CCCX Nor-Cal-Nevada districts

Lots of success at the districts last weekend. Keegan Pelton and Remy Schmidt are new district champions in the juniors. Silver medals were won by Dan English, Kai Yee , Enzo Sapjnikoff and Kathleen Bortolussi. Bronze medals were won by Matt Werner, Mac Tomkins, Nate Vahlberg, Sarah Jordan, Eric Werner, Kyle Taylor and Paul Sadoff.

Just off the podium were Cullen Keefe at 4th, Joey Kochlacs, Jayden Cheung at 5th, Nate Barton 5th in the elite.  All in all, we had tremendous success considering many of the team were not present. 

In a few weeks many of these folks and others will go to Tacoma, Wa. for the nationals. There they will meet up with people who were not around for last weeks race. It should be a great week in December for the team-we must have at least 7 entrants in the single speed category alone. There's a good chance that we will be the largest team from Nor-Cal so every day you'll have a chance to see our racers on the course. 

650 MTN for sale $ 1,800

 This one will fit a rider 5'7"-5'8". It is mostly XT with Stan's rims and a King headset. The components are nice throughout and the bike is really clean. Get in touch with me at the shop if you want to check it out. The frame alone would cost you $ 1,750. This has a Fox fork that is about $ 1,000. Its silly cheap for a bike like this.

 The frame is made from Easton 7005 and has the 44 MM ID head tube foe the tapered steerer. The 1x11 drive train is nearly new so it should be trouble free for a long time.

Shop number is 831-429-8010.  or email paul@rocklobstercycles.com

Alfie step-through town bike for a local

 This is the latest edition of this bike. I started building these in 2006- I can't say that I have made very many of them but I am always keen to try to make them have better features. This one has the Shimano Alfine-11 parts group with hydraulic disc brakes. The rims are Stan's but I did not set it up tubeless. This one takes up to 700x40 tires......actually it might even fit 45's. The Brooks saddle is a must along with the headlamp which is run by the front dynamo hub.

Steel CX/gravel frame for Colorado

 I still have to make the fork for this- a crowned disc brake thru axle model. This is for an old customer who has had a couple of my frames over the years but this will be the first disc brake version. It still has a nod to the old days with the smaller head tube and brazed on collars.

 This frame comes in at just a hair over 4 lbs. so it isn't a heavy steel frame.

Two more days until race day !

Winners of the elite races and single speed races will get the horn trophy- normally only something at a Rock Lobster cup race , Surf City will be presenting these to the winners Sunday afternoon. The flyover is built, the course is being built. It should be bumpy and rustic in the Santa Cruz tradition that in the case of Surf City goes back 41 years.

Steel disc brake road frame for Monterey, Calif.

 This type of frame is getting to be more popular in the last couple of years. I make the frame out of a mix of Columbus tubes, mostly the Zona and Life series.

 The hydraulic brake line goes inside the down tube so that it does not get in the way of the shifter cable routing. There's no cables at all on the tup tube of a frame like this so it has a clean look once it is fully built up.

This one will be paired with an Enve disc-road fork which I'll be ordering a couple of this morning.
The frame weighs 3 lb. 15 oz, only about 7 oz. more than the same frame in aluminum.

Steel Ultimundo road frame for a local

 I have enough tubes to make only three more of these so they will never be quite the same when I run out of the True Temper S-3 downtubes. That said, I'll still make the model but it might be a tad different in terms of frame weight and ride characteristics.

 The rest of the tubing in this frame seems to be still in production-being Columbus 'Spirit" and Life.....both are currently produced and in decent supply. It amazes me that there are manufacturers that make such specialized and esoteric materials for building custom steel frames. My thought is that nobody, not the builders, distributors or tubing manufacturers are making much money. I gues that we are all in it because it is what we care about. I am thankful that in my 41 years since I have built my very first frame that there has always been good steel available.

This frame is made from the very best steel I can get: Top tube is my last round S-3. Down tube is one of the last four S-3 bi-oval tubes. Seat tube is Columbus Life. Rear chain stays are Life and the seat stays are Spirit. The head tube is a tapered superlight from Nova. This frame weighs 3 lb. 15 oz.

Step through townie for a local

 This might be the sixth one of these that I have built in the last decade. I really like building a simple bike like this and try slightly different things on each one. This one will get the full Alfine-11 build with Hydraulic disc brakes.

 The frame has the Jen Green copper headbadge and will get a Brooks saddle with some Nitto All-rounder bars, kind of like a cafe racer. The rider wanted a town bike with a slightly more efficient position than the typical upright style with swept-back handlebars.

Even though the bike really screams for them, there will be no fenders on the final build but there will be a rear rack and a kickstand. A townie without a kickstand is a townie in name only.

Gravel frame for Monterey

 For twenty years I have been on start lines of CX and other races to hear right before the whistle the words :" Ride safe- have fun !". The person who has been saying these words at the start of over two decades of bicycle races is getting this frame.

 It has been a good many years since this person has competed in bike races as he's been one of a small crew who run the CCCX series of road, MTB and CX races in the Monterey bay area. Without these races there would be hardly any events like this within an hour's drive from my home city of Santa Cruz. Myself and hundreds of other like-minded cyclists value what the CCCX crew has been doing to keep bicycle racing alive in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.

So, it is a real honor to build this frame- it will be for gravel riding and racing for the most part so it does not have the flattened top tube for shouldering and it has three bottle mounts. The bike will be fitted with Shimano GRX Di II group. The frame weighs 3 lb. 8 oz.

Frame # 4 from 1979 returns

 When I had just barely gotten my feet wet in frame building I planned an ambitious project- I would try to create something like a semi-fancy Hetchins style frame but build it with a serious nod to Bruce Gordon. I had not met Bruce at the time but I saw his work and was immediately inspired by it,along with frames from Hetchins and Art Stump. I also wanted to make the stiffest steepest road frame in Santa Cruz- maybe not the smartest plan but here it is, 40 years later and it still rolls.

 This frame pre-dates the Rock Lobster brand by about 5 years, hence the hand painted 'Sadoff" logo on the seat and head tubes. Yes, I painted it on myself-I used to know how to do that.

 I managed to get a set of Art Stump's investment cast dropouts-there are not many of these on the planet . As attractive as they are, they did not really catch on. I had to shorten the derailleur hanger to get the shifting to work properly.

 I tried to do the Bruce Gordon seatpost bolt through-the-stays binder. This one works really well, even if it isn't nearly as cleanly pulled off as what Bruce did. The seat lug is definitely a nod to Bruce as well.

The tubing id Columbus PS, the heavy track set with oversize chain stays and 24 mm round fork blades. One can really feel the road when riding this bike-that is to say that it isn't the smoothest riding bike in town. It is not unpleasant, though. When I was 24 I did ride it 135 miles in a day and survived without breaking my back. My plan is to overhaul it , throw a larger freewheel on it and ride the Eroica California in April. Seems fitting to take this bike in particular to that event-the two-wheel nostalgia parade. I'll leave the paint pretty much as you see it, rust and all. Bike and rider will look a bit worse for wear but that , in my mind is how it should be.

7005 CX race frame going to Il.

 This is the newest version of the team CX frame- one of many I have built in the last few months. This one has a painted to match Enve fork and the new King 'dropset' integrated headset.

 The frame will also do some miles in gravel events which are becoming very popular all over the country. It seems that the midwest has a wealth of dirt and gravel roads making it a good area for bikes like this.

Small steel gravel/endurance frame and fork

 Built in a classic style with the straight steerer fork, threaded BB shell and rim brakes, this small frame has tubing diameters that suit the smaller rider. My goal was to make a frame that was not going to have a rough ride for the long miles it will be putting in. The smaller diameter top and down tube should help.

 The color is "Cascade blue", the powdercoat equivalent of what I have on my own touring bike that I displayed and the NAHBS last March in Sacramento.

The stainless Salsa dropouts have been a staple on my frames for nearly 20 years.

Team CX bike for a local

 Just got this one built up in time for the Old Growth classic, the local gravel event. Not sure where she finished up but I'm sure that the owner of this bike was in the action at the front.

 The bike is fitted with Easton cranks, wheels, post ,stem and bars- We are really happy with the support that Easton has continued to give the team since its beginning in 2004.

The drive train is Ultegra 8000 hydraulic with flat mount calipers. Other nice bits are the Chris King BB and headset in Turquoise- King has also been a steadfast sponsor of the team and this season is no exception.

Gravel/CX aluminum frame for Florida

 Here's the latest incarnation of the team issue frame- but there are some extras:

 For one, it is not in the team color. Also, the stem, seat post and a pump barrel were painted to match along with the Enve CX fork.

The other feature is the internal top tube rear der. housing ports. I think that this is the second frame I have done this on- not something I intend to have as a stock feature but it does lend to the uncluttered look of this frame- minimal guides of any kind for a non- Di II setup.

An old project comes back to the shop

 Yes, this is indeed a full suspension frame that I built nearly 20 years ago. It was in collaboration with Mike Ahrens who to this day produces many of the aluminum parts that I and other builders use for frame construction. Little did I know when I built this and other bikes with Mike that it would lead to an association that would last more than two decades.

 For a time while Mike was in college he worked for Risse racing. For a senior project Mike got the idea to build a full suspension mountain bike-this was around 1997. Mike approached me about making the frame and I agreed to do it. After the initial frame we went on to make about another 10-15 frames together of this design , more or less. I also built some hard tails and other frames for Mike as did Jason Grove.

This particular bike wound up at MOMBAT at First Flight bicycles in Statesville, NC. When the MOMBAT collection was to be sold off one of the employees of Santa Cruz bikes bought this bike and it is now back in Santa Cruz. For most of its life this bike was a display item. Now it looks like it will finally do some time on the trails in the redwoods where the inspiration for many mountain bikes happened back in the early '80's.
2019 has been the year were old projects such as this have re-surfaced and come back to my shop . So far I have seen bikes from the very early years of my history and ones like this-while not the oldest, represent a time when I was willing to take on more adventurous work-a time when mountain bikes were in the middle of an evolution.......it was an evolution that I mostly stayed out of with this exception and maybe one other. The good thing about building this and other bikes with Mike is that I wound up with a very important ally for building aluminum frames and a good friend in Mike Ahrens. He has evolved into a behind the scenes person who drives the forward progress of frame building supplies for aluminum builders everywhere.