Thursday, January 31, 2008

Finally!


Earl Boykins is back in the NBA!

Sorry to interrupt the usual bicycle blogging, but I'm ecstatic - Earl was my favorite Denver player (back when they didn't have the league's 3rd highest payroll - what a waste) and I was really bummed when he didn't have a contract this season. I doubt there are going to be a lot of Bobcats games on national TV for me to see, but that's ok.

In other news, I saw someone I think was Robyn Erbesfield at the Spot tonight! She's like 45 or 50 but DAMN can she still pull down!

A few more...


Doug's frame is almost done, here are a few more pictures (mostly for Doug, but I figured others might be vaguely interested).

The frame uses a 38mm 9/6/9mm butted downtube, ovalized out to 42x34mm at the BB shell for a little extra stiffness. Seat tube is a 31.8mm straightgauge 4130 tube, and the toptube is 32mm 8/5/8. Pretty beefy all-around - it's a huge frame. But it's still reasonably light at a little under 7 pounds with all the hardware (but no shock).

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Couple shots of Doug's 69er


Believe it or not, this is only the second 69er (or 96er, or whatever your favorite name is) I've done. A lot of people start out asking for them, but then change their minds. No idea why. I've been on the record as being not such a huge fan of the whole concept, but I certainly have no problem building them - what's right for me might not be for you. I think they would kick ass in, say, New England, or maybe the Midwest. Here in the Rockies, we tend to have a lot fewer tight turns and a lot more straight/rocky/fast stuff that rewards a big fat 29" wheel both front and rear.

In any case, random pictures. It's a HUGE (26.5" toptube) 69er full suspension bike, 4" travel front and rear. I've been welding without the pulser lately, I think the bead ends up a little smoother that way. Not that it's bad with the pulser on - but sometimes you like to switch things up a little.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

This one's for you, Dennis!


*Finally* got everything put together. Check her out! 4" of sweet 29er full suspension, in an awesome burnt orange.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Sheri's new frame (plus Snickers) and some basic 29" rules

I just got (mostly) done with this very small (21.5" toptube) frame for Sheri, and thought I'd post up a picture for her. Special bonus: Snickers, looking confused, poses as well.

The frame also reminded me that I need to make some things clear about who will, and won't, fit well on 29ers. There are a couple of hard and fast measurements you can take to quickly determine how feasible a 29er is for you:

-Measure your cockpit length (huh, huh, he said...). This is easy - just take a measuring tape or long ruler and measure from the center of where your stem clamps to the handlebar back to the center of the seat rails, level with the ground. If your bars are higher or lower than your seat, measure to where the saddle clamp *would* be if they were pefectly level. If this number is less than about 24.5", you can probably forget about riding a 29er (though small feet or short femurs that necesitate a steep seat tube angle can help a bit). Think about a 650b or 26" bike.

-Measure your handlebar height, from the ground to the grips. If this number is <36" or so, you won't fit on a suspension corrected 29" bike easily. Not a problem, obviously, if you want to go rigid-specific - in that case, 34" is the magic number.

-Measure your inseam. Standover *can* be a problem for smaller folks, though the first two problems already mentioned are usually bigger hurdles. Honestly, people are a little too hung up on standover - you will never, ever crash such that you land on the toptube, and if you do, a lower toptube just means you'll have farther to fall onto it. If you can mount and dismount the bike comfortably, you're good to go. That said, if you've got a 28" or shorter inseam, a 29er may not be a great idea for you unless it's non-suspension corrected.

Monday, January 21, 2008

It's just not right...


So I have some space heaters in the shop that can warm things up by 15-20 degrees, at best. Let's call it 15. So if it's a really bitter cold 20 degrees here in Boulder (the average high temp on any given day is January is 46), I can still work ok.

I leave it to you to decide how much work I got done today, and approximately what the temperature was in there. Good lord.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

2 posts in one day? AKA "Tardpants"


Check out this thread on the framebuilder's email list, I dare you:
The Great Tardpants Thread.

Seriously, who says stuff like that? A 5 year old?

On the plus side, wouldn't it be rad to name a bike model the Tardpants? I'm thinking, like, gothic lettering like you'd see on a lowrider. If I had a nice ridiculous gothic font available, maybe I'd make some stickers...

Pretty and Strong

Built a fork for Margo over at Luna Cycles a few months ago, and now I finally saw a picture of the finished product. Pretty sweet, check it out! I especially like the smart setup on this bike - comfy saddle, nice non-back splintering flat bars sitting up high, solid disc brakes - a really sensible comfy bike for riding anywhere on, whether for fun or to commute.

I see WAY too many people out on the bike paths in Boulder struggling along on their Lance-approved Madones and C50s who really need a hybrid, because they'll never, ever want to ride in the drops, and they're never, ever going to do a race. Flat bar road bikes make a ton of sense for a lot of people, but for some reason they're never popular. I'm a fan, though. Give me a bike that's comfortable and slow any day over a bike that's uncomfortable and fast - though of course, the whole point of what I do is to provide both.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Friday show and tell: Inside of a head tube

This was the best picture I could take, thanks to the fact that the flash on my camera is pretty far from the lens. But you can basically see what's going on - there is nice, even penetration from the weld bead on the inside of the head tube. You might also notice that the bead is shiny and silvery, which is due to the fact that I pump argon (which is inert, if you remember your high school chemistry) inside the frame while I weld it.

This doesn't make the weld stronger, per se, but it eliminates the oxidized crap you'd otherwise find on the inside of the weld (that crap can create stress risers that reduce the longevity of the joint) and the big plus is that it saves a TON of wear and tear on my reaming/facing/chasing tools - things don't distort as much, and instead of hardened, oxidized crud on the inside of the head tube (or bottom bracket, or seat tube) that has to be reamed out, I have a nice smooth weld bead and almost no need for reaming. I've probably done 300 frames on my current set of reamers and taps without sharpening them once. That's a HUGE savings, especially given that the argon to backpurge the frame only costs a couple of bucks (I run the backpurge at 5cfh).

Monday, January 14, 2008

I don't just build bikes...

Several years ago, Sarah and I were at a loss for what to do for my dad for a gift at Christmas. I'm not big on buying stuff for people, but I already had built him a bike (and anything else made of metal I could think of) so we had to get creative. The Pojaque river runs behind his house in New Mexico, and it's really hard to find a place to cross to get back into the Barrancas (fingery dirt mesas) on the other side, which is a bummer because it's a great place to go run, or walk the dogs.

In any case, the conundrum resulted in this mighty bridge. It's a 2x4 with a chain holding it bowed, and a rope so that you can drop it to the other side under some semblance of control. It works great, and I think it's the best Christmas present we've ever given.

I would have posted it sooner, but the pic was on my sister's camera (that's her on the bridge) and she didn't get around to sending it until today.

Custom bridges start at $25, plus I get to raid your fridge just like at my dad's place.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Saturday morning news

Sarah decided it was time for me to have a haircut. Since I'm a huge geek, I wanted to see how much faster I'd be. Here's the answer - I lost 14 grams! Olympics, here I come!

In other news, I also built another stem yesterday. I think it came out really nicely - 31.8mm clamp, 15 degree drop, nice and beefy for my DH bike. Shiggy provided the reamed out rack mounts that I used as pinchbolts. I'll try to post another pic when I eventually get around to having it powdercoated.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Ventana front triangle with a 24" effective toptube, airline legal 26x26x10 S&S travel case. Brilliant. Thanks to Ruben for the idea - now I wish I'd built myself one of these instead of my S&S hardtail.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Shiny, pretty...


Normally this blog is concerned more with nitty-gritty details of cutting up and welding together metal, but today we'll take a break from that and bask in this lovely colored shiny object. Neat pumpkiny color. Too bad we missed Halloween...

Expect a few more pictures once I have the shock and such mounted up.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

You know you've arrived...


...when you do your first tea-ball repair job. Not for the faint of heart, folks. This fine item is worth at least $0.99 at Bed Bath and Beyond, and could have been ruined with one slip of the torch - but with a mere 1 minute of steely-eyed work, I was able to repair it and earn the gratitude of the lovely Sarah. Which is worth even more than $0.99. I think.

And please, don't even ask about tea-ball repair prices. If you have to ask, you certainly can't afford it. Just keep swilling your bagged tea, you filthy wretch. Pfah, I'd sooner drink turpentine than Celestial Seasonings!

Coming soon: dropouts with integrated tea-balls. Beer openers are SO 2007. The cool kids of 2008 will be brewing tea on the trail - just stick a mug of boiling water under your dropout, steep, and sip, pinky extended of course...

Monday, January 07, 2008

Reynolds 953 - second attempt


Some of you may remember my old 953 blog - you'll notice that it hasn't been updated since November of 2006. There are a couple of reasons for that, first that the first frame had some wicked seat tube and bottom bracket distortion issues (to the point that I couldn't get a BB in without almost wrecking a set of taps to re-thread the BB) and second that Reynolds changed their recommendations on joining the tubes after I'd already built half a frame (you'll need to read through the whole thread to see why I was upset). Needless to say, given that I was out over $600, I wasn't too pleased, so I sold off the remaining tubes and gave it up as a waste of money and time.

Now after more than a year has passed, Reynolds somehow got around to reading about m y griping. I guess 953 isn't exactly taking over the framebuilding world right now, for obvious reasons, but in any case, they made me a very nice cheap offer for some (aged) tubes to try the whole deal again. Hopefully this time I'll be impressed, and my yacking on the world wide web will convince other fools to jump onto the 953 bandwagon. Well, ok, why not.

This time around, I'm making some changes:
1: No more stainless fancy bottom brackets. I'm using my good old 4130 ones from Paragon. Yes, they can rust. No, I don't care. I've never managed to rust out a bike enough to worry about it, and I see no reason to use a shell that I'm going to have a ton of trouble with (and pay a lot for) when the 4130 ones work perfectly.
2: Sleeve the ST before joining it (thus hopefully preventing too much distortion). I'll probably make the shim/sleeve out of 4130 as well, because dealing with stainless on the lathe sucks. What's that? I'll have to paint the frame? Yup. Not a problem for me. It'll get powdercoated just like anything else. I can deal with 100 grams of powdercoat.

I'm still planning on doing a non-suspension corrected 29er singlespeed, so I'll use my usual Paragon SL slider dropouts and such. It'll *probably* be the first actual 953 mountain bike on earth, though Bob Brown has done one that might as well be a mountain bike (it's a 'cross bike with loads of tire clearance) already.

Latest word on other silly projects:
-Belt drive is still on hold until Spot comes up with a belt and sprocket thingies for me. Last word I heard was February. Then again, I've heard "just another month now" for a while. My guess? There are still unresolved problems with the whole system. Spot made a HUGE impression with these at Interbike, from what I've read, so I don't see why they wouldn't be selling them now if they were ready for primetime.
-Ski bike. On hold as well. Probably to be canceled because Sarah and I are going to try to scrounge up some backcountry ski stuff and just go regular old skiing. I like the idea of skinning up more than skiing back down, honestly (my knees are pretty bad ) but I'm sure it'll be fun both ways.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Look what I made...

Yup, it's a stem. This isn't the first stem I've done, but it's (arguably) the first decent one, since I first built a few stems about 4 years ago, had mediocre results, and gave up to build more frames and forks. This one came out well, though, and I'm pretty proud of it. I'm of two minds about stems like this. On the one hand, they look spiffy with a matching steel frame and fork, and they're definitely capable of providing a bit more peace of mind than a lot of the <100g carbon/aluminum stems that are out there. On the other hand, they're a reasonable amount of work (small stuff is a pain to make solid and straight) and they're not exactly ultralight - the one pictured is 105mm long and weighs close to 180 grams. The single-bolt bar clamp makes using a carbon bar a big no-no, too, which is likewise going to be unpopular with the weight geeks. The bottom line there is that to make it worth my while to build them, I'd have to charge something like $125-175 (I'd have to build some more and time myself to see for sure). Maybe that's worth it to some folks - I'm honestly curious, so please comment if you've got a strong opinion either way.

The longevity angle is appealing to me (in fact, thinking about what would happen if a stem broke while I built this one made me decide to get rid of my 5 year old Ritchey stem ASAP), and I'll definitely do some more to try out, but for "conventional" stems (ie, 60-130mm long, standard clamp sizes, rise from zero to 20 degrees or so) there are a lot of mass-manufactured stems that would seem to win the bang-for-buck competition. Then again, not everything is about being cheap. If I can make you a stem that's solid and safe to ride for 30 years, maybe in the long run it's worth the extra grams and dollars.

Expect to see some more stem experiments (next up is an oversized and removeable clamp version) and if things go well, I'll probably start offering them as an option in a few months.