show and tell

Good weekend, I got a lot done. I like that.

House first: Sunday I finally got around to filling in the grout around all the stone blocks I had applied to the foundation of the house. This was one tedious job. You mix up mortar in small quantities, then pour some in a large cloth funnel bag (think cake-decorating bag), then squeeze the runny mortar into the gaps between the blocks. Sounds easy enough, but when half your work is above your head that means you're holding a bag of concrete overhead for hours. It took me about half of the mortaring to finally get the hang of it and get the mix consistence just right. I'd say the first half of the project took about 4 hours and the second half 2 hours.

Once you get the mortar in place, then you have to smooth it in the gaps and make it look good. Unfortunately with stones that are all irregular all the gaps are different sizes and shapes. Therefore there is no tool you can use to get in all the gaps, it's a finger job. I think I wore off all the fingerprints on my right hand doing this, but I managed to get it all in there and smooth, but the concrete mortar just sucks all the moisture out of your skin.

Here's the final result though, I think it looks pretty good. And now we can finish up the garage door trim and paint.

Now onto more important things, bikes. After far more painting than I had planned, I was finally able to build up the new lugged 29'er this weekend. I experimented with some new paint on the lugs, chrome paint! The lugs on the frame were actually stainless since I was planning on polishing them out, but then when I decided to use the bridgestone fork crown, I had a dilemma. The crown wasn't stainless and I couldn't make it match the polished stainless lugs. I didn't like the idea of just painting it and polishing the rest, so I decided to try something new.

Different chrome paints have been around, but none of them have historically been any good. But I came across this stuff that was terribly expensive, but of a quality that was on par with the other paints I use. I decided to try it. I learned a lot during the process of painting this one and I think future projects will go much faster because of it, but the reality is this paint job took as much time as at least three regular paint jobs combined! Was it worth the time?

I think so.

The paint is really unique. I'm not sure that I'd exactly call it chrome, but more like polished aluminum, very metal-like though. I suspect part of tha is due to my base prep, I think I can get it darker to look more like chrome with a darker base prep.

I absolutely love how the fork crown came out though. The blue coming through the windows inside the crown and the long points are just stunning. That crown really makes the bike in my opinion.

I tried another new method on this paint job, liquid masking agent. I did about 75% of the masking with a brush on masking agent. You let it dry, then cut it out with an xacto knife. It was much easier to work with than I thought, and really left some nice crisp edges. I think I'll be using it more.

Here's the whole front end. What's a lugged mtb without a matching lugged stem? Really? I jus had to do it. That's one of Darrel McCulloch's lugged stem kits, but I turned around the back lug to give it a rise and then reshaped all the points to match the frame. You can't see it in this picture, but the headtube is finished off with a sterling silver Bob Brown Cycles logo, the finishing touch!

These stems are pretty well thought out, the steerer clamp is 28.6mm (so this one has a shim, but you can't tell) and the bar clamp is 31.8 so it can fit pretty much any size or type of bar (with a shim if needed). The lugs can be flipped to give different angles and the castings were left with extra material for shaping in the right places. Well done Darrel. Finished product is under 200g for a 135mm length!

The seatlug is pretty straightforward, but I like this picture because it gives you an idea of the depth of color on the blue. That's actually a candy blue finish, the frame is painted silver, all the blue color is in the clearcoat, so it looks really deep. Again, more labor on the paint, but worth it in the end. Candy colors are a pretty neat effect that can be very subtle or quite dramatic. I'm going to be experimenting more with them.

The dropouts are real chrome. These are Campy 1010b's with the deraileur hanger removed (since this is a singlespeed) I was going to use track dropouts, but I just don't think they ever look as classy as road horizontals, especially these horizontals and this bike is about class. There's really no reason to use track dropouts in a frame like this over a forward facing dropout, the wheels hold fine, especially with those huge "fun-bolts" on the King hub. I love the really big window on these too, they really knew how to make a nice looking dropout back when these were made. I've got a few sets left, so lemme know if you want them on your frame!

Finally, here's the whole thing built up. You had to figure out by now where those super-shiny polished XTR cranks were headed right? Polished is the theme of the bike, that along with lightweight. The whole thing comes in about 18 lbs, pretty darn good for a steel 29'er I think. The Stan's no-tubes /Chris King wheels are the main culprit in saving weight, but all the parts are reasonably light.

My only big concern with this bike is the Stan's rims/tires. I'm somewhat skeptical about their long term durability, but time will tell. They're really light, but you can also feel the large de-tensioning of the spokes when you inflate the tire to 40psi, the rims are that thin! I also spent far more time than I think it should have taken trying to get the tires to seal up to the rims. we'll see....

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doozie of a ride

I had a nice long weekend from work over the 4th of July, 4 days off. Beth wasn't as fortunate, she had to work Monday, so we broke the long weekend into 2 mini-weekends of sorts. Friday-Sunday we headed up to my folks cabin with friends Mark & Amy. The weather was great and we had a really nice, relaxing weekend right up until Sunday afternoon.

Mark and I had decided earlier that we'd ride part of the way home from the cabin Sunday afternoon. On the way up, we left a car at Royalton so that we would only have a 75 mile ride instead of a 150+ mile ride all the way home. Seemed like a fine plan.

Sunday came around and we made a last minute decision to boat to Crosslake for one last ice-cream stop before we hit the road. So we all piled in the boat and headed to the local ice-cream shop. Now some of you may remember that I wrote about another trip up to my folks cabin a few weeks ago with a big group of friends. During that trip we visited this same ice-cream shop with the intentions of gorging on ice-cream by all getting Doozies: supposedly nearly a quart of ice-cream on a cone, you even get your picture taken if you get one. Well, out of the whole group of about a dozen people last time, I was the only one to get a doozie. The group was weak.

This time Mark wanted to make up for his poor showing as part of the group a few weeks earlier, so he ordered a doozie, and naturally so did I. The key to eating these things is speed. If you take your time and lick away on the surface, it'll just melt and you'll be left with a cone full of liquid and that's no fun. So you have to take big bites and never slow down, which both of us did. We polished them off with style, then headed back to the cabin to pack up and hit the road.

By the time we got back it was about 4pm, which was later than I wanted, but what can you do. We hit the road figuring it would be 4 hours max to ride to the car we had left in Royalton, so we'd still have plenty of daylight. Keep in mind that at this time all Mark and I had eaten were Blueberry pancakes for breakfast, and then a huge serving of ice-cream for lunch.
I felt really sluggish all the way to Brainerd, but I chalked it up to my laziness and not riding much lately. Mark seemed fine and my stomach was doing alright with that ice-cream.

Unfortunately we both knew that there would be nowhere to stop for food or water between Brainerd and Little Falls. This meant some dinner now even though I wasn't all that hungry, or wait 2 hours at which time I knew I'd be out of gas. Mark was a little hungry, so we decided to stop now. It was Sunday night in Brainerd and we were well on the other side of town from all the chain restaurants, so we had to scour the old downtown section for an open establishment. Finally after riding around more than we needed we found Giovanni's pizza. Not my first choice, but it was the only choice! We ate in moderation knowing it was really hot and that it might not sit very well while riding. Not to mention we had really maxed out on dairy food already for the day.

Hit the road again and again it was getting later than I wanted. It was after 7 now and we still had about 50 miles to go. About an hour down the road both of us started to feel bad. Really bad. The pizza was working it's magic in the wrong way and we both just really felt sick. Standing up was terrible so we sat as much as possible. When we came to the split in the road where we had to decide between a closer town, but overall longer route thru Little Falls, or the overall shorter route through Pierz but a longer time to a bathroom, we headed to Little Falls. The ride had become about the most uncomfortable ride of my life by the time we got to the city limits and I've never been happier to see a gas-station. relief.

After a brief stop and some rest, we got back on the bikes and tried to figure out the best route from here to Royalton. I had been planning on riding through Pierz, so I didn't have a route from this direction. Unfortunately there was an airport between where we were and where we wanted to be and no thru roads. So we headed down through the otherside of town, hoping to pick up a county road south of the airport. The sun was rapidly sinking.

It seemed like we had found a good route riding county road 76 south, it had a big shoulder and very few cars, perfect. Well perfect until it dumped us onto Hwy 10. Yup, it merged right in, so now we were riding on the shoulder of a major highway with cars flying by at 70 mph and it's pretty much dark out. We got off that as soon as possible about a mile down. Got on a county road that could have taken us right where we wanted to be, but instead we turned one road too soon and ended up back at hwy 10 a few miles down. crap. It was ride 10 a little longer or back track quite a bit to try and find another road in the dark. We opted to ride down 10 a little further, facing traffic so we would be able to see if anyone was going to plow into us. After what felt like an eternity but was probably about a mile, we hit another county road and headed off into the darkness. It was really dark now, thankfully there was nobody out on these back roads at all, so we had room, but the bugs were awful. At least we were going the right direction. We rode for what seemed like a long time until we started seeing signs of what appeared to be a town. Houses with mail-boxes at the road instead of fire-road signs, garbage cans out for city collection. So we turned east and headed out towards 10 thinking we were at Royalton (the city is right on 10). Nope, we got to 10 and there was a wood working shop and nothing else. I knew we had to be really close to town, but I couldn't see it in either direction looking up and down 10 and honestly we didn't know if it was just north of us or just south. Not to mention it was after 10pm now and we're really getting tired. So we broke out the cell phone and called Amy to ask her to mapquest this woodworking shop that we were sitting in the parking lot of. Finally after a few minutes of being eaten alive by mosquito's she found it and informed us were were about a mile away from the car! thank God. We turned around, rode to the real to and quickly found the car. Thankfully by this time my stomach was feeling better, but my legs and butt were shot.

Next time, leave earlier, less ice-cream, no pizza. I'm still trying to recover.

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one more time

A few more things I forgot to mention in my first post today:

You might notice that I'm updating the links on the blog sidebar, I've added a few more, removed a couple, etc... Nothing too big, but you should check out the other blogs/pages over there for some good reading. If you like bikes and people who write better than me, you really owe it to yourself to read Tarik's blog, he's a funny dude who has good adventures and must always carry a camera.

I also went through up fixed what I'm sure many of you have been clammoring for, I put the correct link on my website for the current Derailleurtheband website.

Finally my thought for the day:

I was riding home last night from dinner with my back to the sunset. I love riding this way for one simple reason, I'm terribly entertained by the really long shadow of my legs while riding. It's just one of those funny things that makes me smile, if you've ever rode at sunset heading east you know what I'm talking about. Your calves look huge, knees super skinny and thighs really strong. It's like nature's caricature of what a cyclists' legs should look like. I tried to get it with my camera phone, but I was riding a fixie so I can't stop my legs from moving and the camera phone doesn't do as good with moving things, but the skinny knees still come though!

And finally, I saw this WWII poster on my friend Gordy's photosite (Gordy, hope you don't mind) and had to share 'cause it's funny. Although I wonder if they would have really used the work "ass" back in the 40's.

Another week down.

I'm really glad this week is wrapping up. Don't know why, but I've just been feeling really tired the last few days. All in all, it was actually a pretty good week.

Monday I got in a great ride. It was a beautiful night when I got home from work, so I headed out on the road bike. I had a plan, I had talked to Beth on the phone before I left and she wanted to go for an easy ride later when she got home, so I was supposed to go out for a short, hard ride and tire myself out, then go easy with her afterwards. So I headed out to Cottage Grove and did pretty much all the big hills down there in big gears. I was more successful at tiring myself out than I had planned and bonked on my way back home to pick up Beth. That was an hour and a half of big hills. Then Beth and I headed out at a much easier pace, headed down to Swede hollow, up Phalen parkway and around lake Phalen, then cruised down the parkway home and that ended up being another hour and a half. Three hours total and I was ready to eat. Beth really wanted ice-cream so we managed to find ourselves at Dairy Queen later that night which provided another funny encounter. We were sitting in the Miata eating out ice-cream when a mini-van pulled up next to us. The Dad driving got out, then his daughter (who couldn't have been over 10) got out, whispered something to her Dad and he nodded, then she came over and told Beth "that's a really nice car, ever since I was a little kid I've wanted this kind of car." She went on for a minute or so and it was so funny, you could just see the Dad rolling his eyes. We laughed.

Tuesday was band night, which was proceeded with some shop-time prepping frames for paint.

Wednesday was my birthday (and my Mom's, happy b-day Mom!), so I decided to take the day off work and do what I enjoy the most: gettin' shit done. I had high hopes of finishing up my 29'er project, doing a repair, and painting 2 other frames. I started off with the repair and had it 90% done when I ran out of gas. Literally. So I had to load up my Oxy-acet. cylinders and go exchange them. I decided to pick up my painting supplies at the same time and grab lunch, so that turned into a couple of hours. Finally got home, finished up the repair and did the finishing touches on my 29'er then got ready to paint. I managed to get everything primed, sealed and basecoated, but was running out of time, so I cleaned up in time for Beth to come home and we went out to dinner. Didn't get as much done as I wanted, but a good day nonetheless.

Thursday, did some more paint prep work, I'm working on finishing up this chaingaurd I made and it's all thin sheet-metal and it's taking more time to prep than I'm used to. I want it to look perfectly flat and smooth, so I've been doing a lot of finish sanding between primers. Then met some friends for drinks and dinner and that pretty much turned into the rest of the night.

The 29'er project is coming along nicely. The frame and fork are all done, I just need to build the matching lugged stem and then it will be ready for paint. I'm going to put together a simple web-page sort of documenting the construction of this frame since I was able to take pictures along the way. But here are a few highlights until then. To the left is the headtube, just after brazing and a mild clean-up. I'm really diggin' the subtle little side points on the lugs.


Here's the fork crown all brazed up and ready to rock. I do love those old bridgestone crowns, but man was it a pain to braze and clean up. The casting doesn't have the smoothest shape to it, so I had to do a lot of sanding to get it how I wanted it. The tire shown is pretty small, it's a 1.75" tire, so a 2"+ will nicely fill out the space.

I'll just leave it at those couple pics to tease you for now. I'll get a bunch more up once I make that other web-page. I gotta start thinking about how I want to spec this thing out.

In other news, I updated the sale page a couple weeks back and never mentioned it here, so I thought I would. There's a bunch of new parts on there and even a complete bike, so check it out, buy my junk.

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misc ramblings

Well, another week is gone, thankfully. Had a nice ride Wednesday night. I rode over to Minneapolis, met up with an old friend then rode back to St. Paul, spectated at the time-trials on shepard road, then road back to Minneapolis and finally back home to St. Paul. That's a lot of back and fourth!
The time trials were fun. We didn't actually intend to stop there, but got sucked into the glam that is bicycle race spectating. It was virtually impossible to ride down by the start and not run into people we knew, so we hung out for a while, saw a few really fast finishers and headed on out way. The time trail was only 4.5 miles long, so there was some serious speed being laid down. Doug Swanson came though under 9 minutes, meaning he averaged over 30 mph the whole time. I think a few of the Pro's came in under 8:30. That's smokin fast.

On the ride over to Minneapolis the first time, I encountered an all-too-familiar phenomenon on Summit Ave: boneheaded riders. I swear Summit Ave is the Mecca of riders without any common sense or courtousy. Summit is the main bike highway from St. Paul to Minneapolis, and it's my fastest route to get to downtown Minneapolis from my place. So naturally when I'm on it, I 'm usually running late to meet someone so I put the pedals down all the way across it, which means passing lots of riders. Now most of them are nice commuters just on their way home and they're friendly as can be, but it's almost impossible for me to make it all the way from downtown to downtown without some stranger jumping in on my wheel completely unannounced.
I don't mind people drafting me, but fer cryin' out loud people, let me know you're there. There are parked cars all along the route, so doors can fly open at a moments notice, I have to swerve quite a bit to avoid things in the road, people, cars, etc... It's simply not safe to have someone an inch off your rear wheel and not know about it, and it's even less safe for you bonehead.

Wednesday I had an interesting one though. I passed a guy that was obviously comutting home from work, riding his schwinn letour with aerobars and double panniers (I'll never understand aerobar usage in a major metropolitan area). I passed him going about 7-10 mph faster than he was going, I made a very safe pass when there was no traffic around. Well since they can't time stoplights in St. Paul, you hit most of them when you head west. About a mile up I hit a red light and waited. A few minutes later this guy rolls up and promptly goes around me to get in front of me at the light. Guess he thought he'd get the jump on me at the light or something...
Light turns green, he barely moves, but finally start riding, I end up having to pass him again 25 feet down the road. Never saw him again after that.

I just don't understand some people.

I finally got around to getting our air-conditioner working at home yesterday. We've had a few humid days and a few hot ones earlier in the year, so it was overdue. I thought all I needed to do was splice the wire that had been cut during construction. So I started there. Got that patched up and turned on the power. I figured I'd lube the motor before I started it, so I went outside to take off the cover and check out the internals. That's when it hit me, we moved the air conditioner during construction and never fully remounted it! So a five minute job turned into an hour or so as I had to clean off the concrete slab, level it, re-fill in the dirt under one end and finally mount the air conditioner down to the slab. Oh yeah and hose out the inches of cottonwood that fill up the heat exchanger each year. By the time I finally got it all back together and running, it was just about time to head out to meet some friends for dinner.

I think we're going to try and check out the downtown crit tonight. Crits are so much more fun when you're spectating instead of racing, especially one this fast. Maybe get some frame painting done this weekend, sounds like it's supposed to storm most of the weekend, that's good painting weather!

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continuation?

Ok, so I lost steam in finishing up that last posting. And to answer Fride's question, you're a week off, I rode up north the previous weekend and it took me a week to write about it... yes you saw me this past weekend on the on-road mtb ride thing Saturday.

As Fride alluded to there was a supposedly epic ride planned this past weekend. I was pretty excited to actually get to do it and have long rides two weekends in a row! I showed up at CRC at 7:30 right on plan and amazingly there were already other Kenwoodies there. These rides are getting waaay too organized. We had everyone by 7:45 and hit the road headed to the River bottoms.
As usual I was on a mono-speeded bicycle, but unlike usual there were many folks on bikes with those gear-changer-thingy's on them. I had opted to gear up slightly for the ride, but was very much undergeared for what was ahead.

We rode down on roads, it seemed like the long way, but we got there and my legs were about blown from spinning so fast on the pavement. Met up with KK at the entrance and called Fride to find out he and the other Fride had parked at the Bloomington ferry bridge parking lot instead of the lyndale parking lot as they were instructed. So we rode west for a while and eventually hooked up with the Fride bro's. They rode with us just long enough for Gary's chain to break, fixed it and turned back. Probably a good move as we were heading into the nettles area of the trail in order to get to the cedar ave bridge.

It had been a very cool morning when we left and I discovered a great trick for the nettles. I had worn knee warmers and happened to have on thin but tall wool socks. I was able to pull the socks up and the knee warmers down enough to fully protect the legs and got the sweet bonus of looking like a Norwegian xc-ski tourist riding a bike!

Made it through the nettles and onto the cedar off-road commuter trail and took that pretty much all the way to the Mendota Bridge. From here I thought we were planning on hitting the new mtb trails in Medota Heights, but several had timelines to hit, so we all hit the roads back to CRC. Not a bad ride, but a lot of pavement for a mtb ride. ended up being about 4 hours.

Stone and tttt both had new steeds to try out on the ride, both steel geared 29'ers. One a Kelly (RIP) and one a Sycip, both really nice. Kind of gave me the bug to get some work done on that rigid 29'er I've been thinking about. So...

I spent Sunday in the shop, working on putting the finishing touches and paint prep on a frame that's recently been complete. I had a lot of chroming to do to some small parts and all the dropouts, so that took some time, but while letting parts soak in the chrome bath, I started cutting lugs. I've had a set of Richard Sach's Newvex lugs knocking around the shop for a while and I planned to use them on a mtb project and this was it. Here's what they look like as they're cast. I'm really not crazy about the style of these lugs as is, they're supposed to be an updated version of the classic Nervex lugs from the 70's, which they are, but I didn't really like Nervex lugs that much either. So I bbbb'd them up!



They're actually really nice castings, good job on the design Richard. I just don't care for the rounded points all over them and especially the forward points that wrap the headtube. I went for a little more sleek style with small straightpoints and then really simplified the wraps around the headtube. Oh yeah, they're stainless too, so I'll be polishing them out, should look pretty nice on the finished product.

I'm still unsure about the seat-binder, I'm not crazy about this look, but I'm debating what I'll do to them, I guess it depends on how I attach the seat-stays.


Here's my other pet project from the weekend. I scored a used set of XTR cranks on ebay for $27. They had been sprayed with this awful rubberized underbody coating. Not sure why someone would do that, but they did. No matter, it came off easy in the blaster. Them I went to work polishing up the arms. I've always thought these would be great cranks if they came in a polished version, and I think I was right! These are destined for singlespeeding as you can tell by the spot spiderless ring set-up. I think they'll probably end up adorning the bike with the lugs from above.

I also found out that I should be getting my shipment of Reynolds 953 steel later this summer. The stuff has been impossible to get, so I'm in for the next shipment. I can't wait to try this stuff out, and I've got a few tricks up my sleeve for making some truly one-of-a-kind frames with this, so keep your eyes peeled later this summer.

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long weekend ride

That's a trick title to the post, it was a long weekend and a long ride that occurred on the weekend. Guess I shouldn't have to explain my puns, but when they're that bad...

So last Friday I returned to my binge training plan. Hadn't ridden much in a week or so, then rode up to my folks cabin north of Brainerd with a couple of friends. It was a long day, but a great one. I started off early meeting Deanwood at CRC at 7:30. From there we headed over to Mark's house to pick him up and head north. Unfortunately I was way-layed before we even got to Mark's house, my boss called my cell phone. Unfortunately it wasn't just him, but half the staff at one of our plants too. They had a make-believe crisis that I had to talk them through, so after a few minutes on the phone my boss apologized for the call and we headed on our way.

We carpooled up to Big Lake, parked the car and hit the road the right way, on 2 wheels. We picked a route of county roads all the way to Brainerd. The roads were light on shoulders, but even lighter on traffic, so they worked well. We headed north and fought with a little headwind until the lunch stop in Pierz. We were all feeling the ride already by noon, so lunch was a welcome rest. We stopped at Anderson's cafe and motel to check in for some lunch. They certainly were accommodating and pleasant and I think were fascinated with the fact that we were riding our bikes up past Brainerd. They even made Mark some bonus steak fries since they thought we'd need extra energy. All in all the cafe/motel was odd, but we left full and re-energized.

From there we pressed on up county road 45 to Brainerd. The wind was taking it's toll on me and the pace was pretty fast. About 80 miles in my legs were done, cramps in both quads. Yuk, I hate cramps. I had to just spin them out, and eventually they went away but those miles really sucked. Once we hit Brainerd I was feeling better and able to start taking some pulls instead of just sucking Def and Mark's wheels. From there we hit the Paul Bunyan trail all the way up to Pequot Lakes. The trail was a welcome change as it was shaded and had little wind. I should probably say it was a welcome change for me, Def was still cranking away hard and Mark seemed to be doing great, I needed the break.

We kept on and finished off the ride. In the end I guess it was around 120 miles, but none of us had computers so we don't exactly know. Based on the overall time and the time we stopped for lunch I think we were holding about 20 mph for most of the ride, that's enough to make me hurt.

We got up to the cabin at 6 pm and had beaten the other folks meeting us up there, so we took to the lake. The semi-cold water was awesome on the legs, like instant physical therapy on my muscles. Then it was a nice relaxing evening waiting for the others to arrive.

to be continued....

still busy...

So here's the second part from yesterday's post, the bike. As I mentioned I finished one up this weekend, built it up Tuesday and delivered it last night. This one was a bit more fun than usual for a couple of reasons. First off, it was built for a good friend who'll be using it to compete in the Madison Ironman this year and secondly, it's an actual full-on racing bike, which I don't get to build as many of.
The flashy orange paint job is what really get's your attention first, but there are a few other details that make it fun too.

The frame is mostly Columbus Life tubing, built with Slant Six lugs. I really like these lugs the more I use them. They've got plenty of material where I want it and have a nice general shape right out of the box. I tend to carve off some meat on the headlugs, but the seatlug is great for fast-back stays or a wish-bone stay like this one has. There's a nice sized area on the back of the lug to fit the mono-stay. The more I look at this frame, the more I like the wish-bone stays when combined with the sloping top-tube.

I built it up for the customer as kind of a budget racer. He didn't have a pile of cash to throw at it right now, but needed it to be good enough to race an ironman, so I put together a unique group of parts to save some cash, but give him a good solid foundation that can be upgraded later.
The drivetrain is all 105 stuff, with the exception of the crank. I opted to sub in the new Race-Face Cadence road crank instead. It's got a nice integrated BB with external bearings like the shimano offerings, but I think looks much better, weighs less and is a bit cheaper. The Canadians seem to have really made a good product here, I wish their off-road cranks had as narrow of a Q-factor as these.

For wheels I opted to spec out Neuvation M-28's. You probably haven't heard of Neuvation, it's a one-man company making some really nice overseas built wheels. The parts in the wheels are impressive and he basically has zero overhead, so that keeps his pricing down. If you're looking for wheels on your new BBC, let me know, it's virtually impossible to beat the deals on these.

This one will be put to the test pretty fast, the new owner, Deanwood, and myself will be putting in a 115 mile ride tomorrow. I don't think any of us are really prepared for it, so that should be interesting. I'm really hoping it's dry and not as hot as it's been, I'm still nursing some sunburn from the past weekend.

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Busy as a bbbb

The holiday weekend just wasn't long enough, so I took the liberty of making it longer. I took Friday off work and ended up taking Tuesday as well. But don't think that me taking a 5 day weekend means long naps at the beach, nope it was productivity all the way. I had to keep up my reputation as the most productive human alive (as Tarik may claim). So...

Friday I stayed home to paint bikes, Yup, bicycles that I built. I've been really crankin lately down in the shop, I managed to crank out a frame last week as well as an S & S retrofit and I had a few other odds and ends to paint up. I spent the morning doing paint prep and masking. The coupler job required just masked panels around the couplers, which in turn means I have to mask the couplers, then nice panels around them and finally the rest of the bike. That's a lot of masking for a touch-up. Then between masking jobs I got distracted by the Miata again. Still trying to make it run perfect, I decided to add a couple gauges so I could check the air/fuel ratio while driving (I suspect it's running lean). Once I got into that, I had the center console pulled apart so it seemed like a prime time to change out the radio too. My old Alpine stereo is fantastic with the exception of one glitch, the knob doesn't work when it's hot or humid. I've tried everything to clean it, but most of the time you just never know what's going to happen when you turn that knob. The one thing you could count on was that the volume probably wouldn't change. So Beth had an older pioneer stereo knockin' around the house for a while, so I threw that in. It has no knobs. Now if I could only figure out how to set the clock and turn off the annoying beep everytime you hit a button. I've installed many many car stereo's and I've never had one beat me in not being able to set the clock like this one has!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah Friday. So after that I went for a nice ride on my bike and met up with friend Dean for a spin around St. Paul. We headed back over to the house for some BBQ action afterwards since he hadn't seen the place for a few months. We grilled, hung out, and I gave him a ride home later on. That was the end of the relaxing for the weekend.

Saturday I still had paint work to finish up, so I got up at 7 and started spraying. Finished up all that work by 10 am. Then it was time to get going on outside house projects. The retaining wall was first. The wall was all up, but the whole thing had to be capped yet (those are the finished blocks that get glued down on top of the wall to make it look all purdy). So we made a couple trips to Patio town to get caps since the trailer can only take 1000 lbs per trip. Unfortunately due to the slop of our front yard, the wall is stepped down many times and at each step, you have to split one or two of these blocks to get the spacing right. That means I had to split about 20 concrete blocks. Fortunately I had a great idea sometime back (though not far enough back for me to have used it on the actual retaining wall when I really could have used it!). I still had the electric hammer from my Grandfather. This thing is awesome, it's basically a miniature electric jackhammer. I put the wide chisel blade on it and went to work, it cut the rock splitting time from about 4 minutes of hammer and chisel time with about 30 seconds of power tool use. So I'd fit the blocks up, split them and Beth would epoxy 'em down as we went. Sounds easy enough, but they're 50 lbs each and they're just about all overhead, so it worked over our arms and backs pretty good.
That work took us through early Sunday, then it was time to put on my mason's hat. The stone facing for the garage exterior was next. Up till now, the outside of the walls of the garage had just been bare rough concrete. We bought these cast concrete stones for the exposed faces last fall but just hadn't gotten around to installing them yet. I hadn't done much stone work before so this was a learning experience.

I had to start off with putting metal lathe over the wood header for the garagedoor and then putting down a scratch coat of mortar on that.

That went pretty good other than the fact that there isn't much room up under the roof overhang to work. Next the directions said to install the corner pieces first and fill in after that. It also claimed that the mortar should adhere fine to the existing concrete surface without a scratch coat on that. I started installing corners at the bottom and worked my way up. about 2 feet up things went awry and stones started falling off and I started losing my patience. As it turned out the mortar didn't adhere well to the older cured concrete, it was just too smooth of a finish, so I ended up propping a lot of the stones in place with sticks and scratchcoating most of the existing concrete. That pretty well took care of Sunday.
Monday we finished up the corner stones and started on the part above the garage door. Those stones held much better since there was a nice rough scratch coat up there. All the stones are different shapes and colors, so the process of piecing them in took quite a while. Infact I thought this would be a 1-2 day job at the most, and it ended up taking 3 so far and I still haven't grouted anything! I stayed home yesterday and finished up the rest of the front face and the side by the sidewalk.

Even though it's not grouted yet I'm really thrilled with how it looks. The stone goes so well with the retaining wall and the colors of the house. It was really worth the effort as I think this is kind of the finishing touch on the curb appeal of the house.
Here's the finished view from the driveway, click on the images for bigger versions.


And since I haven't been updating this too much with other house progress, here's one picture of the new front door. We installed this and the new screen door a couple weeks back. Beth put a few coats of paint on the door this weekend too, but it doesn't appear to have adhered properly. So much for the supposed "factory primer" finish on the door, nothing want' to stick to it. It think we're going to have to take it down, scrape this paint off and spray the door. Other than the paint issues, it's great. The stained glass looks really nice inside the house.

Well, I've got more bike stuff I'd like to talk about but I'm about out of writing time, so I'll write about that later. I should have some pictures of my latest frame this week too, once it's all built up.

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To finish the story on the tandem repaint from my last post:
I have to say Hat's off to the Big S company in that they stand behind their product. The owner of the tandem called them up and sent some digital pictures I had take of the defect and they told him to send it in, sounded like a warranty repair. So he'll get that fixed and end up with a new paint job at no cost. Good deal all around, customer gets his bike fixed and repainted for free, and I don't have to hassle with the thing anymore.

JimG posted a comment on the last entry as well asking for a picture of the distorted chainstay from the other paint job I spoke of. Here you go:

It's somewhat difficult to see in a photo, but there is a fairly sharp ridge formed where I've circled and there's a matching one on the other side of the stay. These happen to be very thin chainstays (This wouldn't have happened on a thicker stay) and the stop was brazed with brass. I have no idea why anyone would install a cable stop on a tube this thin with brass, that's just a crummy idea to begin with and as you can see it's not the neatest brazing. There were a few other spots on the bike with some copper flash around brass brazing, which is an obvious indicator of far too much heat. Fortunately for the customer this appeared to be the only place with real damage though, so a new chainstay is going in.

Had a great ride Monday night. I headed out about 4:30 and rode towards Mlps. About halfway in I thought I'd see if Otree wanted to meet up for some riding on his way home from work. Good timing as he was just getting ready to head out, so I headed south and met him near the 494 bridge by the airport. From there we did some hills in St. Paul, up Ohio St., up the highbridge, then he showed me his scheme of connecting up the Grand Ave hill, Ramsey hill and Alley D'uez. By the time we got up all those I was really starting to feel it, so I peeled off and headed home and he did the same. All in all about 2 hours of mostly hills on a beautiful day.

Yesterday I was still feeling the hills in my legs, so I worked on bikes instead. I'm trying to finish up a frame right now and I got pretty close last night. Finished up the seatstays, installed all the bosses and did a little finish work on the lugs. Set it off to soak overnight and I'll try to wrap it up tonight. I still have to finish up the fork, but I think I may get that done this week too. It feels good to start catching up on some of this work around the shop, I just wasn't really able to spend any quality time in there in April.

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bikes -n-cars

Well I was finally home for an entire weekend. Felt good.

I thought I would do some catching up in the bike department and try to crank out a couple of paint jobs that have been waiting. I stripped both frames and amazingly found defects in both frames. Talk about a bummer, especially for the customer.
One of them was brand new, a custom build by a low-buck midwestern builder who shall remain nameless. He had overcooked the chainstay in the simplest of operations, installing the rear deraileur cable stop. Really dumb mistake, but he buckled the chainstay right at the stop and created an almost certain future failure point. So now I have a paint job and a chainstay replacement to do. Sigh.

The other frame was a tandem made by the biggest marketing company in the world of tandems, the big "S". I'm amazed at this one as they typically overbuild all their stuff by about a factor of 3, yet buried under that paint was a buckle in the captain seat-tube caused by a mistake in welding and a few years of riding.

It really sucks having to make those phone calls to people to tell them the frame that they innocently brought in for a repaint has a pretty major problem buried in it. It's a really rare occurrence, infact I've hardly ever had to do it before, but here I was having to make two of those calls in one weekend. yuk.

Since I wasn't going to be painting Sunday I decided to do some work on my other hobby, playing with my 1992 Miata. Granted I'm a die-hard cycle advocate, I still love to tinker with this car, it's the only car I've ever actually enjoyed working on. It's logically designed and well laid out, easy to service and tune. Usually I have it out in mid-April, but due to all my travels this year I hadn't even taken it out yet. It's always started right up with no problems after a long winter's nap, but this year it started up fine but just didn't want to idle at all. This vintage of Miata is known for it's persistent idle drop problem, but this was far more, it just kept cycling up and down never leveling out.

I've done quite a bit of engine modification to this car in my continual efforts to draw far more power out of it than Mazda felt it needed. In the process I've developed a pretty good understanding of this particular engine, but this idle business was getting the better of me. The car has a pretty primitive computer set-up that reads about 10 different basic error codes if there are abnormalities. I kept getting a code for a faulty air-flow meter, but the voltages coming out of the meter seemed fine. I broke down last week and bought another used airflow meter from the junk yard to plug it in and see if it got rid of the error code. So I tore out the old one, installed the new one and things got worse. The fuel pump wouldn't stop running and the idle got even more uneven. Turned out Mazda had made a change in the wiring of the AFM in 1991, so despite the part # being the same for 1990-1995, the actual part was not identical. Bummer.
I decided the problem was probably not the AFM as it really seemed to test out fine. I checked every vacuum line in there, but found no leaks, so I started checking the fuel system. I have a supercharger on the engine with quite an array of fueling enhancements that run off the boost level and the engine seemed to run better when I tricked the fuel system into thinking it was under boost. So I checked the fuel pressure and found that the factory-set Aux fuel pressure regulator I had in there was completely mis-set, the engine was getting 10 psi of gas at idle and about 60 psi under boost. It's supposed to be getting 37psi at idle and and extra 5 psi for each lb of boost. That means the car is running waaaaaay lean. bad, very bad. I pulled the plugs and sure enough they were really dry and getting white. That's bad, hopefully I caught it before any serious damage was done to the pistons. The compression seems ok, so I hope I'm alright there. A quick adjustment of the Aux fuel pressure reg and things started looking better. it would idle, but still not as solid as it should be.
Eventually after a few more hours of measuring volts and checking connections, I checked the simplest part on the engine, the PCV valve. Shoulda done that sooner, it was plugged and wasn't opening all the way. A quick spray of carb cleaner and it moved free, reinstalled it and idle was rock solid. Doh. Still has some drop at start-up, but about 95% of the problem went away. I think I can live with it where it is now until I can find time to play with this last little idle drop. I think I'll be installing an air/fuel ratio gauge as well to make sure I'm not running lean anymore. it'd be a real bummer to melt down a piston since this engine really does run great now!

Oh well, now I can focus on bikes again, and maybe the house a bit too, still have much to do outdoors in the yard, but that can wait for anther day to write about....

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travels recap

Life on the road gets old, that's for sure. Looking back on my calendar I see that I've been home a grand total of 12 days out of the last 50 days. That's not a good ratio. I just got back from a trip out east which was a change of venue for me in recent times. The weather sucked as it rained most of the time, but I did get to get together with the Large Fella on a bike and family which is always a high-point. Incidentally the Large Fella is rapidly getting less large which I think is awesome, but what are you gonna do when the title no longer fits the man? : )

Prior to that trip I had the good fortune of actually having time in my schedule to ride in the Cable Classic bike race. It was kind of odd since I really haven't been riding my bike much this year, but I figured this was my best shot since I had been out in Fruita for 4 days of riding the week before and that just had to be some semblance of fitness as a result of that trip. right?

This race was a first for me. No, not the first time I raced it, I've been doing it for years, but this was the first time I had ridden this race (or any race in the area) on my own single bike. I've always done it on tandem, so I wasn't really sure how I should approach it. Naturally I decided to approach it in typical bbbb fashion: on a singlespeed with far too large of a gear on it.
My race preparations included looking at the bike for a while, thinking back to the old Cable classic route and then thinking hmmm that race is mostly fire-road, I should gear up. Of course anyone who actually has full use of their memory functions would know the race is mostly singletrack with a couple of fire-roads thrown in there.
So Friday I threw a 44t chainring on, left the 19t rear cog and put on a 22 toother as a backup, just incase I got soft. I figured with all those fireroads I'd want to be over 2:1, of course I forgot that there aren't really any fire-roads and I was riding a 29'er which makes the gears even higher.
Friday night is rained all night. Typical cable classic weather. Saturday morning it was still raining. That didn't bode well for my gearing choice as the mud was going to really slow things down. Oh well, I brought it, might as well give it a go. I lined up at the start, about 1/3 of the way back figuring I wasn't in great shape so I shouldn't start too far up there. Bad mistake. That fire-road I remembered, it's all at the start, so once the gun went off, I spent the next 5 minutes cranking the big gear around people trying to pass before we got in the woods and things slowed down. Well, the woods came too quick and i got stuck in a line moving about 5 mph. That just wasn't working well with the 44-19 gear, I think I was turning about 20 rpm for a while. Basically I had to stand the entire time we were in the woods, which was pretty much the whole time.
About 8 miles in my back was rapidly telling me it wasn't going to put up with this standing much longer, so I decided it was time to switch to the 22t cog in back. I pulled over and Deanwood and Scotty-Rob passed me right away along with about 20 others while I tried to change cogs in the mud. Eventually I got it switched and working and got back on. The gear felt immediately better, but I think all the damage had already been done. My back kept aching the rest of the race and my quads were not far behind. I kept trying to catch up to deanwood and Scott, but I just never could get them in my sites. Then about 15 miles in I realized my back brake wasn't releasing when I pulled the lever. The mud had gotten the better of the cable and the spring tension on the brakes wasn't enough to pull the pads away from the rim. So each time I'd use the rear brake, I 'd have to reach back and pull the brake arms open or it would just keep rubbing. I got pretty good at just using the front brake and kept the back as an option for emergency stopping action.

Slowly I was gaining ground, passing folks. My legs started coming around and I felt ok the last few miles of singletrack. The key was just getting off and running all the hills. I wasn't getting any traction on them in the mud and my "low" gear was still too high for hills, so all around that plan just worked better. Finally we hit the end doubletrack which dumps you onto about 2 miles of railroad grade and eventually the finish. I made it in, a couple places behind Deanwood and Scott, and just infront of WW (who would have been far infront of me had he not missed the start). I crossed the line and quickly found the rest of the Kenwoodies. They were all freezing from standing in the cold waiting for me to finish. I felt pretty comfortable with the clothes I had on, so I gave my rain coat to Stone and some spare gloves to WW and we all headed off on the long road ride back to the start (this is a point to point race).

Putting on the dry clothes I had in the car were by far the highlight of the day. Spent the remainder of the day driving back and picking sand/mud out of my hair. Not a bad day. Maybe I'll get back on my bike someday again soon...

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You probably think I'm a complete slacker since I haven't written anything on here in over a month, but honestly nothing could be further from the truth. I'm always a busy guy, but this past month went too far past that point for comfort. I've been out of town for some part of each week for the past 5 weeks now, most of it down south in Little Rock.

I've been running an installation of several major pieces of equipment in a plant down there, trying to cram months of work into a matter of a couple weeks. Add in getting Bronchitis and then Strep throat in there and it's been a hell of a month. Last week I had to do my timesheet for work and I had about 380 hours of work logged in under 4 weeks, so needless to say I'm overdue for some rest.

Rather than do that though, I decided to stick to some travel plans I had made way back in Jan to go to the Fruita Fat Tire Festival. I debated pretty had even going since I was so tired when I got back in town from Little Rock, but I had bought the plane ticket months ago and I really wanted some time to just get away from anything related to work. Colorado seemed like a good place to do that.

This trip had started off slow way back when we were organizing it, it was looking like 3 or 4 of us were going to fly out there and ride bikes for 4 days. Well, by the time last week came around our Kenwood group was up to 11 people heading out from Wed- Sun. Big group to say the least, but what was even more amazing was how many other folks from Minneapolis headed out to Fruita for the fest. It seemed everywhere we went we kept running into people we knew from town. I'd say between the groups from Kenwood, Surly, Morc, CRC, and a last minute appearance by Geno, there were probably 40 or more people from Minnepolis out there. Kinda weird.

The first two days out were pretty much a complete shock to my system as I hadn't gotten any kind of exercise in 3 weeks due to work getting in the way. Even the modest elevation out in Fruita was painful and my legs constantly reminded me they were in no condition for this riding. Wednesday we just went easy supposedly and did a little 3 hour afternoon ride at Mary's loop. Thursday however was a knock-down, drag-out grudge match of a ride around the Edge loop and a few other areas. The ride took us about 5 hours I think (I lost track of time) and I'd guess we put in about 40 miles. The ride was pretty much a long gravel road climb that kept getting steeper and steeper. Did I mention all but three of us were on singlespeeds? My 34-20 gear on the 29'er was great for most of the riding, but this climb was too much. I bet I walked about 2-3 miles of climb, but eventually made it up top. The descent after that seemed like it should have been great and it was for a little while, but then the trail runs in a dried up stream bed for several miles. So you're completely wasted from climbing a couple thousand feet over about 10 miles, then you get to ride down a deep, loose gravel stream bed with spear-like sticks jabbing you the whole way. Fun stuff. By the time we made it back to town to find some dinner I had a terrible time trying to stay away until the food arrived. That night I slept good.

The next day I didn't have a whole lot of fire left in my legs, but after a good meal and an hour on the trails I was starting to feel better. I think my legs were starting to remember how riding felt. We broke up the riding Friday, roughly 3 hours in the morning and 3 in the late afternoon. That worked much better for me as I had time to recover between rides and get some food. By the end of Friday I was actually feeling really good and took an extra run down Chutes and Ladders with the extra energy.

Saturday the riding got dialed up a bit. I figured that might not be in my best interest so I opted to cut a few miles of trail out early and ride with the Vitch (who had just arrived via moto bike), then hook back up with the group mid-trail. By the time the rest of the group showed up I was feeling pretty good, so I jumped in and we continued on the Troy-Built trail and climbed up to the ridge trail up top. Rowntree had described the climb up to the ridge to us before we got there, I think he said it was a "stupid steep gravel road" and it pretty much was. I managed to ride most of it, only getting off the bike twice. It was the first time this year I felt like I was starting to get my climbing legs back, felt good.

Saturday night we headed into town for some dinner then planned to check out the festivities downtown. Fruita has very limited dining, there's a great pizza shop, two mexican restaraunts, Munchies (a burger place) and a few fast food options. The brew pub closed unfortunately. A few of us wanted burgers so we went to munchies and the rest headed for pizza. We planned to meet up at the pizza place then head downtown. Well the pizza place was out of food (I guess they didn't plan on the big rush for the fest), but agreed to let them eat there and serve them beer if they wanted to get food elsewhere. So the rest of the group headed down to Munchies to get some take-out and bring it back to the pizza place, which they did. We all ended up at the pizza place hanging out and drinking fat-tire.

The pizza place closed and let us stay since it was practically free money to them serving us beer while they cleaned up. But the clean-up portion turned into basically a big party in the pizza joint and we stayed until after midnight. I won't elaborate on that much to protect certain folks, but let's just say there was Kenwoodie VS. Fruita-females arm-wrestling, a guy madly whipping a disco ball around over his head while sort-of dancing on a table, a walker, a mop, and a guy somewhat dressed like a cop writing people tickets. A very odd but incredibly entertaining night at the Hot Tomato pizza shop. I left sometime around 12:30 as I was wiped out from riding and not sleeping that much. I think some of the others left shortly after and headed to Troy's (the owner of the local bike shop) house for more partying.

Overall the trip was great even if it wasn't really "restful". I slept for about 10 hours last night and hope to do the same tonight. Maybe start feeling normal again.

As a side note about bikes. Punky Smurf was kind enough to drive out to Fruita on this trip and bring bikes with him, so I didn't take my usual S & S off road bike, I took the 29'er instead. I've been a fan of the 29'er for a while and have been riding one for 2 years now. After riding it out west on the rocky trails and rough terrain, I'm even more convinced. The big wheels just flow right over everything, my descending was so much easier and faster than it ever has been on a 26" wheeled bike. I think I'm going full on 29'er, time to put couplers in one so I can travel with it. Anyone want an S & S headshock 26" wheeled frame? I'll have one for sale soon...

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So much to write, so little time.

So much has happened since the last time I was able to write here that I don't know where to start. I've been really working in "wrap it up" mode. There have been way too many projects floating around the shop and the house that are almost done. I want them totally done and gone, not almost done...

I've delivered almost all the repaints that I had in the shop, which cleared out a nice bit of room. Felt really good to finally get this Ritchey frame back to the Vitch since it had been sitting in my shop since before Kenwood closed up. He's a patient guy, but really I don't like having any projects in my shop that long.

Of course the downside is that as soon as I got rid of 4 repaints, I got two more in. Guess that's business, there's always work waiting.

I'm almost done with another frame build as well. The customer will be providing me with a few critical components for the frame so that I can wrap up the final fit of the chainguard (yes I'm making a chainguard from scratch for this one). I know he's probably anxious to get the final product so I'm eager to get that frame finished up too.

The really big news is that the copper plated nature bike is heading to it's final destination, the lucky lady out east who still hasn't seen any hint of what it looks like. This one has been a long time in the works, but I really hope she feels the final result was worth the wait.
Here's a shot of the whole bike. Now I didn't have all of the actual parts for the build, those last few items will go on when she get's it. So the front wheel, seatpost and saddle are not correct, but I needed something for the photo's. It'll look much better with matching wheels, and a brooks saddle!

Really the beauty of this bike is in the details. The copper finish really lets them all shine through as it shows all the brazing and filler.

I really love the seat-cluster and how that whole area came out.















Below is a shot of the BB area and the kickstand plate. I'm not a big fan of kickstands for most bikes, but this is a full-on touring bike and those double leg kickstands are pretty sweet for holding the bike up while you dig through your panniers.


Getting my logo on the downtube was one of those things that I really put a lot of thought into. After seeing how cool and antique the copper was looking I wanted to make sure the logo fit in, a regular modern decal just wasn't going to cut it.








So I applied mask of my logo to the tube, then used a chemical etch to darken the steel in the shape of my logo. After that I was able to apply the copper right over and get this cool antique look. I just love how textured the copper came out and the light and dark areas around the lettering. In many areas the finish look more like weathered leather of mahogany than metal.


As I said earlier, this is a fully loaded touring bike. Lights were definitely a requirement. In this case, the fork is designed to take a B & M dynamo and headlight. It's actually set-up to take either a right of left hand dynamo for maximum flexibility, and there are about 5 ways the lamp could be mounted to accommodate many rack configurations. Again, I love the way the copper naturally darkens around the lug edges, highlighting all the carving that went into this bike.










The dropouts are pretty standard BBC issue, but it's worth a few pictures of how the brass filler shows through the plating. Initially I was concerned that this would look bad, but in the end, I think it only adds to the overall appeal of this finish. The color around the eyelet is actually a small amount of copper oxidation that occurred prior to clear coating. I expect the copper will oxidize slightly even under the clear, but it will be a slow process and should only add to the charm.



One thing I will say is that this is not a finish to be applied to sloppy brazing. As you can see, everything shows. Here is a shot of the driveside dropout. Filler has to be only where it's supposed to be or you'll see it. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, this pictures shows the texture of the copper quite well.




In other news, I'm still hacking and coughing constantly. This thing just won't shake loose, but I know several other folks with similar problems and it sounds like the cough hangs on for about 3 weeks. yuk. I still managed to get in a couple of rides this weekend despite hacking the whole way. Did some hills with the kenwood boys Saturday, during which time I discovered that I still felt pretty weak from being sick. Then went out Sunday on what should have been an easy ride, but due to my tired legs and a stiff headwind I really felt the hurt.
That ride pretty well took the wind out of my sails the rest of Sunday, so I layed low and tuned up an old commuting bike for a friend and then installed a couple sections of trim upstairs in the new room. That was about all I had the energy for.

Talk at you later,

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down...

I'm feeling pretty drained right now. I've been fighting off what I thought was a cold for the last week or so. I'm starting to wonder though since the cough just isn't going away and I feel like my lungs are still full of crap. I'll give a few more days to see if things improve, but I'm getting tired of hacking all day. I felt quite a bit better on Saturday, and not bad Sunday (after a long nap), but today's not going so well. I think it might be time for another nap soon...

Due to feeling like crap, I haven't gotten any kind of exercise since the long fixie ride the previous weekend. This isn't helping my fitness kick that I was on. Usually I just keep going right through most colds, but this one seems to really be draining my energy. Maybe I'm just getting old, I dunno. Either way I'm not exactly on track for getting in shape for my upcoming trip to the Fruita fat tire festival.

I have been doing pretty good at getting stuff out of the shop lately. Both work that I've finished up, and stuff that I've sold off. That's a good feeling, I always like it when stuff leaves, one less thing to think about. I'm excited to finally get to build up the copper-plate nature bike this week (hopefully) and get that on it's way to the owner. It's been a long road, but that should be one heck of a cool bike. And I'm nearing the end of another frame for a local customer.

I also made some good interior house progress this weekend. We got the final 2 interior doors finished and hung. That probably seems like a job that should have taken an hour or two, but I actually spent most of Saturday just getting one of them up! As you may recall, we got a screaming deal on two maple flat panel interior doors, unfortunately they were not pre-hung doors, and me being dumb assumed that it wouldn't take long to make door-frames. Well, I was right, it didn't take long to make the door-frames, but it took forever to hang them and get them straight, rout out the recesses for the hinges on both the frames and the doors, drill all the holes for the doorknobs, and then actually hang the doors in the frames and re-shim to make everything straight. In the end it turned out as most of my projects seem to, I saved a bunch of money on the purchase, but ended up spending 2 days labor to make it work. But those maple doors and frames sure do look nice and we probably could not have bought what we ended up with unless we had the doors custom made for us. Pictures soon!

In other news, the band has a show this Friday night. I haven't sent out an email about it yet, but I will soon. We'll be playing at the Terminal Bar in MLPS, so come on out and get Derailled Friday. We haven't played out in a while, but we're pretty pumped up to get back to it!

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fixie death march

Yup, that was this morning's ride. I missed out on last week's off road death march due to my own inability to find the ride start on time. So this morning I was right on time for the start of this certain-to-be disaster.

I left the house at 8 am after debating if I should ride to the start or drive. I decided to ride and get in the extra miles, besides it was dry out and the forecast was for rain so I figured it would be more time of dry riding. So I rolled over across the river to Minneapolis on my fixie and met the others about 9 am.

Four of us rolled out about 9:15 and headed east. There was a strong wind out of the east so we figured we'd rather have the headwind at the start and tailwind coming back home. I navigated a route across St. Paul and onto the gateway trail. I thought we could take that out to Stillwater and avoid some cars. Wrong. It was fine until we crossed 36, then the trail was still all packed ice. Not great riding, so we ducted off into the local neighborhood and found our way back towards Stillwater. Stone was complaining about something not feeling right on his bike as we pulled off the trail so we stopped to check it out. Turned out his drive side crank arm was loose, so we tightened it up and headed east.

We rolled into Stillwater and Stone's crank was acting up again and he was pretty sure it would keep it up the whole ride. So we stopped at a coffee shop for a quick bite and to analyse the crank situation. Unfortanately the crank was aUltegra splined model, so once it's loose the splines quickly go to hell. Since there was no bike shop nearby, the best option was to shim it. So after eating an egg salad sandwhich and cup of potato soup ( I don't usually like soup, but it really hit the shop) we started crank surgury. Otree spend some time making shims from his Coke can, and we managed to get about 6 thin strips of metal in there and crank'd 'er down good. Seemed to hold, so we rolled on.

We decided to head south towards Hudson, incase the crank fix didn't work we could stop by Art Doyle's there and see if he had another crank arm. Unfortunately if you want to cross to the wisconsin side of the river in Stillwater, you have one heck of a hill to get up. County road E in Wisco is steep, I mean really steep. We were all riding fixed gear bikes and had about 35 miles in already. Otree was the smartest one, he walked the steep part. I pulled it off with my 46-17 gear but it took a few minutes before I could actually breath at the top. I thought my legs were literally going to fall off, I was in no shape to be trying this crap.

Anyway, we all made it up and pressed south to Hudson. The wind was good enough to switch direction, so we still had a head/cross wind, so we did a little pacelining to make things easier. Rolled through Hudson, crossed back over into MN and headed south towards Afton. We made the call to skip the really big hills in Afton since we had a long ways to get back and I think everyone was feeling it. We took Indian Trail back up towards Woodbury and suffered a bit on the rolling hills there. The wind had completely shifted to coming out of the west now and it was only getting stronger, so we got the bonus of a headwind all the way home too. Finally crossed 94 again and rolled into Lake Elmo. Once we got over the last big climb in Lake Elmo, the ride got really quiet. All of us were quickly fading and running on autopilot. The legs keep turning, but the brain is shutting down. I thought I would ride back to Minneapolis and then home, but I was quickly fading. My legs were on the verge of cramping and I knew pressing further was a bad idea. I was about 5 miles from home, so I decided to pull off and head home. I had put in an extra 12 miles getting to the start, so I didn't feel too bad about ditching out.

Rolled in about 3 pm. I felt remarkable good for having just spent more time in the saddle in one day than I have this whole year. I think we had about 5.5-6 hours of ride time, and I suspect we were averaging about 16mph with all the in-town riding, faster out in the country. So if we didn't make a century, we must have gotten damn close. None of us have computers on our fixies, so we'll never know. My legs think so though...

Not a bad day. Never did rain on us.

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Bike shows abound

This weekend there were not one, but two bicycle shows that have impact on my business. The first one I'll talk about was the Minneapolis Bike and Travel Expo. This was a first year for this show, so it was a little on the small side, but very worthwhile. It was held in the Minneapolis Convention Center on the same weekend as one of the largest events at the center, the Home and Garden Show. I'm sure the idea was that visitors to the Home and Garden show would trickle down to the lower level to check out the bike show, good thinking. The big downside was that if you drove there for the bike show, parking was a mess. I wanted to stop by the show to see what it was about and see if I should have a booth there next year. When I pulled into downtown I was immediately greeted with gridlocked traffic, bad enough that I decided to just turn around and go home. I mean I just wanted to see how big it was, I wasn't really interested in looking at vendors booths. But as I was heading out, I spied a parking spot on the street, took it and walked a few blocks back to the convention center.

I headed in and was actually surprised at the size of it. I was expecting it to be pretty small since this was the first year, but it was bigger than I anticipated. I don't honestly know how many booths were there, but I spent some time walking around. There were a lot of travel destinations, chambers of commerce, that sort of thing. Not too many manufacturers, but a few of the bigger places. What was nice was the amount of bikes available to test-ride. They had set up a big area in the middle of the show with a test-track for riding. You could ride the concrete around the perimeter, or there were obstacles in the middle from some pseudo-off-roading.
There was only one framebuilder there, Dave Anderson, who is brand new to the game. I got to meet him for the first time and he seemed like a nice guy. He's only a few miles away from me, so I look forward to talking to him more. I think this show was ripe for more builders showing off their work to the local audience, So I'll probably try to get a booth here next year.

Secondly, the North American Hand Made Bicycle Show was this weekend in San Jose CA. This is basically a bragging rights show among builders. Period. I can't think of any other purpose it serves. Honestly I really wish I could go to this show just to met other builders, but realistically it just doesn't make sense. The show is in CA which hurts in two ways; first, I can almost be guaranteed that there won't be a single local customer for me there. I really don't feel any need to grow my internet based work, I've got plenty of that, I want to be working with local customers who I can meet in person and work with in person. Secondly, it's in CA, that's not exactly next door to MN. Sure the plane ticket is expensive, but when you add it up, that's actually the cheapest part of the show.

Flying to CA for the show would have been about $350 with a screaming deal on airfare. But the Booth would have cost $700, then add in a hotel for several nights and you're well over $1000. That's still the cheap part of the show... In order to have a proper display, I'd need to have a handful of bikes to show. Right now as dumb luck would have it, I could have had 3-4 show-quality bikes to bring, but next year I probably won't be in that position so I'll have to build something for the show. Then have components on all those bikes. Then take a week or so to carefully assemble, then partially disassemble and pack all those bikes. Ship them all out there, then have a day or two to re-assemble them (which is always fun in a hotel room). Did I mention I'd need to take time to build a display which could travel too and ship that out there.
Ok, so now I"m at the show and display my wares for the weekend to a bunch of other framebuilders, not a single one of which will ever buy a frame from me. Then I get to pack them all up (another day of work in CA) and re-ship them back to MN. Then fly back home and spend another day unpacking bikes, hoping they all made it back unscathed.

In the end I would have spent the equivalent amount of time as building two whole frames, so consider that $4000 in lost sales, plus the cost of all the shipping and handling, this thing adds up to about a $5-6000 investment when it's said and done. All to show off to other builders and probably not reach a single customer I want to reach. Hmmmm.

I just browsed through a few photo albums take at the show, and I have mixed emotions about that too. The work displayed is really over the top. It's readily apparent that many many builders spend a lot of time making show bikes for this event. The creativity is outstanding, I think it's great that the show promotes that. On the flip side I saw an awful lot of really ugly crap too. At some point people need to realize that just because they can do something doesn't mean they should do something. The theme of the show seemed to be gaudy paint jobs, or what can I do to this frame to hide how ridiculous it is. I like intricate details, but they need to be refined, elegant and perfectly executed, not garish for the sake of being different.

One of my biggest pet-peeves about much of the work I see is that it's not actually hand-made as the show's name should imply. There's more and more lazer cut parts out there. It's cheap and easy to do these days, but it doesn't actually showcase any skills on the part of the builder. I see dropouts, headbadges, downtube logos, and all kinds of other stuff that was programmed into a machine the machine cut. Where's the art in that? Am I sounding too old and grouchy yet? I just don't see how slapping some pre-cut crap onto a frame shows talent. Ok, I'll stop before I offend anyone too much.

Even with all my whining about this show, I still really do want to go. Maybe next year, if they don't have it the same weekend as the Minneapolis show.....

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bike talk

Let's talk about bikes for once. I've been pretty madly trying to finish up a boatload of repaints lately. It's nearly spring so everyone who's ever considered repainting their frames calls this time of year and I always get slammed with paint jobs. I think it's time to re-align my pricing to adjust for demand!

Anyways... The best part about doing repaints is getting to see naked frames! Seriously, I love seeing how other builders or companies do things and you can't tell that through layers of paint and putty. I've got a unique batch of frames in right which include an Original Tom Ritchey fillet brazed bike, an 80's Pinnarello, a 70's Falcon, and a few other regionally made handbuilts by several builders who shall remain nameless. They really represent a variety of construction methods and quality levels.

The Ritchey 1s probably my favorite in terms of the sheer amount of time Tom must have put in to this thing. It's a unique design that Tom used with "pseudo-lugs" at the head-tube and seat-tube. He made tubing sleeves to slip over the tube, then layed down huge fillets over those to make the appearance of lugs, but they're not exactly lugs. The seatlug shown here is the closest thing to a lug as it had sleeves on both tubes. The finish work on the fillets is amazing, they're huge and flowing and hardly a pinhole anywhere. The shape is great (if you like huge fillets) and very even.

The headtube is pretty neat too. With paint on it, this looked pretty close to being lugged, but in reality, the bands on the ends of the headtube were machined in place. Yup, he turned down the headtube from a thicker tube just to get those reinforcing bands on the ends. Again, the huge fillets give a very unique look to the joints, and the "lug" points are filed very thin and even. Very clan brazing on them as well, especially for using brass. To be honest, these are the best shaped (in terms of not needing any filler to look like a perfect radius) that I've seen on any bare frame.


The brake bosses are impressive as well. No need to worry about those suckers coming off! this is the largest build up of brass I've seen on a boss, but he sculpted it very well. This is purly an artisan touch, no functional value at all. Probably not something I would do as I don't like the look, but the execution is fantastic.

Overall, nice work Tom.




Then compare that to this early 70's Falcon. There really isn't much comparison. This thing has filler material all over the place, especially in places that there really shouldn't be filler. There's brass all over the shell, and lots of copper showing. The copper is a direct indicator of overheating during brazing. When you overheat the brass filler to the point that it boils, the zinc is boiled off leaving the copper. In reality this is very typical for English made bikes of the 70's & 80's, tons of heat applied, sloppily throw some brass at it and call it good. Functionally this fairly sloppy construction method wasn't much of a problem because the tubing used was pretty thick walled and gave them a big margin of error.

This next one is a mid 80's Pinarello. I've done a few Pinnarello repaints and I have to say I'm consistently impressed with the quality on these. Most Italian frames of this era were constructed similarly to the Falcon shown above; overheated and sloppy. Pinnarello seemed to actually care about build quality though and really hit the details. This frame was actually silver brazed which is quite unusual due to the higher cost of silver. The lugs, shell, crown and dropouts were all investment cast specifically for Pinnarello (which is a huge investment). All the cast part shave detail engravings, and all the brazing is clean and well done. The lug shorelines are pretty crisp and there isn't any extra filler material floating around. I've seen far worse work from some fairly "high end" US custom builders.

Honestly these are the only Italian made frames I've come across that really impress me. Most of them historically have been pretty shoddy.


I keep thinking more and more about my painting business and if it's worthwhile. These repaints are really kind of a time-sink. I raised my prices pretty significantly last year and it cut out a certain portion of the business, but not as much as I figured it would. The paint supply market keep changing too, which only makes things harder. My local paint supplier used to have 3 locations, one of which was within walking distance. Now they're down to 1 location and it's about a 15 minute drive for me each way. I'm sure the reason for this is the raw material costs keep going up causing them to have fewer over-the-counter type of customers (the small guys like me). VOC requirements keep getting tighter, which I'm in favor of, but it makes the product more expensive.
Lately I've been having decal issues too. More and more people seem to want restoration style finishes, meaning they want exact replacement decals. Often I can get them, but it takes weeks and they have to be shipped from Europe, otherwise I have to recreate them and have them made locally. I've got a fantastic decal guy here in town, but he recently moved to the complete other side of town, so if I need to work in person with him to fine tune colors or patterns, that's an hour's drive each time.

I figure as an average, I spend about 1 hour of my time just driving to get materials per paint job. When you have 5 to do in one week, that's a ton of time that could be spent building frames. I still do make money painting, and the paint service brings customers to me that otherwise would have never heard of me, but it also take a big chunk of my shop time away from building frames. That adds lead time to every order and probably costs me some orders for that reason, so there are trade-off both ways. Maybe I'll just raise my prices again and see what that does, otherwise I may even consider not doing re-paints at all (just painting my own work).

well, enough whining, I gotta run.

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Long time, no blog.

Sure has been a while since I had any time to write here. Life has been pretty hectic for me lately. I feel like I haven't had time to do much of anything I really want to do, but this weekend the tides seemed to turn which is good 'cause I didn't know how much more I could take...

3M work has been kind of unbelievable. I've got a big rush project that is consuming far more of my time than I'm used to. Basically we're crunching an 8 month project into 2 months; piece of cake. So in addition to spending far more time at work than I'm used to, when I get home I'm pretty well fried and fall asleep. Not to mention I get to look forward to spending large amounts of time in Arkansas in the upcoming 2 months. yipee. Needless to say, this has put a crimp in my usual bike work/enjoying life schedule.

As a result of this I seem to be reverting back to my time tested (as being less than ideal) methods of binge training. You know going all out for about 1 day, then nothing for a week or two, then hit it hard again... President's day weekend we headed up north to Bayfield WI for what has become an annual event, the Book Across the Bay. This is a ski race across chequomegon bay at night. Well due to our unusual January, there was significant open water on the bay when we got up there, but they still held the event. However the night of the race it was about -10 and there was stiff wind coming across the lake which was going to make for a headwind the whole race. So between the idea of skiing that close to open water on Lake Superior and the cold wind, we decided to bail on the race. That was Saturday night. Sunday it did warm up a bit, so we got in a nice ski. I took advantage of the fact that there was real snow up there and I classic skied on beautiful freshly-set tracks. I think I got in about 20K in the couple of hours we were out and it felt great. That is until the next couple of days. That was the only classic skiing I had done since last year at this time, and my inner thighs reminded me of that for about a week. There were so tight I could barely walk. Then I had to go back to work, which meant no free time and no exercise during the week.
This past weekend I decided I had enough of this not exercising business, so I made time in my schedule to go out on a ride with a few Kenwood folks. It was a little more than I probably needed but it sure was fun to be out. We started out at One-on-One, rode down the river road, grabbed a quick bite to eat at Caribou (and some coffee for Stone) and made our way down tot he Kenwood enduro route. That basically consists of riding from one end to the other across the south metro on dirt trails, or in the case of this weekend, ice trails. The trails actually weren't all bad, there were mighty slick sections due to all the melting and refreezing lately, but there were also large sections of dirt that were a blast despite the 15 degree air. After about 4 hours, my legs told me they had all they could take of the 34-18 gear and needed a break, so I took the light-rail shortcut home. All in all, it was a great ride and I felt better than I figured I would considering how long it had been since I rode a bike.

As a side note, once again I want to say how rockin'ly awesome the light rail is. There are bike racks right inside each car, so you can just roll your bike in with you. Not to mention way faster and easier to figure out than the bus system. Apparently I'm not the only one that thinks so either since it was standing room only in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday! We gotta get the line in from downtown St. Paul to Minneapolis, it would be fantastic.

Sunday I finally got in some painting time on bikes. The paint work has really been piling up in the shop, so I prepped, primed and started painting 5 frames Sunday. I've still got a ways to go, but it won't be long before I can get a bunch of these frames out of the shop. It's pretty bad when I've got 10 frames in for work simultaneously in a one-man shop. There are literally frames everywhere!

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What a trip.

I’ve been back down in Little Rock this week and it’s certainly living up to the high standard I’ve set for trips to the south. You may recall my adventures of the last trip I took down here about a month ago, car fires, ripped off bumpers, etc… I’m not totally sure, but I think I may have topped that. By the way if this writing seems rambling and bad, it’s due to a severe lack of sleep this week, you’ll understand if you make it through the whole story.

I was down there for an installation of equipment in the plant. A three day install of several small systems which had plenty of issues on it’s own merit, but I won’t bore you with any of those. Let’s get down to business, craziness that happens in Arkansas.

I’m driving home (to a hotel) across town Monday night, and I happened to be talking to my lovely wife Beth at the time on my cell phone (don’t worry, on my hands-free set). She asked if I had any crazy automotive tales from the road on this trip yet, to which I replied a calm, cool, no. Not 10 seconds later a crappy mid 80’s Chevy Impala passes me going at least 85 mph (in a 60 zone). The guys gets about 200’ in front of me, but still in the left lane when I see something happen, but I can’t quite tell what. He hits the brakes hard, almost skidding to a stop while sticking his head out the window. His hood latch had released and apparently the secondary safety latch was an optional feature on that car ‘cause the whole hood flew up and smashed in his windshield! So much for a non-eventful trip!

You would probably think that’s the strangest thing that would happen during the week, but my friends you would be wrong. Or maybe your right and this story was just more annoying, frustrating and tiring than the hood-latch incident, I dunno but it’s a good story nonetheless.

Wednesday was a terribly long day for me. I worked nearly straight thru from 7am to midnight with one half-hour break in there for lunch. I spend almost 7 hours straight drilling precision holes in some structural steel for a strain gauge installation. I won’t talk about the details but I basically spent 7 hours on ladders 15’ in the air trying to drill various ½” plate steel beams (damn I love engineering). Needless to say by the end of the 17 hours I worked that day I was beat, or maybe more accurately a zombie. I was also hungry as was my partner on this project, who shall be named J for our purposes. So we decided to grab a bite to eat on the way home, but it was after midnight in Little Rock AR on a Wednesday night. The only thing open was the IHOP across from the hotel. So we went in and got a table. I went to the rest room to clean off 17 hours of dust, grease and rock that was covering me, and upon my return John told me he ordered coffee and the waitress was coming back to get my drink order. A guy came over and took my order and brought J’s coffee. Then a gal came over and brought my OJ and coffee as well. Hmm, oh well, just crossed communication. She was kind enough to leave us a couple straws though, one for my OJ and apparently one for J’s coffee…

I ordered some French toast and J ordered the Banana nut pancakes. They were out of bananas but that didn’t stop them from offering banana nut ‘cakes, they put fake banana flavoring in the cakes, and then provide banana syrup (?). Whatever. The food came some time later, seemed like an eternity and it was about as good as you would expect from an I-hop in AR at 12:30 am. Pretty much everyone working at the restaurant disappeared after that. We waited till 1am for them to actually let us pay, which sucked since we knew we had to get up by 6:30 the next day. We walked out of the restaurant, went to our cars, got in and started them up. Then, J noticed that I had left a couple of wrenches on the front seat of his car. He walked around the car to open the passenger side door and get the wrenches to had them to me, but somehow his driver’s side door closed. Of course the keys were in the ignition since the engine was running, and somehow the doors were all locked. So now we’re at the I-hop at 1:10 am with a running rental car inside of which the keys are locked! To make it worse, we’re in Arkansas. Damn.

There happened to be a group of about 8 police officers eating inside while we were there, and two of them happened to be leaving just after us. We flagged them down and inquired about getting one of them to pop the door open with a slim-jim. Unfortunately the Little Rock police force has been required to stop carrying slim-jims because too many people were suing the police department for damage to their vehicles while trying to open them. Again, damn.

So J calls the rental car place. Lemme tell you, 1am in Little Rock, there’s nobody at National rental car. You’re lucky if there’s a person working there in the middle of the day much less the middle of the night. He got through to an 800 number which was about as useful as the police force, kindly informing him they would call a locksmith for him, but he would have to pay for the service as they don’t have any spare keys for their cars. It was a great customer service experience to have in the middle of the night. So finally he got a 24 hour locksmith willing to come out, but it would be 30 minutes before they could get there… At this point we had gone through my whole car trying to see if there was anything we could use to pop the lock, but didn’t find anything. The car was brand spankin’ new (4 miles on it when he picked it up) so we really would have felt bad smashing in a window for this. So we went back inside and waited. J decided there was nothing I could do to help, so I took off to go back to the hotel and told him to call if he needed me to come back over and get him. He waited and finally at 1:50 the locksmith showed up and popped the lock. I had made it to bed by about 1:45, J made it about 2am. We both were back up at 6:30 the next morning.

I’m going to sleep.
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a long day

I had a pretty long day trip yesterday. I had to run up to Hibbing for work to meet with a contractor. For those who ain't from these here parts, that's about 225 miles north of here, in the heart of mining country. If you've seen the movie North Country, you've literally seen part of Hibbing and you have a very good idea of what the town is like.

I got an early start, leaving the house about 6:30. Made a quick stop in at the office hoping a drawing had been emailed to me overnight, but it wasn't so I pressed on northward. The drive up was uneventful. I made a quick pit-stop at the Hibbing McDonalds and went on to my meeting. Side note here: I couldn't help but notice pretty quickly that is seemed all the retiree's at McDonalds were staring at me (pretty much everyone who's retired in Hibbing hangs out at McDonalds or Hardees all day long, don't ask why, it's just what they do). I also noticed that out of the 25-30 cars in the parking lot (there are a lot of retiree's!) that I was driving the only foreign car in the whole place! Granted there was a geo prism, which technically is foreign built, I doubt I'd win that argument with any local. It seemed they really know how to spot a city-slicker up there!

Meetings went fine, got things wrapped up in about 4 hours. But rather than head straight home, I decided it would be dumb to be this close to Giant's Ridge and not go for a ski. The snow in the cities is shot, and it's not that much better up north, but the trails at the Ridge were in far better shape than I expected. I skied the Silver, Summit and Bronze trails and all of there were fantastic. The best part was the whole time I saw one other Nordic skier. If you want to ski up there I highly recommend the middle of the day on Tuesdays!
Just as I was packing up to hit the road, the Stillwater high-school team showed up and headed out. They probably have their region meet up there this week.

We were supposed to get some rain/snow mix last night, but my drive home was uneventful, the snow didn't start till pretty late so I was home in bed before anything fell.

I did treat myself to some new listening for the drive up, I picked up the latest (sadly, last) Johnny Cash album: American IV: The Man Comes Around. While it's not exactly a new release, I hadn't heard much of it yet. Man, he doesn't disappoint. This album is mostly covers, but the title track is an original. I don't honestly think I've heard so much emotion put into existing songs as this album does. It's definitely not an uplifting album as most of it deals with death, misery and suffering (as many of his songs do) but he really powered it up. Honestly listening to this then knowing it was his last recording you can't help but feel like he knew this would be the last one. The last song on the album "well meet again" seemed like a more than fitting ending to a remarkable era. In short, if you haven't heard it, you should.

that's about all I have time for today,

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