Where have I been, you may ask.....

Howdy from Ashland, Oregon. I have been up here teaching at United Bicycle Institute for the last two weeks. I am a visiting instructor for the first time and I have the job of teaching a tig-welding framebuilding class to eight students, almost all of them with no welding exoerience at all. In two weeks they learn to weld and construct a complete bicycle frame...it's a tall order but the school can claim nearly 100% success in achieving this. United is perhaps the best place on earth to learn bicycle mechanics and/or framebuilding and I am privaleged to be allowed to be an instructor here. I'll put up photos of the experience soon. Looks like I'll be back next year if all goes well.....it will delay some of your frames a couple of weeks but it is something that will help the new builders coming up and help me to be better at what I do in my own shop. I have probably learned more in the last two weeks than in the last year about streamlining my building procedure so this has been time well spent and all future Rock Lobster customers will benefit from what I have learned here at UBI.

the fleet is done

Kansas city, here they come, to be ridden fixed in the dirt. These three frames have no brake mounts of any kind as it will be all in the legs for the riders of these steel chariots of pain.
I had to do a lot of 'manipulation' to the stays....i.e. bending and crimping to get the desired crankset and tire room. This project truly shows what a custom bike is-something that you can't find from the big companies. Bikes like this are very minimalist in appearence but there are a lot of little details that might go un noticed by anyone except the owners.

slidin' in steel.

Here's a single/geared disc only mtn. bike frame in progress. It's old style in some aspects , mainly the tubing and the fact it will have a rigid fork. The sliders are definitely new style and the disc only aspect is not something one would see back in the fully rigid mtb days. This is one of four mtb frames iIwill be building before I leave to teach at UBI later this month.