pinstripe suit convention

So as you may or may not know the Republican National Convention is right here in St. Paul this week. Between Gustav and the RNC you'll be hard pressed to find any other news. Naturally in a very left-leaning twin cities metro area, there are quite a few large protest marches. The first major one being today from the state capitol down the Xcel center. While I'm not a big protester kind of guy, this sort of thing just doesn't happen very often in MN. So when my friend Kate asked if I wanted to go check out the march, I jumped at the chance. It's really sad that pretty much all the news converage focused on the couple of idiots who went out early to break things and make havoc. There were ten's of thousands of people making a great peaceful protest and the few idoits get all the press and make it look like everyone was trying to break windows and damage cars. Sad because that just wasn't the case.

Not a whole lot of bike content here, but I suspect most of my readers tend to lean left and will appreciate some pictures. Thanks to Kate for all the photos! They're roughly in chronological order from the pre-march ralley, then through the march. Click on images to make 'em big.

Nice shirt, there were a lot of good ones.

Homeland security levels finally explained

Iraq. vets for peace

Some dude riding a sweet elephant bike

Gotta love these ladies slogan

Lots of creative costumes

Elephant gittin' it.

Dancing Bush and McCain, hard to beat 'em

protestors of all ages

Bike Builder looking uncomfortable, but rockin' the look.

The march starts, it's truly a sea of people

We though we were in about the middle of the crowd, but later realized we were probably in the front 1/4, there were just a ton of people behind us.

More bike cops than I imagines MN coupld possibly have. All on pretty lame bikes, but all treated us well and with respect. Thanks guys and gals in blue.

The riot cops and "MN peace team" working together. The riot gear really does make these guys look imtimadating.

lots and lots of riot cops. I found it ironic that they were all lined up in front of the Children's Museum main entrance. Watch out kids! I feel sorry for all these people having to be out in all that gear all day in the 90 degree heat.

Click on this one to enlarge and look for all the guys up on the roof of the Xcel

Appearently CNN took over the Eagle St. Grill and literally made it there own. New signage, bus and lots o neon in the windows. odd.

Only tandem I saw, had to lock 'er up to the freedom fence. They put up all this steel fencing to keep people out of the area of the convention.

And finally one really great sign.

I hope to get out more this week just to do some people watching. Hanging out at the Liffey after the march we saw some "unique" people. Can't wait to see more. I'll bring the camera. I'd like to get some shots of the ridiculous coast-guard patrols out on the Mississippi, literally machine guns mounted front and back ready to kill the terrorists! seems like overkill to me, but what do I know.

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back

This one goes out to the Large Fella, since he won't get off my back about not bloging this summer...

I'm really not trying to abandon the blog, but quite honestly I haven't had the time, or more importantly the motivation due to the utter insanity of my life this summer. I won't bore you with details of that, but I think I'm getting back on track and hope to be back to the old bbbb soon.

Anyways, I am actually still making bikes and making progress. Hoping to wrap up another frame this weekend.

A few weeks ago was 8/8/08, which meant an annual party gathering (we've been doing this since 1/1/01 and only have a few more years left!). This year the plan was to camp out at Afton state park and enjoy the merriement found there. Since Afton really isn't that far from my place, I decided to do a mini-bike tour out there. Loaded up my grocery-getter bike with camping gear and headed out on a beautiful Friday afternoon.

It was a great ride out there and back the next day. The bike worked great despite the heave back-end load. I'm really loving this bike for all around transport of lots-o-stuff. At some point I'd like to build a new cruiser style frame for this application, but for now this bike works great.

In other news, I could really use raising some funds here this fall (due to the craziness of life) and I've still got a couple bikes for sale, so I thought I'd pimp 'em here again: (copied from a previous post)



Here's a fun one that's available!

BBC custom 29'er with matching S & S couplers and matching Marathon SL fork!

This bike isn't actually new, it just looks that way. I refurbed and repainted it to have as a demo bike. I suspect it'll end up at One-on-One very soon with a for-sale sign on it.

It's a 21" frame with a 23.75" effective top tube, so it's a big-person bike. I like that it's proportioned basically the same as an 18" 26" wheeled bike, in the pic it's tough to know it's a 29'er.

It's designed to do it all. Currently set up as a singlespeed, but it has a derailleur hanger and full provisions for running gears. Fits nice fat tires, the tires on there are 2.3" Panaracer Rampages!

Pretty sweet build kit on there too, if I do say so myself. Paul's brake and levers, XT spiderless singlespeed cranksetup (with spot ring), super-trick nuke-proof singelspeed wheelset with Velocity Dyad rims, Truvative Team bar and stem, Cane Creek S-6 headset, Raceface post. All the good stuff... If you're one of those folks that like those gear-changing thingy's, I can set it up with gears for you, no problem.

And the paint... It just jumps out at you in the sun light. It's a house of color green pearl over black, looks like a British racing green, but with tons of metalflake to make it pop! Chrome painted in logos and of course a stainless steel headbadge to finish it off.


This stainless lugged bike is available:
It's a 60cm seat-tube x 58 top tube. Sport-touring geometry, email for details.

Artsy seatlug shot.

I'm also wiling to sell my personal 953 road bike:



This one is a 58cm top-tube, 6 degree sloping top-tube, actual seat-tube length is 55cm due to the sloping top tube. Chainstays are 40.5cm, 73 degree parallel angles. It's pretty much a full-on road racer geometry -wise. It's built up with a full campy record 10 carbon kit, reynolds fork, post, stem and wheels. All top-notch, anyone local is welcome to take it for a spin. Email for more pictures and details. $2500 for the frame, or $5000 complete bike. It's like new.

anyways, that's all for now,

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Bucked.

Buck hill got me last week. got me good. Last lap, last half mile or so. Rocked it through a fast, rough downhil singletrack, but just before clearing the last corner my front tire just stopped. Not totally sure why, but it sure happened. I remember flying through the air and the only thought in my head was "don't put your arms out, you'll break them again". So I didn't, I tucked and tried to roll, but landed on my head instead, fortunately in a pile of sand.


I got up pretty quick and noticed I was about 12' away from my bike and on the opposite side of the trail. Brushed the sand off me and was surprized how good I felt. No sharp pains, no broken anything, so I got back on and rolled it out to the end of the race.
After the race I was still feeling ok, face felt a little swollen and I figured I'd be sore the next day. Got some pretty mild road rash on my face, and the bridge of my glasses smashed my nose pretty good. All in all I felt like I got off easy, until the next morning....

Woke up at 4am the next day with the second worst headache of my life. Took some Advil, started to feel better, but that only lasted about an hour. Vision was a little blurry in one eye, so I decided it was time to call the doc. My usual doc sent me to the ER. Sat there for 2 hours only to find out what I pretty much knew, I had a concussion. Not much you can do. Slept a while Friday, but headaches kept me up most of the weekend. On the plus side the worst seems to be past and the vision is totally cleared up.

I finally got the paint done on Billy's bike. Took just short of forever, but I think it came out good. Billy's been the most patient man around and I appreciate it. Hope he likes the bike. Now if Spot would just get the damn belt drive cogs in stock I could finish it up.




I've been on a comutting bike kick lately and spent a couple of hours getting a few old bikes put together in new ways. For todays post I'll show one of them, what I like to call the Browntrager.

I was insprired by Marko and dusted off my old Bontrager Race. I've got a pretty prime off-road commuting route to 3M so I've been jones for a bike suited to this purpose. I wanted a singlespeed but I've got some big dirt climbs and some fast pavement on the commute, so a couple of gears seemed appealing.

I stripped off the stock Bontrager-crowned Judy fork and whipped up a rigid BBC fork more prudent for a 29'er front wheel. Then built up a new rear wheel around a Sram three speed hub. Why not. Sure it's heavy, but it seems pretty robust so far and it's still lighter than a hub, cassette and deraileur. Not to mention I really only needed 2 gears, the third is just a bonus.

The gear ratios on this hub are surprizingly far apart, so my pavement gear is nice and tall compared to my off-road gear. The third gear is almost silly low, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it sometime.

Threw in some snazzy control tech brakes, sugino cranks and the original bontrager stem and post. All in all, a pretty neat bike. Fun to ride too. Not too bad for a bike built from nearly all parts-bin findings.

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uberslacker

Sorry about not posting for so long. I'm still here, still working, just haven't made the effort to do anything on the blog. I've got pictures in the camera that need to come out, maybe next week.

Life's been a whirlwind lately, but I'll try and get this blog thingy back on track soon. In the meantime, get out and ride, it's summer and the weather in MN has been spectacular.

till then, keep livin' the high life:





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SS

Another one done....






The scalloped seatstays are very difficult to pull off cleanly in stainless, but man does it look good! Mini-six lugs on this one, standard oversize tubing, pretty light. Frame came out a little over 3 lbs. I'll have some pictures here soon of it built up with campy chorus. Should be a fabulous little bike.


In the mountain bike world, one of the greatest races around was this weekend, the cable classic. Been doing this one for a long time and this year was by far the best weather for the start that I can ever remember having. Sunny and probably around 50. I geared lower this year simply because I was too lazy to take my usual 34-19 gear off, but it felt great for this race. The start is always a mad dash on a singlespeed since there's about a 2 mile dirt road roll-out. Amazingly I made up a lot of ground in the start and probably picked up about 50 places from where I was positioned in the gate.
Once you're in the woods at the cable classic, you're in the woods for a while. The race is basically 23 miles of singletrack with a couple short fire-roads in between. There were quite a few downed trees this year due to recent storms, which meant dismounts. There seemed to be a lot of grumbling by the mtb boyz around me about the dismounts, but I was in full CX mode and started using them as opportunities to easily pass folks in the singletrack. Seemed like I could pick up three places at each one.
About 20 miles in I suddenly found myself alone, which was odd. There had been a pretty steady stream of riders all through the race, but they seemed to all be popping near the end, so I dropped the hammer as best I could to get as much lead as possible before the long railroad grade finish (which really sucks on a singlespeed). It must have worked or the other riders took pity on me for being foolish enough to race singlespeed because nobody passed me the whole time. odd. Anyways, came in 57 overall, which I was pretty happy with. Was still minutes behind the fast kenwoodies, but they train and stuff... and were on gears. Great racing to all the Kenwoodies up there!

Highlight was having someone cheer for me saying "yeah, go Ezra!!!" Guess k-racing jersey and rigid single = Ezra. They must have thought Ez shaved his beard, grew hair on his head, got taller and a lot slower.

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paint

I've been doing what feels like a lot of painting lately. It's not as much as it feels like, but I've been shooting paint over at Curt G's shop, breaking in his new booth and giving him some pointers. He's learning to paint, so spraying over there gives me a nice place to shoot, and him a chance to see someone else's technique at the same time.

Shot this S & S retrofit and a couple others this weekend. Nice little Bianchi frame that's now been touched by three local framebuilders. Chris Kvale added the rear eyelets a couple years ago, I replaced the downtube and added the couplers, and Curt tried his hand out at laying some base color coats on the paint job. The paint is my own home-brew mix to recreate Bianchi's famous Celeste.

S & S seems to be the hot ticket right now, all three frames I painted this weekend had couplers and I currently have 4 frames waiting in my que for retrofits. It's all good by me!

Here's a fun one that's available!

BBC custom 29'er with matching S & S couplers and matching Marathon SL fork!

This bike isn't actually new, it just looks that way. I refurbed and repainted it to have as a demo bike. I suspect it'll end up at One-on-One very soon with a for-sale sign on it.

It's a 21" frame with a 23.75" effective top tube, so it's a big-person bike. I like that it's proportioned basically the same as an 18" 26" wheeled bike, in the pic it's tough to know it's a 29'er.

It's designed to do it all. Currently set up as a singlespeed, but it has a derailleur hanger and full provisions for running gears. Fits nice fat tires, the tires on there are 2.3" Panaracer Rampages!

Pretty sweet build kit on there too, if I do say so myself. Paul's brake and levers, XT spiderless singlespeed cranksetup (with spot ring), super-trick nuke-proof singelspeed wheelset with Velocity Dyad rims, Truvative Team bar and stem, Cane Creek S-6 headset, Raceface post. All the good stuff... If you're one of those folks that like those gear-changing thingy's, I can set it up with gears for you, no problem.

And the paint... It just jumps out at you in the sun light. It's a house of color green pearl over black, looks like a British racing green, but with tons of metalflake to make it pop! Chrome painted in logos and of course a stainless steel headbadge to finish it off.

If you're interested, email me. You're welcome to take it for a spin. Otherwise like I said, hopefully it'll be down at One-on-One soon and you can check it out there.

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Been a while, lots going on. Went to Fruita, didn't take any pics though so you'll have to peruse Thorny's blog to get your fix. He took lots.

Been trying to play catch up in the shop lately. I've got a couple in paint right now and I'm about halfway through this 953 frame:


Mini six lugs, really light tubes. This is defintely the lightest one I've built to date. Reynolds is realy hitting the mark on the tubing now days. I suspect this one will be right around 3lbs complete.

Speaking of 953, I took my stainless road bike out for the first time this year yesterday. It was my first ride of the year on a geared bike, so it felt a little odd. It felt amazingly fast, especially after riding in Fruita on a big fat-tired mtb. That thing is so light and quick compared to my fully fendered fixie, made me feel like I was TSP.

Out in Fruita I decided to rock some fat tires, fatter than I've ever used on a 29'er. Got a set of Panaracer Rampage tires on my stans rims. They barely fit in the frame at 2.35" wide. They were a touch lighter than advertised, which was refreshing (about 680g). Still not light tires, but man did they feel good out there on the rocks. I felt so much more sure-footed on that jagged terrain that they were more than worth the extra weight on the climbs. In fact I felt like I could climb better since I wasn't trying to keep all my weight back on the rear tire for traction. THey just plain hook up. If you're somewhere a bit more rugged than Minneapolis I highly recommend them. Probably overkill for cranking out laps at buck hill or Wirth though.

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pics

I've been working on a strange project lately. I was approached by a publisher from Australia about being part of a book she's publishing on "Bespoke Bikes". How could I resist. Part of the deal was needing some large-format pictures of my work. Unfortunately a lot of my pictures from the past are sized for web-applications not large-format printing. So I went through and pulled what I could from my archive and then set out to take some new ones. I didn't have time to get an good action /riding pictures, but I thought I'd share what I had. At least give you something new to look at on this blog! I'll warn you, if you click for full-size, they're big files.

Shop in B & W

Stainless lugged BB sport tourer with Campy Centaur triple group. This one is for sale, email me for details or watch the blog for more into. it's a 60cm seat-tube x 58 top tube.

Artsy seatlug shot.

Stainless slant six lug gettin' the file treatment

Fitting up fastback seatstays prior to brazing

Custom tandem Eccentric shell, I like the contrast of the paint to the grass!

dragonfly in copper.

warmth. finally

The weather seems to finally be warming up around here, hopefully we're done with the late season snow...
I got out for a few rides since last I wrote. Last weekend I met up for the ride Thorny and Chef set-up, somehow it ended up being just O-tree and myself. We rolled pretty much everywhere it seemed. I think it was somewhere around 5 hours of fixie riding and remarkably, it felt great. until the next day.

Paid for that for a couple days, then spun some errands Tuesday since it was nice out and I had places to go. The leg's weren't feeling great, but I was out and enjoying it. Thursday I decided to hit some hills and see how that felt on the fixie. Headed down to Cottage Grove on one of my usual hilly rides and that went pretty good, but I kept it short. An hour and a half later I was back at home and my legs were shaking. Guess I have some work to do, but at least I didn't feel like I blew up completely while riding, just afterwards.

I spent a couple of nights this week wresting with my car. It's a good car, but just rolled 100,000 miles in Feb and a few things were starting to show a little wear. First off I knew I needed new tie-rod ends, so those went in Monday night. I quickly learned the price of parking the car on a busy street for 7 Minnesota winters. Every driver's side nut or bolt was completely rusted in place, while all the passenger side fasteners we're easy as pie to remove. The car get's a lot of road spray on the driver's side while parked on the street, causing the excess corrosion.
The tie-rod ends got rid of most of the clunking up front, but there was still a little play due to a bad lower ball joint, so Wednesday night that came out.

Unfortunately I had to grind off all the bolts including the main knuckle bolt due to all the rust. Left a few dings in the control arm which I wasn't thrilled about, so I figured I better fix that. Good move, as I was removing the lower control arm I discovered the sway-arm mounting bolt was broken, broken off in the blind hole in the sway arm! yuck, either replace the arm or do some drilling and tapping. This is about the time it comes in real handy to have a full metal shop at your access.

Drilled out the bolt remains, retapped the hole, replaced the bolt, welded up the damaged end of the arm and reground it to shape. Seems like a lot, but it took less time than driving to the dealer to get a new one (the dealer was closed anyways). I love having tools.

Get it re-aligned today and it should be good as new. Even with paying for an alignment, I think I came out about $500 ahead. Not bad for 2 evenings time.


I've got Billy's bike all ready for paint, hopefully get that squirted soon and get him out riding on it as soon as the trails dry up. Now if Spot would just get me the carbon-drive system parts for this bike that they claimed would be in production Jan 1, I'd be set.

I started in on the next 953 frame as well. Why not, I can use a few more things to juggle around!

20 days till fruita, 8 days till FDM08.

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rollin

Finally got in a couple rides this week. The mercury hit 55 Wednesday so how could I possibly resist. Rolled around St. Paul mostly, across summit, through minnehaha falls, to fort snelling and over to lillydale. The lillydale trail doesn't get plowed so it still had a good layer of glacier on it so I opted for the hilly road route instead. While my legs were not ready for any hills, the view was good. Perfectly clear day, nice view of downtown coming back home. I managed to drag this one out for almost 3 hours of fixie action. felt good. felt bad.

Thursday was warm again, but not quite as warm, about 45. The forecast was for big snow Friday though so I figured I might as well go for another spin before I was snowed off the roads. Road north this time through roseville to run an errand. Felt great for the first half, till I figured out I had unknowingly been reaping the rewards of a tailwind. The ride home felt brutal, and to make things worse I popped a rear spoke abotu 2 miles after I turned around which threw the rear wheel waaaaaay off. Rode home into a stiff headwind with a rear wheel rubbing the brake and frame. Oh well.

Got home, fixed the offending spoke and re-tensioned the wheel. Hard to complain when it was a wheel built from used parts about 20,000 miles ago. I just can't escape my inner cheapskate.

I had to pull off the cog to change the spoke. It's probably been 3-4 years since that cog came off, I was amazed that I got it off without too much ordeal. But I was amuzed enough at the appearence of the gritty cog to snap a pic. I love how much crap is caked inside, yet the teeth are nice and polished (and hooked!) from chain wear.

Ahh, the little things in life..

And pushing on with all my forking lately, finished up three more forks this week. here's two of them.

I've felt like all I've done the last few weeks was build forks. Don't know why, but people keep asking for 'em. It'll be good to get back into some frames next. I've got a whole slew of stainless frames coming up in the que.

enjoy the snow you locals, happy Easter.

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