Pics from Martin!

The Austin greenbelt, baby! Thanks to Martin for the pics of his slack front/short rear 29er (click the link for geometry info if you're that kinda geek).

Fatbike...schmatbike!

Every once in a while you get just the right conditions for perfect snow riding on your normal mountain bike... and today was not really one of those days but Shoreline is still 95% rideable and 100% fun. I didn't see a soul on the trail in almost an hour of singletrack (amazing how much slower you go with 3" of snow) though I did see a few fatbike tracks.

My camera was not so happy in a blizzard, nor have my photography skills improved...but hopefully you get the idea.

Cool stuff from Dave

I've posted a few pics from this before, but here's the professionally written/edited story for those who like big long crazy bike adventures:

Oregon Coast Fatbike Adventures:

http://salsacycles.com/culture/guest_blog_synonyms_for_oregon_sand
http://adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/04/fatbiking-100-miles-along-the-oregon-coast/

Check it out!

Those curves are infectious...

Remember when if you wanted some curved tubes on a bike I would throw a big fit about how they didn't accomplish anything?

Yeah, y'all won on that one. And now you won on forks too - people have been asking me for years for curved fork blades but due to a combination of stubbornness and too much other stuff going on, I never got around to doing a fork blade bender. But I got a very strange request (for a fork with 125mm of offset!) that wasn't practical without bending the blades, and here we are.

Here's Mary's mountain/bikepack fork in the early stages of being built.

I know someone is going to ask so:
-There is no extra charge.
-This will only work with tapering/smaller diameter blades. I can't bend the big constant diameter ones safely for forks as the radius is just too small to do (at least for me) with larger diameter/thinner wall tubes.
-Yes, I can accomplish all the offset with the curve if you'd like unless you need a LOT of offset for some reason.

Finally...

1: Started David's frame (and finished the front end) after the holiday week from hell with sickness for everyone and me playing full time dad and full time nurse most of the time. Least productive bike building week ever? Probably.

Here's a bad picture - I think the white balance was screwed up on the camera.

2: Mountain bike season is finally over. Normally I would not celebrate this but the season usually ends around the start of November and at this point even I'm getting the jones to scrape the storage wax off the skis. I'm sure I'll be sorry I was rooting for winter to start when I'm out in the shop and the high is 23, though. 

Anderson Truck Trail

Thanks to Mike for the picture. Normally I would be impressed with a post-Thanksgiving ride with dry trails... but this is San Diego, where it's ALWAYS good riding weather. So a big raspberry to you, Mike - here we have PM2.5 levels that make it unhealthy to exercise. I hear Park City calling our names, I think.

Old style no-seat-tube-manipulation WW FS bike. Man, these look weird to me without bent seat tubes and tapered steerer forks now...

Sneak peak... Gal's 29+

Everything that can go wrong with assembling this bike has - spent almost an hour dealing with swapping the front axle after WI sent the wrong one, need to true up the rear wheel after some shipping tweakage, and I'm inexplicably (ok, explicably: distributor screwed up) missing one brake rotor. Ugh.

But it's gonna be wicked fun and I have permission to ride it around the block before I take it back apart and put it in a suitcase.