well I've heard the rumblings around the kenwood racing circle, where the hell has bbbb been?
Short answer is either in New Jersey, or working on my kitchen. Yup, the kitchen remodel is in full swing, so operations in the frame shop and general riding time has been temprorarily cut. The good news is, we're over the hump on this one, just need a few more items to arrive and I'll have a new kitchen.
The shop is starting to look like a frame shop again, and less like a home depot refuse pile. Once I get all the sawdust swept up, I'll fire up the torch again.
tomorrow promises outdoor road riding as long as the weather holds. Damn that snow this weekend, I though we'd be on dry pavement by now.
realyl good news is work progresses on the BBC/Kenwood Racing super sweet schwag project. watch for details soon.
bbbb
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damn this one was a lot of carving. There are three leaves around the circumference of the top-tube, then 2 more carved into the headtube portion of the lug.
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well, thought I'd post some pics of what was a super-secret undercover project. My cover was blown a few weeks ago, so I might as well go public with it.
There's a new picture gallery called nature lover with pics of a lugset I've been working on for quite some time. I'm pretty psyched about finally getting to braze these up, but I'm not looking forward to masking them for paint. gotta find some nice earthy tones that go well together for this one.
this one is my fav, but the dragonfly is damn cool too. look to the left for more pictures.
this one took the longest, but definitely came out the coolest, there are three leaves around the top-tube, then 2 more in the headtube.
Got another cool frame leaving the shop this week, an S & S touring/commutting bike with long reach sidepulls. This has got to be the most versatile bike design I do. They're great for general road riding, touring, rough-roads, even cyclocross or occasional road racing. in short, I like'em.
nice horizontal dropouts with Chrome faces. I like using skinny rear triangle tubes like these when I can, I think they look great in the dropout junction. The scallops come out to a very nice size with forged dropouts this way. Probably just one of those details that only I care about, oh well that's why I do this stuff.
In other news, Deraileur (the band) had an acoustic jam session last night. I got to play my new Cajon drum last night, and I gotta say it's the coolest chunk of wood I've ever heard. It's like an all wood conga. I gotta get me one of the stringed cajon's. Buy more bikes, then I can get more cool drums! Look for (or listen for) some of this stuff on the new deraileur album (which may actually get done sometime this year).
done.
bbbb
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Damn Bob!! And all I got was some initials?!?! Where's the love brother?? WHERE'S THE LOVE?! The lug work is really beautiful... is this for Beth? Now you know what you've gone and done right?? Yes, now I'm going to just throw Amy's Atlantis in the junk pile and order her a custom tourer with some dragonfly lugs... she LOVES that dragonfly stuff. Glad to see you've entered the age of the blogging man, welcome aboard brother. I'll place a link to your blog on mine... Peace- -Me (Large Fella)
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That is just killin'!! Really beautiful work Bob... stunning. So throw me a quote on a tourer for Amy-similar to mine but obviously not as stout-with all the bells & whistles that I have on mine... with butterflies & dragonflies (no trees though... I love 'em but Amy will be more into the cuddly, gooshy stuff) on just the HT/DT lug and ST lug... you know my email address. -Me (Large Fella)
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I'm not referring to ralph nader or the corvair. No, todays writings deal with an all too familair topic, the people driving their cars around me while I'm biking.
Had a nice ride going yesterday with o-tree, but as we're riding along the river flats, getting reacy to climb up into Minneapolis, this guy in the oncoming lane decided the driver in front of his was going too slow. Nevermind the fact it was a double striped no passing zone, nevermind that fact there are 20 mph speedbumps every 200' on this section of road, and especially never mind the fact that there are 2 pedestrians legally riding in the oncoming lane. He swerves out to pass just as he goes over a speed bump, appears to bottom out the suspension on the car and nearly hit both of us. For what reason? to get 20' farther up the road and be behind another car....
Times like that it's good to carry a cell phone. I'm a pretty regular user of the state patrol bad driver reporting web-site:
https://www.dps.state.mn.us/patrol/unsafe/report.htm
I just call myself and leave a voicemail with the licence plate of the driver so I can report them at my leisure. Doesn't go on their record, but it can be used as evidence if they're ever in court for a motor-vehicle related issue (which I figure with the way these people drive, it's only a matter of time...). Besides, it makes me feel good, like I'm givin to the a*%#@ that just cut me off, or never bothered to look.
My favorite though is when I get run off the road or harrassed by some idiot in a company vehicle with their name right on the side. Case in point, last summer I was actually intentionally run off the road by an idot driving a truck for "the Asphault Driveway Company" (yes, that's their actual name, they're in minneapolis near the U, I use their name to help you decide next time you need a driveway). I can only assume (based on the deeply intelligent conversion the driver and I had after I caught back up to the truck) that he was intellectually unable to put together the fact that his employer's name was right on the side of the dump-truck he was driving. Needless to say, I stopped by his employer on my ride, as it was on my way and had a little chat. I don't think that person works there anymore.
Don't get me wrong, not all drivers are bad, but when you encounter a thousand different drivers on every ride, the odds are against you only meeting up with the good ones.
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Good thing Otree didn't get ahold of that guy. There'd be nothing left of him.
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I've done some pretty stupid things in my life on a bike. I really can't deny that, and I think anyone that knows me will concur. I think the problem is I just convince myself too easily that some really dumb thing will be good for me, make me a stronger rider. The real core problem though is that they usually do make me better and then cause me to want to do even more dumb stuff.
Case in point, this weekend I chose to join up with a Kenwood hill training ride. But being who I am, I can't just show up and ride up a bunch of long hills, I have to do it on a fixed gear bike (I have this medical condition which causes me to believe that I can ride a fixed gear bike, or singlespeed mtb anywhere a "normal" person can ride a geared bike. don't ask why). So I did the ride and hit the wall hard going up Ohio St. in St. Paul. Inbetween gasps of air, all I could think was "why are you so stupid?" I headed back east towards home after that thinking I wouldn't be able to make the climb up to Battle creek to get back home. Fortunately for me, the path back up to my house was partially covered in ice/slush and I couldn't keep any traction on the fixie, so I had to walk part of it. darn.
The next day I was pretty much useless, thankfully it was Easter Sunday, so being useless is polically acceptable. I sounded like an old man getting up or sitting down, my legs felt like they would give way at any moment to leave me as a big pile of jello on the floor, just waiting for someone to pick me up and and throw me away.
So what exactly did I learn from this experience you ask? Well, I didn't die, so I guess that means I better try something dumber. So when it hit 66 degrees here in St. Paul yesterday, I decided a ride out to afton was in order. For those of you who aren't from around here, Afton is where the hills are (home of the Afton Alps ski area, but using the word "alps" is a bit of a stretch, really should be called "afton river bluffs"). And of course I had to take my fixed gear out for the ride.
The entire ride out there my brain was actually functioning (quite a change from my usual) and I kept telling myself that I would turn around at afton and take the same rolling-hilly route back home to avoid the really big climbs. But being me, once I got there, I had to see if I could do them, so up I went. There's three big climbs out there, the first is the steepest, about 6%, but less than a mile long, the next is the longest about 5% for about a mile and a half. The last one is a mix, starts off really steep for a short section, but then never seems to end as it graduals out. ( I know that doesn't sound like much for those of you that live in the mountains, but you're probably not riding a 48-17 fixie either).
The first two felt awful, no other way to describe it. The third one surprised me though, I though it was going to be the hardest one, but turned out to be the best one. By the time I reached the top, I was actually feeling better than before I started them. odd. Infact, the whole ride home from there just got better and better. Guess being stupid was paying off, I felt like I broke through some leg-strength wall, or maybe I had endured my pain limit and my brain went into some endophin-induced nivana. Whatever it was, it felt good.
guess I better go find something dumber to do today....
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"Dumb is as Dumb does" F. Gump Give yourself a break... you could have "tried" to ride on that ice. Now that would have been some kind of dumb! ;-) -Me (Large Fella)
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I like the hills out in Afton myself. I ride with a group most Saturdays from Oakdale and down to Afton or thereabouts. I don't do it on a fixie though. Maybe I should. There is going to be a Brevet Series starting in May that goes through that area. Anyway, I like your site. It'll have to do while I save my money for one of your frames. I'm thinking a 650B Brevet bike with a sort of French Rene Herse look and feel to it, and the leaf-print lugs. Really spectacular. I'm saving starting now.
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Well, it’s Friday. It’s about time.
It’s been a long week, if you didn’t know the Brown household is in the process of remodeling our kitchen. I’m too cheap to hire something as simple as that out to someone else, so instead I spend every spare minute I have installing cabinets or tiling walls.
It seemed like a good idea at first, I bought the house five years ago and the entire main floor had been remodeled with the exception of the kitchen. I’m now learning why the kitchen hadn’t been done, it’s an evil-money-time-patience-tool-sanity-eating blackhole. Everything that approaches it gets sucked in, never to appear again. The real kicker though is living without a kitchen. Didn’t seem that bad the first week (I took a week off to hit this project with both barrels along with the help of lots of family), but after the third week now, I’ve never longed for a home-made meal more. That alone is motivation enough to get to make it operation this weekend. Wish me luck.
Enough home talk, I got my long-awaited shipment from Pacenti Cycle Designs this week. This shipment included some steel and supplies for the top-secret bbbb road racer project, but more importantly it came with the missing link to Kirk slant-six lug project. For those not familiar with Kirk, he’s a great guy down in Tennessee who’s gotten himself into the lug designing/selling biz. He’s got great lugs and I use them as often as possible, his original design is what I used as the base to carve my nature lover lugs from (I’ve been shocked at how many folks didn’t realize that I have to carve all that stuff out by hand, lugs don’t’ come cast in the shaped I used for the nature-lovers!). By the way, response to those lugs has been tremendous, it looks like I’ll be carving up more similar ones this year for other projects so keep your eyes out for more examples.
Kirk’s slant six project is a really cool one, especially for me since I build lugged Mountain bikes. He’s selling a lugset to take modern double oversize diameter tubes (1.25” TT, 1.375”DT) and a 36mm headtube to fit today’s 1 1/8” steerer-tubed forks. The angles are designed for a sloping top-tube, which has become pretty common on compact-style road frames these days. But even better, with just a little tweaking, they come out almost perfect for a suspension corrected mountain bike frame. That makes my life easier since I can use lightweight modern tubing to make lugged mountain bikes with far less lug-work now. Until now, there was a part missing though, the seatpost. To take full advantage of the lightweight tubes available for the slant six lugs, they can be used with a .5mm wall butted seat-tube, but that requires a 30.6mm seat-post. Look around and tell me what you find for options in that size. I’ll tell ya right now, there’s nothing that goes well with a super-swanky road racing machine.
Enter Kirk, again… He had Wound-up make a custom seatpost for these lugs. I got my first samples this week, and they’re absolutely gorgeous. A very nice looking carbon shaft with a polished aluminum head shinier than the spinners on the Cadillac Escalade that cut me off this morning (if you want real spinners, check these out!).
Words can’t do it justice, I’ll try and get some pictures up this weekend or next week, it’s pretty sweet.
Remember me this weekend when you’re out riding your bike in the spring weather, I’ll be installing kitchen wall tile….
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