Thursday, January 29, 2009

I have discovered the world's worst hangover cure


Thanks to Aaron the ethanol pusher and his comfortable house, I woke up this morning with a heck of a hangover. And I think I've discovered the absolute worst way to get rid of one, aside from ritual suicide or drowning.

That's right, I rode the trainer in the kitchen and watched "Manhattan Project" for two hours. I think the splitting headache I developed from the movie canceled out the one I had from the hangover.

Ye gods, what an awful film - and I remember liking it a lot when I was about 12. Favorite scene: at the national science fair, the nerdy character who only appears to be mocked as comic relief is standing in front of his geeky, lame presentation: "Access to All Human Knowledge through Computers" (remember, this is the mid 80s). Yeah, jeez, what an idiot. Computers? People exchanging information through *computers*!? That's never gonna catch on.

Ashish's frame, random thoughts

First off, for Ashish, here are a couple of random shots of your frame, 90% done (still needs disc tab, bridges, brazeons, etc). I've slightly modified the bender, and the seatstays took much less time (like, um, about 4 hours less) and came out quite nicely. Practice makes perfect, as always. It's amazing to me that 5 years into building bikes I still come up with better ways of doing things almost every time I build something. And when I talk to other folks who build frames, there's almost always a forehead-slapping, "why didn't I think of that" moment when I see how they do something - and likewise, people see the way I do things and pick up new ideas.


It will be interesting to see how that kind of cooperation holds up when frame builders start running out of work (which, if you read my previous post, I think is already happening). NAHBS, by all reports, has been quite the love-fest in years past - I really hope the gloom and doom doesn't lead to backstabbing as the pool of potential frame customers shrinks.

It wouldn't be a bad thing, IMO, to thin the herd a bit at this point, though. I'd probably argue that I wasn't really prepared fully when I started selling frames (as a matter of fact, I never *intended* to sell them at all, but I got caught up in the 29er/MTBR tsunami and was sort of in the right place at the right time - people pretty much were beating down my door wanting 29ers), but some of the stuff I see online (there are several framebuilder's forums and email lists/newsgroups out there) is fairly shocking. There are people who literally have built one frame who are hanging out a shingle and charging $1500 - and then posting questions online about how to do VERY basic stuff. I won't shed a single tear to see those folks out of "business" - and on the plus side, if you're interested in framebuilding as a hobby, I think there will be some *smoking* deals on fixtures and tools in 2009.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Whither the custom bike industry?


Talking to friends (both pro and non) in the framebuilding world, it's clear that orders and interest are way, way down (and personally, I can report that I've never had a slower January for orders, given that I've had zero so far). This probably has something to do with stunning declines in house prices and massive layoffs and banner headlines reporting them, but I digress. People aren't as flush with easy cash as they were, and I understand that putting food on the table comes before bike purchases, let alone *custom* bike purchases.

The question then becomes - what will happen to the custom bike "industry" in a true economic downturn? There's no question that a custom bike is a frivolous item for most people (heck, any high end mountain bike is frivolous!) Probably 80-90% of the custom builders currently in business started building in the last 10 years or so (myself included) and have never experienced truly difficult economic times. I have a feeling that half, if not more, of these folks (many of them my good friends) will be out of of business in 2009.

Was there a "bubble" in the framebuilding world? Probably. An awful lot of people decided to do this for a living who probably shouldn't have (many of them refinancing houses or taking out loans to pay startup costs), and the market is pretty darn saturated. I'm guessing the folks who are living frame to frame and scrimping by (this is a LOT of framebuilders, including many who charge $2000+ for a frame) will be the first to go, but I wouldn't be surprised to see almost all the custom bike businesses in the US go belly up in the next 2 years or so.

There will be carnage among the big box bike manufacturers as well, I predict. Most people don't need a new Madone every year, but many of them have been buying one anyway. That's probably over for a while, even with Lance back to pump up sales.

For myself, even if I run out of work to do, I'll continue building as jobs pop up, simply because my overhead is essentially zero (I work out of a large garage/shop at my house) - so even a bike or so a month (rather than 4 or 5) is plenty to make it worthwhile. So all you WW owners out there - don't worry, I'm not going anywhere.

I'm also hopeful that people will start wanting to hang on to their bikes for longer, and hence will see it as worthwhile to have them repaired. I've done several repairs of what most folks would consider beater bikes lately (mid 90s vintage Rockhopper type bikes). But honestly, if you can pay $50 to replace a broken dropout and keep your nice commuting bike running for another decade, I think it's worthwhile. Of course, fancier bikes are worth fixing too, and people will keep riding (and breaking) stuff no matter how bad the economy gets, I think.

Long story short, I'm not too proud to go work at the bagel shop if I have to, but I think that 5 years down the road, I'll still be building custom bikes and hopefully putting big smiles on the faces of the riders. Only time will tell.

Monday, January 26, 2009

It's 4 freakin' degrees!

Or, for you centigrade types, NEGATIVE 15.

I bet you can guess how much work I get done when the temp graph from NCAR looks like this:



Where am I living, Fargo? For crying out loud!

I wanna go back to Tucson.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Making Seitan


By (sort of) popular request (all two of you):

Sarah's "Down with Meat, Down with Freedom" hippie Seitan

Step 1: Purchase some wheat gluten. We get ours from Vitamin Cottage (a health food store chain) for about $2/pound. A pound of gluten will make about 2 pounds of seitan (which is a lot).

Step 2: Take 1 cup of gluten, add 3/4c of vegetable broth and 2 TBSP of soy sauce, and mix in a bowl. You'll need to quickly knead the ball of gloppy dough quickly, 10-15 times.

Step 3: Let the dough rest for 5 minutes, then give it a few more kneads. Break it up into 3 or 4 pieces.

Step 4: Put the dough pieces in more veggie broth, with a few chunks of raw onion, crushed garlic, and slices of fresh ginger (or whatever other flavorings you'd like) and bring to a boil, then simmer for 1 hour, covered.

Boom!

You're done. You can eat it right away, refrigerate it for a few days, or freeze it indefinitely (it thaws nicely and doesn't lose any texture or flavor to speak of). Serve it to your hacky-sack friends at the NORML meeting next week.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Wing night!

Well, ok, so I'm one of those America-hating commies who doesn't eat meat and rides a bike to the farmer's market to pick up organic patchouli and play hacky-sack. Or something like that. So I'm not really having wings. I'm having seitan wings. But as most people know, the chicken is not the important part of wings. The *sauce*, man, the sauce!



Thus, Sarah's nuclear wing sauce recipe (yes, it's really that color)

2c dry cayenne peppers (or 3-4 TBSP powder)
1/2c H20
1/3c chopped onion
6 big cloves to 1 head of garlic, crushed (adjust according to your or your SO's garlic tolerance, and whether you feel like you might score that evening)
1/3c canned tomatoes
1c white vinegar
1 stick butter
1 bottle of "Louisiana" hot sauce (surprisingly easy to find)
1/2 lemon worth of lemon juice
1 tsp honey or agave nectar
1/4c ketchup

Roast the peppers in a pan. Run a fan, or risk tearing up and coughing uncontrollably. Don't burn them. Add enough water to cover the peppers and boil for 5 minutes or so.

Drain the water, put the peppers in the blender with the water, vinegar, and a teaspoon of salt. Blend the bastards.

Cook the butter in the pan until it's all melted. Add the onion, garlic, tomato, and hot sauce. Cook for 5 min or so, then add the peppers and cook for 2 more minutes. Pour everything in the blender and blend again, add all the remaining ingredients, and pour back into the pan. Simmer for 20 minutes.



Now get some fine beers (Avery Hog Heaven or Rascal would be fine choices) and go nuts with chicken, or seitan (which is really good - seriously, especially if you make it yourself), or whatever.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

F*^%ing seatstays!

So I spent most of the day making some S-bend stays for Dan's frame. And I learned several nice lessons:

-Making S-bends with enough tire clearance (in this case, we wanted 70mm minimum) for small 29er frames (this one has a 15" seat tube) is a PAIN. In the end, the stays had to end up being only very subtle in their s-bendiness. I might need to make a tighter radius bending mandrel for this sort of situation - the 6" radius wasn't tight enough to allow both bends AND sufficient tire clearance. Maybe I'll do a 5" or 4.5" radius mandrel sometime soon.


-Laying the stays on a flat surface (table) and letting the bent portion hang off is an easy way to assess if the bends are symmetrical. Of course, they're never going to be *exactly* the same, but this method is good enough, as long as you've got a decent eye for detail. Thanks to years of messing with bikes, I do at this point.

-The bender itself needs some work. The mandrels are great (though Jason was right - they have started to warp slightly on the back side - though I don't think this will end up being a problem) but the cradles/spine probably needs to be rebuilt/rethought. They tend to hang up, and the cradle holders are starting to bend from the force of bending the tubes. Not so good, especially if I want to bend beefier stays (these were just 16x.7mm cromoly ones, fairly strong, but nothing crazy). I need to make some cradles that are shorter (they hit the mandrel when trying to do tight bends) and possibly also that fit the radius of the tube better.


Long story short, I spent like 4 or 5 hours on arguably the least important structural portion of the frame today, all in the process of trying to get a spiffy look. What have I become?

The frame is freakin' sweet, though, especially now that it's *finally* done.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Slow week for posting...and another sweet deal for 650b fans

Sorry about that, guys. I've been spending all my time packing and shipping those d*&% neo-moto 650b tires... I really didn't anticipate how fast they would get snapped up and had to spend a bunch of time yesterday playing mailman.

There are worse fates, though. I don't have much too riveting on the slate this week - finishing up a 29er frame for Dan and getting Mike's fork done (I did all the mitering at about 9pm last night).

Also complicating matters is the unbelieveable weather - it was 71 degrees yesterday! I strongly believe that if you're a framebuilder, and you don't take advantage of January weather like that to get a ride in, then you really should find another job, because you don't actually love bikes.

In lieu of saying something interesting (I can't even think of a good recipe to post!) here's some more crap you might be interested in buying from me:
-105 10-speed front derailleur (double), brand new in the baggie. $20 shipped.
-DT Swiss EX200 rear shock, 190mm eye to eye, 50mm travel, sick light and nice. Brand new. $150 shipped, please make it go away.

-650b FS frame that I messed up (story follows in a moment).
-22" effective toptube, 14" seat tube (center to center)
-70.5 HT and 73.5 ST angles, 4" travel front and rear.
-13.25" (without sag) BB height, 43.5cm chainstays.
-Never ridden or even built up.
-Yours for only $1300 (these normally run $1900) - plus you get the DT shock listed above for free (or if you prefer a Fox RLC, you can get that included instead). Best of all, it comes in any color you want!

Full warranty, of course, for the purchaser.


So what's the catch? There are a couple of them.

0. The sweet Julie Furtado saddle is not included. Julie is mine, all mine.

1. This frame is designed (well, unintentionally) for a 1x9 or internally geared hub setup. You CANNOT run a front derailleur, as the pivot location (I wanted it higher than normal for a more rearward axle path at the beginning of the stroke) is high enough that the derailleur will hit the chainstay no matter what. So it's 1x9 or Rohloff only. If you want, I will be happy to add an ISCG so that you can run a Hammerschmidt crank at no additional charge.

2. I messed up and used the wrong shock length when I was putting on the shock mount, so that needs to be removed and replaced with the correct placement. I will endeavor to make that repair totally invisible, but it's possible that there will be very slight evidence of the old shock mount being removed after the new paint job.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Neo-Moto 650b tires for sale!


$25 each (plus $5 for shipping) or $52 for a pair, shipping included in the continental US. Sweet deal on a closeout from one of my distibutors - this is a great all-around 650b tire for you medium-size wheel fans out there.

No need to be a WW frame owner to order, just paypal me (waltworks@gmail.com) or email if you have questions. Limited quantities available, I'll sell 'em until they're gone.


EDIT: As of 11pm mountain time, they are sold out. In fact, I have a few payments from folks who may be out of luck. I will assess the stockpile in the morning and let you guys know (and refund any payments needed). Once again: THEY ARE GONE.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Training with bacteria


As some of you may know, I have a ludicrously unlikely plan to break the Winter Park hillclimb record this summer.

I was uncertain that I had the mental fortitude or physical talents needed for such a goal, but fate is already smiling on me in 2009.

That's right, I've got food poisoning. Last time this happened I lost 3 pounds and didn't eat for 36 hours. I'll be lean and fit before you know it! I've never been so convinced that my intestinal flora are my best allies - and I've gotta give a nod to the person or persons who didn't wash their hands before preparing my calzone last night, too.

This is a team effort, people.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

More bender stuff


I spent some of my time in Tucson (and yes, I'm back now) making some more bending forms with the help of my pal Erik (who has the super-dope woodshop). I had to do the last bit (cutting the proper size/radius grooves) on the mill, though, and that's one of the things I managed to get done today.

Getting back into the swing of things over the next few days. I'm mostly caught up on email and should be shipping out a whole load of crap tomorrow or Monday as well. Feel free to email or call if you need to talk to me.

RIP, LX

Why?

For god's sake, why?!?

Shimano LX is no longer (yes, I know, many of you geeks knew this months ago) being produced, as of the 2009 model year, at least not for mountain bikes. Now it's a "trekking" grouppo. It has been "replaced" by a group called "SLX" which is oriented towards people who throw themselves off of things on bikes (note that I have nothing against these people and in fact am one of them at times) and looks as if it was designed by someone who watched X-men 2 a few too many times.


Here's the thing - SLX is 25% (give or take a few bucks) more expensive and 10% heavier (at least if the always-dubious claims can be believed) than the old LX group, which was really no slouch in the strength department. Shimano says the SLX crank, for example, is *twice* as strong as XT. Really! Jeez, it's a good thing they did that, because I'm getting really tired of breaking XT crankarms!

The serious hucking crowd runs either Saint/high end tomfoolery, or old STX-RC parts they found in a bin in their parents' garage. We don't need another kinda-heavy, kinda-beefy "midrange" group - and I really think an inexpensive XC-oriented mountain bike group is a good thing to have in the lineup. XT is expensive, for crying out loud!

Also, I miss the old LX crankset - which was identical to the XT crank, but half the price, with steel chainring bolts rather than aluminum being the main difference. $5 worth of chainring bolts later, you had an XT crank! Sweet! Fortunately, the LX technology (ie, hollow crankarm, integrated spindle and external BB) has made it down to the Deore level now - so that's probably what I'll be rocking (or running) when my current LX cranks die. I hear they're godawful heavy, though.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

I'm an idiot

I've gotten several irate emails from people who ordered T-shirts and never received them. Here's the story:
-I'm terrible with HTML, so I copied/pasted the code for the shirt purchasing from an older file and modified it with a new picture and correct price and such.
-I neglected to figure out that the email address on the code was an old one that I no longer use.

So if you ordered a shirt and never got it, check your paypal account. It will probably list the payment as "unclaimed". Cancel that payment, then use the newly-fixed link on the t-shirt page to re-order the shirt. The payment should go to waltworks at gmail.com.

My apologies for the screwup.

Monday, January 05, 2009

Go West, young (sort of) man!

I'm off to Tucson for riding, sun, suds, more riding, food, suds, etc.


I'll leave y'all with a neat shot of a pretty unique color that just got back from the PC - BR24 or something. It's supposed to be a bronze metallic, but it's more like a light-colored *leather* thing. Weird, but very cool.

I'll take the camera and try to get some action shots in the desert. I will be occasionally checking email, but if it's not important, please don't expect a reply until I'm back.

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Love/hate

No bicycle content today, geeks. I will throw you a bone, though: today I made the world's ugliest ISCG mount. Luckily it will be behind a chainring and not particularly visible.

Recent things I've liked a lot:

Hot Dog...the Movie. Rusty thinks he is featured in a few of the powder skiing scenes in this movie, and it's a hilarious 80's ski/nudity comedy. Worth checking out, though I'll warn the fellas out there that the nudity really drops off after the first 45 minutes.

Cowboy Bebop. I'm not normally an anime fan, but this noirish, tongue-in cheeky one is great.

Love in the time of Cholera (the book). I always was intimidated by Gabriel Garcia Marquez' reputation, and by my friends who reported futile efforts to read A Hundred Years of Solitude but this book is fantastic - a snapshot in time of turn of the century central America.

Ventus. Kurt Schroeder is a genius. This reminded me a lot of Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, in a very good way.

The Spot. I think I would go crazy if I didn't have my favorite bouldering gym just a 5 minute ride from the house.

Mountain Project. I love wasting time looking at old routes I put up, and I see the potential for this to be the king of online climbing guidebooks. All you need at the crag is your Iphone...

Stuff that sucked:


Maze. This is the reason I generally don't like Anime. I don't know what made Sarah order it from Netflix.


Boulder Dog Regulations. They make you pay $15 for an "offleash" tag, but never bother to enforce any of the actual rules about how dogs have to behave. Given that I've spent considerable effort and money training Pele, paying that money for nothing kinda sticks in my craw when I see rangers give endless warnings to dog owners whose dogs are completely out of control. Or when I almost run over someone's dog that doesn't understand bikes and shouldn't be anywhere near singletrack.

Off to Tucson on Tuesday morning. I may or may not (probably not) post anything until I get back on Jan. 14th.

Friday, January 02, 2009

...the rest of the story

This will be my last long post before going on vacation (Jan. 6th-14th, guys) so enjoy!

I finished up Marcus' 36er frame today. It was an interesting process for a number of reasons - the wheel size demanded quite a lot of thinking on both of our parts about how to do the geometry, and fabricating some of the frame members was fairly unusual (and hence difficult) as well. I think it came out very nice (it's only 6 pounds, which is amazing to me) and I hope it'll ride really well too. Big thanks to Ben Witt for geometry ideas, too.

First off: check out the mitering drawing. I have a set of Excel macros that I use to figure out miter lengths and angles normally, but that program is set up to have the seat tube meet the BB shell - this frame has the seat tube offset 6" forward of that.

I thought about doing some new macros, but decided I trusted good old pencil/paper more.


With that out of the way, I started building the front triangle. Here's an early shot of the main structural members all in place.


Downtube was welded to the BB shell, and then partially welded to the head tube, and then I compound mitered the TT at the head tube end. The downtube is a 1.5"x.035" 4130 chunk (there are no commercially made butted tubes long enough) and the toptube is a 1.375"x1/.7/1mm butted Supertherm jobbie that is arguably overkill. But the only way to use a butted tube (the toptube is very short due to the weird seat tube placement) and weld in a brace safely was to do it this way. So while it's way stronger than it needs to be, it's also lighter than the other option, which would be a .035" straightgauge tube.

Here's the compound HT/TT/DT miter. The DT is partially welded in (where it'll be covered by the toptube) before the toptube is put in to ensure maximum joint strength.


You might note that there's a scribed line/cut in the head tube - that's a solution to a problem I ran into with my Anvil frame fixture. Basically, the head tube portion of the fixture has to be adjusted to a different height depending on what length fork and bottom bracket height you're building. In this case, that height was 30mm taller than the fixture can be adjusted to, so I had to leave the head tube too long and cut it most of the way with the lathe, so that I could easily cut it off with a hacksaw (and then face) afterwards. I also had to flip the dropout portion of the frame and chainstay fixtures backwards to make them long enough (this baby has 490mm chainstays!) To be fair to my pal Don who makes these excellent fixtures, I'm pretty sure this isn't something that comes up too often.

The seat tube uses 2 sleeves (one at the TT, one for the seatstays and TT/ST brace) which I made, as usual, from .058"x1.25" 4130 cromoly. I'm getting much better at this process at this point and it went quickly and smoothly. Marcus and I discussed how to orient them for maximum cool looks, too. Here's a picture of the toptube sleeve and toptube before I tacked them.


I welded everything up, of course, and here are some random shots of that.

Seat tube/toptube:


Seat tube/downtube:


Almost finished HT/DT/TT:


Finally, I tacked in the chainstays, and did some bending/dimpling of the seatstays. Tire clearance on this bike is *tight* - it's got 65mm of space for the 2.2" tire, but I had to go absolutely nuts with the bending and dimpling and tweaking to get everything to fit. It uses an 83mm BB shell, which helps a ton - if I did the equivalent with a 29er, it would have 400mm chainstays!

Here's a shot of the frame before finish welding the rear end:


That's all for tonight. I did do the bracing, but that's not exciting enough for me to spend any time on posting pictures. I will do an update when the bike is together and Marcus has some feedback on how she actually rides.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

The beast stirs...


Early birthday present, Marcus. Check it out.

And yes, guys, Marcus *did* skip several spots in line. He is a Boulder local and wanted this thing done in time for his birthday in mid-January (is that supposed to be hyphenated?) and I agreed. One time special offer birthday frame.

And yes, it will have 36" wheels. I will do a big wonky construction post with a bunch of pictures and text about the design in the next few days.