Thursday, August 25, 2011

Why Waltworks is like the Celtics

Check out this article by everyone's favorite/least favorite geek, Malcolm Gladwell, about owning an NBA team.

Now think about the "psychic value" of being a framebuilder... the money is a lot less, but in some ways, it's the same story for a lot of folks - loving bikes means they'll do it practically for free.

Just thought that was interesting. See y'all in 10 days or so!

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

First shot of Willie's fork


...along with a bunch of other forks. Normally I'm not much of a fan of the assembly-line system of building stuff, but I am all out of the steerer tube I use the most of the time (the excellent OXPLATMSRD-LT that I pestered True Temper into making 5 years ago), so I spent the day mitering things up. Not shown are the disc mounts and crown races, but those are all prepped and ready to go too - which means I will have a long day of welding ahead of me when I get back from Bend.

I'll probably do a few posts from Bend, and Sarah is going to be spending some of her time working on finishing writing (due November first!) her doctoral biochemistry thesis, so I'll also have some time to answer emails and do design work (and even order parts for folks).

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Now THAT is how you tour!


Lee is ready to stay hydrated.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

KVA - the followup (or the postmortem?)

Edited: I decided it wasn't particularly fair of me to say bad things about KVA's tubes, when my experience with them (or any stainless) is very limited. Suffice to say that Chris's cross (Kris Kross?) bike never saw the light of day; I built him an OX Platinum bike instead after having numerous problems with the KVA stuff, and I am not offering bikes made with any form of stainless tubing at this time. There are some great builders out there who work with it and do awesome stuff - if you're excited about that, I encourage you to contact one of them.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

My 15 minutes of fame...

The meeting was, as these things go, a big success. Only about 20 people turned out, but it was something like 18 mountain bikers and 2 grumpy NIMBYs, so for once we had the advantage of numbers.

Long story short, the Open Space Board of Trustees voted to recommend a bike-accessible trail on Anemone hill. This is a really big deal - kudos to everyone who showed up and made their voices heard.

As an aside, I got quoted in the Daily Camera article. And they took out all the "um" and "uh" so that I sound smart!

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Miguel's Race Report: Soggy Bottom 100

Why do we have a tendency to script events of our lives? We imagine how an event will occur and then play it out in our minds. Often we forget the details of what would actually take place and just focus on the end result of our script.

Today was a good example of a script that I had written for myself. The goal: win the Soggy Bottom Bike Race. It sounds simple to put these words on paper but in reality the task is much, much, much more difficult. The Soggy Bottom is a 101 mile bike race in Alaska. In actuality it is 108 miles because a section of the race on road is not tallied as part of the actual course distance. In addition I had never ridden the course, had no support crew, which is a huge disadvantage, and the weather could always be unpredictable, which would also favor the local racers.


Going into the first checkpoint (at the top of the first climb up Resurrection Pass) I was in first place but this part of the race does not require much more description than this. Long ago when I was a distance runner a wise man told me that the half marathon was the boy and the full marathon was the man. Needless to say I hadn't even reached the boy stage of the race; essentially the entire race was ahead of me.

On the first of three major downhills I literally took a turn for the worse. This wrong turn resulted in riding an additional three miles and losing about ten places. I basically watched them pass me as I rode in the opposite direction. One of the riders that I passed going the wrong way actually told me that I was going the right way, and this helped continue my misdirection. I was stopped by another first time Soggy Bottom racer from the Yukon who told me that I was going the wrong way. I was defeated. A hundred mile race is difficult enough to race well, let alone win, and here I was riding extra needless mileage when I was supposed to be saving all of my energy to race the actual course. I half heartedly started going the right way, the Yukon rider racing past me and I hobbled with my broken pride to the next checkpoint.

The checkpoint at mile 42 was where the race actually began. The first thing that I asked when rolling into the checkpoint was where the water was. All of the other riders in the race had support so I assume that this was the first time that the race staff had gotten this question. Slowly rolling over to the back of the pickup that served as an aid station I unscrewed my water bottles slowly so that the mud would not spill in and I began to fill up with water while shoving food down my throat. While doing this I heard someone say "where's the water?”



I knew that there was one other person out on course that did not have support - my reason for racing the Soggy Bottom had just rolled into the aid station. Chris and I used to call each other frequently but since he moved to Anchorage a year or so ago the phone calls became less frequent and the possibility to ring his doorbell was no longer available. As with all good friendships that are far apart the things that once held us close; the roadtrips, the epic mountain biking, and the summiting of peaks were now distant memories. But when I heard "where's the water" I smiled knowing that we were now in this together.

We topped off our water bottles and we agreed to work together. Just knowing that we were together I knew that the remaining two climbs and the remaining three descents would be much easier with my compadre. Almost immediately we began catching riders on the ascent back to Resurrection Pass. I could feel that our collective spirits had been raised and we had the possibility of working ourselves back into a podium position.

As I paced Chris up to the top of Resurrection the steady rain began to come down. The only thing keeping me warm at this point was the effort of going uphill. Near the top of the pass Chris took over being the lead rider on trail and I followed him to the next aid station. On this descent the mud on the trail was becoming a factor; our gears began to shift erratically, the braking became more difficult and the traction was becoming more and more slippery. We reached the aid station at mile 72 and as we were shoving food in our mouths people stopped to help us since they realized these mud covered racers before them had no outside support. While we were at the check point the fifth place racer sped off. He had a slight lead on us when we checked out a couple of minutes later.


Again I set the pace up the climb with the intention of getting our podium spots, but unfortunately we did not catch anyone during the climb up to Resurrection for the third and last time. We were at approximately mile 80 in the race and my body was cold, muddy and tired, fighting nausea, basically all around miserable. Even faced with this we knew that the last descent was the only obstacle left in our race.

We put on all the clothes that we had left in our pockets on our bodies and Chris took the lead down the last descent. We knew that this was it, our last chance to fly to that finish line and get a podium spot.

Around the first corner there was a rider with a flat tire - it was the rider who steered me in the wrong direction - the only racer deserving to have a flat tire at the side of the trail out of the entire field that was racing. Moving up to 4th and 5th position gave us new wings down this last descent; well maybe it was this and the red bull/coke that we had just slammed were giving us the winged effect.

We began to take huge risks on the downhill and in reality our frozen fingers could not have effectively stopped us anyway. The trail at this point was flowing like a creek and the mud was quickly sealing up my glasses, jumping into my mouth and flowing freely in the air around me. Chris still had his foot on the gas; we were flying down this descent. Being from Colorado I never ride in the mud, and the two wheel slides into corners were outside of my comfort zone, but seeing Chris do it gave me the belief that I could also do it too. Through the high velocity of our descent Chris told me that he was getting tunnel vision, and I realized that my vision was also starting to tunnel, so naturally I told him to keep pressing the pace.

We caught the 3rd place rider on the final uphill with a great individual effort from the both of us. The final miles of open road were now before us and we could draft off of each other - we knew that no one else would catch us from behind.

We crossed the finish line together, tied for third place. I hurried to the bathroom and I began to think about it while waiting in line: "why do we script the events of our lives before they happen?"

I know that I will always script things before they happen, it's because it’s in my nature and this will likely never change. This race, however, was the rare occasion when reality was better than the script that I had imagined. Although this race was just a day in my life the beginning of the script was written long ago. It evoked the decade of memories that we had shared when we lived in the same city. During this time was when our friendship was forged, the desert single tracks of Utah, the aspen and pine forest trails of Colorado and the rain soaked roads when we crossed the eastern United States together. It was based on two friends riding together, feeding off of each other and racing together - the perfect script.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Another chance - maybe, for more trails in Boulder

Time to get involved, folks.

-Click here to email the OSBT and City Council (it's a BMA page, you'll be asked to copy a list of email addresses into your mail client). The BMA has a nice list of talking points to use, but don't just copy and paste.

-Show up at Wednesday's OSBT meeting 8/17 at 6pm at the Utility Maintenance Center, 5050 Pearl Street. City council will meet on this topic on Tuesday, September 6th.

We got completely shut down on the west TSA, but IMO the OSBT is open to considering the Anemone Hill area for some trails (as of now, it's a bunch of rutted out social trails, homeless campsites, and garbage, so if we can't get a trail there, we can't get one anywhere...) So this is well worth your time, even if you're burned out/pissed off about the West TSA.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Sunday Quick Rant: Mismatched Rims Rule!

Folks, front wheels don't see nearly the kind of heavy loads or abuse that rear wheels do. It's not silly or weird to use different rims on the front and rear of your bike - for example, I run a Crest on the front, and an Arch on the rear on my XC bikes, because that way I don't have to build a new rear wheel every year, and I save some weight on the front wheel. And in my experience, front wheels are basically unkillable unless you run into a tree, or land sideways off a jump, and at that point, ALL front wheels taco, no matter what rim you're on.

You can of course use rims from different manufacturers, beefier rims, whatever. I sell *custom* frames, and with that, you can get a *custom* wheelset - that means mismatched rims are not a problem at all. If your friends give you too much crap about it, just take the stickers off, and nobody will ever know.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Moody Blues... I mean greens?

Obligatory self-deprecating intro: I once attended a Moody Blues concert. And thought it was cool. God I was lame when I was 15.

Sorry. The title was an attempt at a joke, since this bike's owner's surname is Moody. Apparently I am just as lame now.

On to the bike. This is a classic "squeeze a small person onto 29" wheels" XC setup:
-59cm/23.2" toptube
-96mm head tube/39cm seat tube/29" standover
-71/73 angles. I am not a believer in slacking back the head tube angle and steepening the seat tube angle to make a bike appear smaller in terms of effective toptube (size small production 29ers are notorious for this - many of them have LONGER wheelbases than the medium size). You end up with a bike that *fits*, but handles like crap with wheels way too far in front/behind the rider.
-Nice shortish 43cm chainstays, with a direct mount front derailleur mount (though there's no derailleur right now) and 2.3+ tire clearance.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Downhill Introspection

Chris emailed me with an interesting question about my old 29er downhill bike (if you don't remember it, you can read about it here):

How would I do a bike today for DH and 29" wheels differently than I did 4 years ago? Given how excited I was about the old one, I was surprised how much it seems totally obsolete to me now:


Hi Chris -

Some stuff I'd do differently:
-Design for 140-160mm fork (the current one is built for a 180, and it's WAY too much fork for me), with a tapered steerer (so 44ID head tube).
-ISCG mount (shoulda done that on mine, but was planning to run a front derailleur).
-Shorter chainstays (probably in the 43cm range?) for more manualing/wheelie fun (currently they're 45cm).
-6" or 6.5" rear travel rather than 7" - once again, too much travel for the way I ride, especially with the big wheels.
-Supertherm throughout (mine is only partially Supertherm, as True Temper did not make it in 29er-friendly configurations back then) to save weight and add some strength.
-31.6 or 30.9 seatpost for Joplin/other height adjust posts. Mine is 27.2, and the GravityDropper is a crappy post, IMO.
-Slacker front end (mine is 69 degrees, I'd probably go 67 or 68, especially if using the Fox34 140 Talas so I could crank it down if/when I wanted it to steer quicker).
-1"/25.4 main pivot axle. Mine is 24mm and it's annoying to do the preload. With the 25.4 I could just drive some 1" star nuts into the (hollow) axle and then use 1" headset end caps instead - lighter and stiffer, and easier to work on.
-135 or 142 maxle, rather than non-threaded 150x12. Lighter, just as stiff, easier to deal with when installing the rear wheel.

That's probably about it, but as you can see, it's a pretty extensive list! If I were doing a light-duty DH setup, I'd probably just use a Ventana rear end modified for 6" travel (I just use a longer stroke shock and longer rocker with a normal rear end) and build around a 140 Talas fork. That would be the ultimate freeride setup - 68 degree HTA that goes to 69.5 with the talas cranked down, tapered, ISCG or even Hammerschmidt...



Wednesday, August 10, 2011

24 hours in the Sage - anyone need a rider or two?

So my friends are all lame, and nobody wants to race the 24 Hours in the Sage with me - anyone need a rider for their team? I'm happy to race until my lungs bleed, or take a lap and then a few beers and party - I can be as serious (or not) as you want. Sarah might be interested too - so if you need another couple to fill out a 4-person mixed team, cool.

If anyone's interested, drop me a line.

Monday, August 08, 2011

Al's 36er, complete!


It almost looks like a trials bike with the in-line seatstays and toptube. Pretty neat looking bike, and hopefully it'll be super fun to ride, too. Interestingly, because it's pretty small (and I've figured some stuff out every time I build one to simplify things) I think this is the lightest 36er frame I've done - about 5.5 pounds (that's mostly due to the fact that it was small enough that I was able to use a butted downtube, rather than straightgauge). Of course, once you add the ~20 pounds of wheels and tires, it's not going to end up being a light bike, so the weight is pretty irrelevant, really.

More congratulations!


To Chris and Aaron, who appear to have finished together at 5:18 in the CTR (who won the sprint, guys?) as well as other folks who gave a great effort (including Kimberly and Jefe) but had to drop out. Nice work everyone!

Also, just to keep you entertained, here is a picture of Martha on her first spin on her new Waltworks 29er. I hope she put a helmet on shortly after the picture was taken...

Saturday, August 06, 2011

Congrats to Eszter!

Yes, she took a DAY off of her old record!!!

Now, all you bike industry people out there - don't you think Eszter needs someone to pay her to ride her bike at this point? I mean, the Waltworks sponsorship is great, but seriously - she's one of the best female long-distance mountain bikers *ever*. She writes an awesome blog. She lives in CB and lives the life, she's friendly as all get-out - this is your chance to get in on the ground floor. This girl needs some real sponsors, instead of some guy who builds bikes in a garage. Step up, and drop her a line.

Random Saturday pics from Brian

Minnesota represent!



Friday, August 05, 2011

I (heart) Carte Blanche



Unlike some people, Al basically told me to do whatever I thought would work best for his new 36er - so here's the current state of the art (keep in mind, he's 5'10" tall - no huge dude by any means).

-69 degree HTA, 90mm rake fork.
-510mm chainstays, plenty of tire clearance, 83mm BB shell and kinked seat tube.
-Paragon sliders to allow geared/single use.
-1 1/8 head tube - I see no reason to do a tapered setup when the odds of being able to build a tapered rigid fork anytime soon are next to zero. Plus, it's rigid.
-23.8" effective toptube (yes, that's right). Yes, there will be some toe overlap. Acceptable price to pay, IMO - if you're riding super-gnar chundery switchbacks, you should probably not be on this bike. It's for XC.
-33" standover (it's possible to get a little lower, but not a whole lot - once again, you gotta just deal - the darn wheels are just too big to have lots of standover for most folks).

I seem to be doing more and more of these - maybe it's time to start hassling WTB about doing a run of a "real" 36er tire...

Addendum: Feldman points out, quite correctly, that for many people, the state of the art head tube would be a 44mm ID version with an inset/zerostack headset, to get the bars lower. Not a concern for Al, so not necessary in this case, but a great idea for smaller riders who run their bars closer to saddle height.

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Hookey Pt. 2 Elk

It seems that whenever someone leaves town for a long period of time, the sendoff ride is 2 Elk in Vail. Rusty will be stuck in Houston with nary a mountain in sight for the next couple of years, so we rode a 5 hour loop that finished with the epic and awesome 2 Elk descent to Minturn.

So yes, I did basically no work yesterday. Bros before bikes, yo!