Yes, I still am a framebuilder..

With liitle or no blogging I'm sure some of you might assume that I have gone away and hung up the torch. This is definitely not the case, I have just been buried in all sorts of situations, some my own making and some I really didn't ask for. This aside, I have been belching out work with some regularity. This frame is a 'big-tire road' with the addition of S&S couplers. I built a steel for as well as the bike will be in and out of a travel case many times, not a good place for a carbon fork.

Here's the fork with the Pacenti 'Paris-Brest' crown, one of my favorites as it allows for lots of fender and tire room, something required on this type of bike.
Here are some of the last aluminum and scandium frames for the winter back from the painter. He still has about a half a dozen more......I built a lot of frames in Aug-Sept. and they are going to fill up the rack in the next day or so. I think I might get to that 100 frames for the year mark that usually is a little more than I can do. When you don't get a long vacation it is surprising what you can get done. Next year......long vacation !

A gathering of frame builders

Since the construction or rather, destruction at my shop ( see overopinionatedframebuilder.blogspot.com)has proved to be noisy and dusty ( Friday morning they were using a chainsaw for the demo work..) enough to make it unfeasable for me to get much done, I took a Friday off to go up to Santa Rosa for Levi's Gran Fondo ride on Saturday. The night before the ride, a gathering was organized by Jeremy Sycip and others for any Nor-Cal or Oregon frame builders to attend. It wasn't a real "show", it was more of a street-corner party-but a street corner party with about 22 frame builders in attendance. We all showed up with our bikes that we would ride the next day with about 6,000 other folks. Local Santa Rosa folks came to the party riding some incredibly odd machinery. Most of the rigs were designed to run on railroad tracks as well as the street. The creativity in the construction of these rideable giants was remarkable.
Rick Hunter, fillet brazer extrodinaire takes a look at the assembled bikes. Most builders brought 'cross bikes or big-tire road bikes as the route involved about 1/2 hour of dirt road.
This behemoth spouted flames out of the three torches on top....no doubt, this machine was constructed for 'Burning Man'. As you can see, hundereds of folks were there to see the bikes, meet the builders and ride in a tiny portable velodrome, the 'whiskey cone'. I think that this was better than any bike show I've ever been to-but then, it wasn't a bike show....it was a party.

S/S nscandium 'cross frame

Something is up with my poor old camera so two of these photos are abnormally dark. If you click on them you'll get the larger image which might actually show something. This frame was built for an Easton employee who had a personal stash of sample tubes. These are not currently something I can buy but maybe some day there will be a pallet of tubes of this style coming my way from the far east. The frame has sliding Ahrens dropouts and is all scandium except for the seat tube. It has a specially profiled top tube with a flat area on the underside for more comfort when shouldering. Funny, I thought that cyclocross was all about discomfort......silly me.

Working too much to blog...

Hard work pays off some times. Here's the result of a couple of weeks of real focused grinding work in the salt mines. Six scandium frames will be in boxes tomorrow off to the heat treater along with a repaired team bike. These frames along with numerous repairs have made a September that really ran me down. I don't know how I'll have anything left to race cyclocross on Sundays but really, my job is to make fast bikes-not make my bike fast.....just the same, I'll still try !

Halfway there

After spending the morning prepping frames and driving all over town doing errands I was still able to get this front triangle done after lunch. The rest will have to wait a couple of days as tomorrow is my birthday and I'm shutting the shop. I hope when the door closes I'm really gone. I'm so hell bent on getting things done in the shop I think I might have forgotten how to do anything else.

Crazy busy this month

I'm pretty slammed this month and have not been able to photograph many of the frames going out to various points across the country. Broken team bikes, new team bikes, new anything bikes......I could be here 24-7 and still not keep up. At least now the broken team bikes are all fixed and bound for the heat treater .( Note the red one in the photo with a new front triangle..) To answer the obvious questions, # 1. Yes, aluminum and sandium frames can be repaired and re-heat treated for more seasons of abuse.# 2, yes, team bikes can and do break after many races and pounding rides. # 3, How long does the typical scandium 'cross frame last ? That's up to you....ride it like a BMX bike and you'll be lucky to get two seasons out of it. Ride it like and old man ( Me.......26th in the Nationals.....not bad, actually-just not noteable) and you'll be on season 6 on your frame with a big smile. #4 How do they fail ? Typical failures : Cracked chainstay , fatigue cracks near welds in the front end. These frames don't break in half catastrophically unless you don't pay attention to weird noises , and or front-end riding characteristics. The frame will warn you when it is ailing. Essentially, race bikes are just that-made to go fast, not made to wind up being handed down to your grandchildren. ....Yeah, I'm pretty burnt out from the repairs but happy that the bikes will be back out on the circuit getting the same beating as always.

Disc Brake 'cross frame and fork

This frame will be able to be thrashed on the trails, take racks for light touring and maybe get abused in the occasional 'cross race. This is a lot of bike in one package.