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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Where do I start?

I've had so little time to write here that I tend to forget all the good stuff I want to write. I have things I make mental notes of everyday that I want to talk about, then I don't get around to it and forget...

So I guess I'll ramble on about whatever I can manage to remember today.

Busy weekend, but the good kind of busy. I worked in the shop most of the weekend. I'm closing in on another frame, which feels great. But there are a few items that will be really custom on this one, so that will take some extra time. I'm going to try and fabricate a custom chain guard for it at the owners request. That will be a fun challenge and if there's one thing I like more than anything it's a challenge.

It seems like this time of year really brings the repaints out of the woodwork. I had two more frames dropped off for repaints this weekend and about 5 inquiries this week. All it takes is one week of warm weather (even if it's in Jan in Minnesota) and everyone starts thinking about spring riding. I have 6 frames waiting in the shop right now for paint and I suspect more will be coming soon. The problem is I really don't feel like doing repaints right now, I don't like painting that much compared to building frames. So what does this all mean????

Time to raise my re-painting prices! I raised my prices significantly last year in an attempt to reduce my painting workload (I mean really, if I don't enjoy it that much why shouldn't I make more money off it?). I've hit that same point, but the work doesn't seem to be slowing as much as I hoped so I think they're going to go up a little more. I'm also going to try and publish a form on-line with itemized charges for paint items so people can see why what they think is a simple paintjob adds up to $500 so quickly.

The good news is some of the more ridiclous requests have slowed down (at least for now). I used to get people wanting $2-300 repaints on frames that honestly we not worth $50. I'd try to explain that, but it usually fell on deaf ears. Now that most paint jobs seem to price out around $400 I seem to be getting less of those.

Ok let's change subject and talk about our crappy weather. Saturday it poured rain here all day, so much for any kind of ski base. Between the three days of 45+ degree temps and the rain, that pretty well did in all our snow. I wouldnt' mind that so much if it weren't for that fact that it's only Jan and this is MN. It's not going to stay warm for a few more months, so now we'll be left with cold barren earth for a while. No skiing, probably to cold to want to ride. That sucks. Guess I'll have to try and work-out indoors a little, gotta get in shape for the Kenwood trip to Fruita in April!

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mmm copper

More coppery goodness occurred last night. I put a few coats of clear on the whole frame after plating it the previous night. Considering how skeptical I was about doing this finish, I really love how it came out. I've had a few folks ask how I did this. I used a copper sulfate solution to create the plating effect. The surface needs to be prepped extensively though for this to work, it needs to be cleaner than you can imagine and had a consisent suface finish. I acid etched the steel to help prevent corrosion and remove an oils left from my hands, then sprayed on the sufate. Finally once it's completely dried, I cleared over it with a lacquer.

This is my favorite shot. The headtube came out all marbled and cool. As the future owner said: "it looks like mahogany!"

The plating solution just naturally darkens around the edges of the cutouts and lugs, which really highlights the fanciness of the lugs!

To get the logo on the downtube, I used a vinyl paint mask on the bare steel, then acid etched and darkened the lettering, removed the paint mask and plated the copper over the darkened area. I honestly had no idea how this would come out. The result is an antique-looking logo that I think fits in perfectly with the rest of the finish.

This second nature bike has been a long time on the making due to lots of factors. It sure feels great to see it almost done and to see how spectacular the finished result is looking. This frame is an anniversary gift for one lucky lady in New York, so she has no idea what it looks like yet. I sure how she's as thrilled with it as I am to have made it. This has been a really fun process.

The husband who is giving the gift has really been pushing me to show this off at the Frambuilder's show in San Jose in March. And I've really been tempted to go since I happen to have 4-5 really unique frames in the shop right now. The downside is that I'm swamped with work right now and I don't realistically think I'll be able to take the time and money for ship 5 frames to CA, fly out there and display them. I guess it's just not in the cards for me this year. Maybe next year though if I can plan ahead better!

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Weekend-end

Well it's the end of the weekend and I managed to really fill the time up well this weekend.

Friday and Saturday I got in good ski's at Battle Creek. There really isn't much snow left in the metro area, but I've been continually amazed at how good the trails are. The grooming has just turned around 180 degrees from where it was 5 years ago. They even got out and groomed the new flatter course on the west side of Battle Creek road this week. It's not perfect, but it's probably got the best real snow classic track in the twin cities. Here's a pic, not bad eh? Sadly it appeared that more people had walked on the trail than had skied. I talked to a couple groups of people Saturday about not walking on the trails and all of them simply didn't know that they're not supposed to be walking out there, much less that it's actually illegal in Ramsey county on the posted trails. I think I'll write a note to the county park manager to find out what it would take to post signs with the trail rules at the other entrances. There are a lot of entrances to these trails and the only sign informing people not to walk on the trails is at the parking lot. I think we just need better communication. Skiers are the biggest influence, if you're out there and don't say anything to folks walking on the trails, they will simply assume it must be alright, we're all better off if more skiers would POLITELY inform them that they should not be walking on the groomed trails. end soapbox.

I got in some good shop time this weekend too. Made more progress on the next frame I'm working on, but even better I got to do more experimenting with the copper plating. I made about 10 trial runs on a fork until I finally got the point where I was getting good adhesion. Once I had that figured out, I lacquered the fork to keep it from corroding any more. The results are pretty neat, the copper is quite varied in color and pattern so it looks aged. It's not at all like bright shiny new copper. Honestly it looks like an antique, but it's brand new. Really unique for a bike frame.

The copper coating react differently to different base metals. As you can see here, it didn't immediately plate to the brass used for the dropouts. I found a technique that allowed it to partly adhere to the brass, but in the end it ended up looking better with the brass showing through I think. Again, it has that aged look.

I plated the rest of the frame, but I haven't sprayed the lacquer yet. I'll have pictures of it soon. The frame has much more surface area, so there's even more variation in the finish, which isn't at all what I expected or thought I wanted but once I saw it, I really liked it.

The one downside is that the plating is very thin, so everything shows. The frame really needs to be perfect in bare metal form. No filler or primer to cover up tiny file slips or pinholes. So I ended up spending quite a bit of time finishing up the frame a bit more than is required with paint.

In other news, we're living in our new living room!!!! We decided to move our old furniture into there for the time being and it actually fits quite well. Unfortunately that meant moving my entertainment center. Not that it's that big of a deal, but I had to disconnect all the components then re-connect them on the other end. Not to mention the entertainment center itself is fairly heavy since it has a 12" double bandpass subwoofer that I built into the base of it I'm kind of anal about my audio components, so this is a fairly time-consuming process. But it was all worth while since I also got to finally have the home-theater arrangement that I always wanted. If you'll recall, I buried all the wiring for all the speakers in the room in the walls and floor. So I was able to really clean up the cables by wiring everything right into the wall boxes, but it took several hours for me to get it all wired up the way I wanted it.

As with all my projects though, one thing leads to another, and getting the entertainment center into the livingroom meant I had to make wall brackets for mounting the speakers. I've had a plan all along to do this, but I never quite got around to making the brackets which would mount on the electric boxes in the walls and hold the small satellite speakers. So I welded up four box covers with angled mounting brackets on them and got all that hooked up Saturday. I think they came out looking really clean and nice. The front ones are neatly tucked away right next to the curtains, so you hardly even notice them.

Well, it's been a long weekend and I'm just plain worn out. So adios for now.

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Dell-icous

I just haven't had much time to write here lately. Work has been insane, and I'm swamped with bike stuff in the shop, so I'm not sure how much writing will go on during Feb, but bear with me, I'll get back to it as often as I can.

We took a mini-vacation this weekend to one of the cheesiest places in America: Wisconsin. As cheesy as that is, it's even higher on the cheese-factor because we went to the Dells. For those of you not familiar, the Dells are one of a handful of true family oriented tourism traps that will take your money in any form. It's a bastion of waterparks, go carting and thrill shows all designed for one common goal, to make people's kids throw temper tantrums until mom and pop pony up more dough for the next ride/show/slide/etc....

Honestly, the Dells has come along way, it's no longer some family camping at Jellystone park and riding the ducks (the amphibious vehicles that traverse both land and sea all in the name of lightening your wallet). It's a waterpark Mecca. In the Dells, you're not even a hotel if you don't have a waterpark. The latest craze is the indoor waterparks and from all the construction going on, you pretty much have to have one or you're out of business.

We got a screaming package deal, hence the choice of such a cheesy location. It was $50/night for your room, access to the tiny, wimpy indoor waterpark at our hotel, and all the food and drink you could consume. That last part is what makes this a deal. Food and drink in the dells is somewhere slightly more expensive than buying all your meals from the guys carrying beer and hot-dog trays around at the Metro-dome. In the two nights we stayed, I think we ate/drank somewhere in the range of $400 worth! Granted we probably all ate and drank far more than we normally would, but once you check in and pay for the room you quickly get into the "all-inclusive" mindset. It's all essentially free from that point on. Want to eat 5 baskets of mozzarella sticks, go ahead you're not paying for them (although you might pay for that move later). Want a steak and the buffet? go ahead, it's all the same price (that prime rib was great washed down with the roasted ham and meatloaf from the buffet!) Beer? nah, the rail drinks are all free, just have long-islands all night. It quickly becomes a one way street to pure gluttony. Thank God we only stayed 2 nights, I can only imagine what I'd weight if we spent a week. In short, this kind of arrangement is about the last thing this country really needs.

We couldn't make it a trip to the dells without one visit to a real indoor waterpark, and if you're going to do it, you might as well go to the worlds largest, the Kalahari. We forked over $24/person for the evening admission which is good from 5 till 9pm. We got there about 6pm and got right into it. This place is huge, beyond what you can imagine should be in an indoor waterpark. I think there were about 10 slides, all different designs. My personal fav was the roller-coaster type one that actually propelled you up parts of the slide with jets of water. We collectively hit them all except the surfing thing (yes you can surf inside here). We took about 3 laps on the lazy river thingy, which was more my speed, then decided we were all shot about 8:15. That's only about 2 hours and we had all we could take. Honestly, I have no idea how these kids have the energy to do this all day, much less their parents following them around! Guess I'm getting old...

Back on the homefront, there's not much exciting to report. The living space looks like living space, all the carpets in which completed the flooring. The bath/laundry is fully operational. I think I just need to schedule some inspections and get those wrapped up. We'll probably move some furniture in there soon, despite the lack of trim around the base of the room and the windows. We need to buy/cut/stain/poly all the trim yet, so that will take a little while. I'd like to get some shelving up in the closet and the doors installed so that we can start moving all our misc crap into there. That should really help clean up the piles of clutter currently plaguing our house.

I've back at it in the shop, cranking out the bike work. The tube cutting machine is running and I cut the first full bikes' worth of tubing on it this week. Got one frame brazed up and two or three other repairs to wrap up this week. It feels good to make progress down there.

I've got a neat experiment to try soon. The second Nature lover frame has been sitting in my shop for a couple months now waiting for the future owners to decide on a color scheme. Well, they threw down the gauntlet on me and asked me to try copper plating it. So I've got this really cool copper plating solution to try out and I've been experimenting on scrap tubing with it. It's the craziest stuff, looks like a gallon bottle of windshield washer fluid (totally blue) but wipe it on steel and it's instantly copper plated! It's a very thin coating though so all the texture in the base metal shows through, so I'll be fine sanding this frame for a while. Not to mention you can't hide any pinholes or irregularities in the steel with it. I'll post some pictures once I have some worth showing. Should be a neat result.

well, I'm about out of time, so that's it for now.

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The anti-rant

One business issue first, if your name is Gretchen, you live out east somewhere and want to talk to me about a frame, call me back, you didn't leave a phone # in your message, and the email address you left is not valid!

Ok, back to writing....

I'm not sure if that's an appropriate title or not. I guess it's still a rant, but it's a good rant, about good things. That's kind of the opposite of most rants.

I skied three times this week! That's some kind of record for me as I really haven't done anything outdoors for a couple months prior. I've been to Como, Battle Creek and Wirth this week, and all of them surprised me with how good they were. Sure last night at Wirth was a bit icy, but it was totally ski-able.

My big shock was Battle Creek Tuesday. It was about 36 degrees out all day, everything was slush, but yet the skiing was great. Some moron (probably someone who runs cyclists off the road) had been driving an SUV all over the trails in the prior days, but yet the skiing was great. There was a highschool meet going on with kids everywhere, but yet the skiing was great. Ok, you get the picture.

Battle Creek has really ramped up their grooming abilities in the last few years. When I first moved near the park, the trails were appalling. I mean they would hardly ever groom, when they did, it was done all wrong. I offered many times to groom the trails for free or even give clinics to their groomers on what they should be doing (I maintained the ski trails at MTU for almost 5 years, so I've got plenty of grooming acumen). The county always refused, I was always pissed when I'd ski there.

Then things started happening, great groups of citizens banded together and got improvements in the works. We got lights on a nice portion of the trail, then the county bought a new groomer, then in a remarkable showing if insight, they taught the operators how to actually use it properly! The last couple of years they've been refining the trails in the non-winter months, and that brings up to today. Despite a miserable lack of good snow, and temps staying above freezing for days, the trails were pretty smooth and fully covered in groomed snow. Bravo Ramsey County.

Even more impressive was the high-school meet. I coached a high school ski team for 5 years, so I have a pretty good idea of what it's like trying to organize 50-100 kids out in a field of snow and keep them starting and stopping at the right time. I also know how kids like to screw around in the snow, it's teen-ager nature and cannot be stopped. The meet I saw was Stillwater and Roseville doing a skate race. I showed up at the tail end, disappointed that there was a meet that day because that usually means it's tough to ski. Every kid and parent out there was really courteous to me though, I didn't see any of the usual shenanigans of kids building jumps, tearing up holes in the trails, etc... It was pretty cool, my hats off to those two teams and their coaches. Nice work presenting a great public image of ski racing. I don't always see that.

Now that things got below freezing last night, I suspect Battle Creek may be a deathtrap. It's all huge hills and they'll all be ice. I'm not sure there's enough snow for them to do much tilling, so I may be resigned to flatter skiing until we get more white stuff.

Not much new to report on the house. I've been too busy skiing!
I have done a couple more things around the shop, but nothing exciting. A few repairs, start on another frame, etc... I want to get these repairs out of the way since they take up a lot of space in the shop.

well, that's about all for now. I might even get some painting done this weekend (on bikes that is, not the house!).

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shop talk

Well I'm pretty excited, after far too many hours of stringing conduit, running wires and checking connections, I finally got my horizontal mill running properly yesterday. It's exciting because this will be the new dedicated tube mitering machine for the shop.

It actually ran fine when I got it, but I wanted to be able to do some automating with it in the future (I have big ambitions), so I wanted to be able to run it with pushbutton controls and a proper motor starter. As noted in my last entry, the aux. contact wasn't working properly, which meant the motor wouldn't stay running after you release the start button. So I took apart the aux contact to find that it was missing the actual contacts!

This starter was old stock, so a replacement aux contact was difficult to find. I did locate a couple, but they were more expensive than just buying a new starter! So I machined my own from some contacts from another contactor. I never imagined I'd be making internals to electrical controls in my shop, but it was actually pretty easy. After that was made, I installed it only to find out it still didn't work right. Took me a while to figure out what was happening, but eventually I realized the main contactor wasn't pulling my new aux contactor in far enough to make the switch trip. With a few more adjustments, it worked! I know this probably isn't very exciting for you folks, but to me, making something electrical that actually works is a big accomplishment (there's a reason I'm a Mechanical Engineer, not Electrical).


Then I got my rotary table and tube vise mounted up on the main table and aligned everything up. Here's how it looks. It's actually a pretty simple device, basically a cutting spindle with a rotary table and an axial feed, but this one has 2000lbs of steel to back it up! Mass your best friend when it comes to working metal, and the more rigid this set-up can be, the better the cut will end up.

With this arrangement, I think the set-up is about as rigid as it could possibly be. The only improvement I can think of would be to someday replace the vise with a very large 2J collet closer with collets to fit the tubing. But that would be a pile of work and I'd have to change collets with each different tube diameter I use. This way the vise fits all diameters.

The beauty of this arrangement is that once everything is aligned, I will be able to make very accurate miter lengths very quickly. You see the center of the rotary table is lined up with the centerline of the spindle. So I can set any angle I want on the rotary table and maintain the same centerline of my cut.

The master plan then is to have a movable stop located on the far right end of the aluminum bar you see in the picture. This stop have a scale on it to set the tube length to exactly where I want it, then I just put the tube in the vise and cut it. It's hard to describe, but it should work very well and save me a bunch of time. There is a slight length correction needed for different tube diameters (due to the centerline of the tube moving slightly in the vise) but I can account for that in my spreadsheet which I use to calculate the tube lenths.

The next step is to mount my DC motor on the mill for the axial power feed. Once that is up, I can add the limit switches and automate the whole cutting motion, all I will have to do it put the tube in the machine, set my angle and start the cutting cycle.

Incidentally, for other tool geeks, that's a 12" Pratt & Whitney rotary table on there. I picked that up from the same dealer as the mill, he just wanted to get rid of stuff! The spindle is a 40 taper, which I put a 1.5" diameter collet chuck into, which is what hold my cutters. I can change the cutter by simply loosening a nut up front. It works really well.

Aside from playing with machines, I did get some other work done the last few days, including a big chunck of the remaining work on the house. Monday Beth and I spent pretty much the whole day shellacing birch plywood to make out wood-wall treatment for the living room. Took 3 coats on each sheet and a bunch of sanding, but in the end, it came out great This is the north wall of the living room, the one wall without windows. The birch has a lot of pillowing effect to it, much like maple. We're pretty happy with it, now I just need to trim the edges and the top.

I also finished up the bathroom, all fixtures are in, I think I'm ready for the final plumbing inspection! We should be really close to the final electrical inspection as well. Once those are done and I finish a couple small touches I think I might be ready for the final building inspection too! Now that's exciting.

We ordered the carpet for the main room too this weekend, the installer is coming over today to measure things up. I'm not sure when he'll actually install it yet, but maybe I'll know that this afternoon. I think that just depends on if the carpet manufacturer has that exact color in stock or if it has to be ordered. Once that carpet goes down, this thing's gonna look like an honest-to-goodness room!

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