Thursday, January 31, 2013

Mike pt. 1

McCalla has been a friend of mine since middle school. We bonded initially because we were both (sorry Mike, it's true) huge losers, drifted apart when we went away to (NMSU and Colorado) college, then found each other again at a bike race in our hometown. 10 years later, we've been roommates, earned graduate degrees, played endless hours of Perfect Dark, attended a lot of mediocre CU Opera, been on a national championship podium, and even beat some of our heroes riding together.


These days, he rides a ton and races, and I am slow (er) and have a cute baby. So when he decided he wanted a longer-travel 29er that would actually be fun to throw around, I was psyched to take on the project.


This is pretty much my dream job - build bikes for people who are really going to ride them fast and hard. I don't do a lot of fancy paint jobs, I don't do a whole lot of pretty little touches, I just want to make bikes that (pardon my cliche) tear it up on the trails. Enter the McKiller. Did I just write that? Man, I'm going to have to start throwing around attitude more often!

For now, just a few pictures of my progress. The end result will be a sub-25 pound 29er with 43cm chainstays and 5" of travel. More details and pictures as I make progress.



Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Not weird enough?

If you didn't think the QR15/tapered blade fork I was working on was weird enough, check out how weird it looks with a post-mount brake setup (customer is generously letting me experiment a bit on him, but even after I get it figured out a bit better it's still going to look pretty weird...)



After spending some time messing around, it became clear that due to the high precision required, putting the threaded bit into the posts first wasn't an option (no matter how precisely you miter and join the posts, there's going to be enough distortion to pull the end of the mount out of line, especially the lower one). If you install the posts first, then do the threaded inserts (in this case stainless M6 nuts from the HWS, I think M6 pulley mounts would look nicer though I worry about having enough surface area for the brake to mount to) you can make sure the brake will line up right.

The cool thing about the QR15 dropouts is that they line the blade up much better with a post-mount setup than most standard 9mm dropouts.

Oh, I should also mention this is for 160mm. I would hesitate to do 180 or 200 on this setup (though you could run an adapter) just because the posts get even longer. 140 is obviously no problem.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

QR15 part 2 - taper

Yes, if you want a fork with my trademark tapered blades (which are 14mm at the tip) and you want a 15mm axle, the axle is actually bigger than the fork blade. And yes, it starts to look a bit goofy.



I've removed most of the hood (see what a fork with non-tapered 1 1/8  blades looks like with these dropouts here) to mitigate this somewhat. I can't turn down the dropout much further on the lathe without making the axle and spacers not fit properly - so this is pretty much what it's going to look like unless I make my own axle spacers as well (which is an option, perhaps) in the future.



So tapered+QR15? No problem.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Bean on wheels!

No, no bike content. But, um, push-quad content? And brakeless, rigid, and wooden to boot. All the hipsters will be delivering Jimmy John's on these next year.

Wheels are 4", which is the ideal size between 650b and, um, zero. All the traction of solid rubber tires and all the efficiency of no bearings and a hair tie to slow the wheels down.

Seems like just a month ago he was just starting to crawl... oh wait, it was.


Thursday, January 24, 2013

Tom - with powdercoat

If you want geometry and discussion (plus the usual ugly naked/unfinished pix), click here. Color code for those who are curious is RAL 6018, which the powdercoat guys immediately identified as Kawasaki green. Pretty cool color.



The bike will have King stuff, Enve Stuff, DT stuff, and Thomson stuff, and an XX1 drivetrain. Sick. Hopefully we'll get a picture or two out of Tom when she's built up.

Pollutorgasm!

This is the graphic that you see on the SLC air quality page when the PM2.5 count goes over 70. And yes, it's multi-pollutiongastic pretty much every day.


Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Sick, sick, sick

No, not me. The Bean has a 103 fever (to the 2 people who called this afternoon when I was on the way to the doctor with him, apologies for being abrupt with you!) and is not nearly as happy as in this picture. In fact he is totally miserable and needs pretty much constant contact from a parent. Or blackberries (but that only works for a few minutes).


Expect slow email/phone responses and a slow bike output for a few days, folks. Just FYI.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

I couldn't say it better myself

Every year people ask me if I'm going to NAHBS and every year, I say no.

Instead of explaining myself yet again, I'll just let you read a couple of other takes. One is obviously tongue in cheek - the other, a bit of a mystery.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Monday rant: it's not the welds

I hear this all the time and it drives me nuts - many people believe that when you buy a custom bike, you're buying *really good welding*.

Folks, I would bet money that most of the welders making cheap Raleighs in Asia are better than me. In fact, I bet most of them are better than every single custom framebuilder out there. Why? Well, it's simple - those guys don't answer the phone. They don't design the bikes. They don't miter tubes, set up fixtures, paint stuff, ream/face/chase threads and press fits, or ship things. They just sit in one place and weld. I'm pretty sure you get DARN good at welding bikes together after doing it as your 9 to 5 (or, well, who knows how long those guys work) job for a while.

Are welds on overseas frames as pretty as on a custom bike? That's really in the eye of the beholder. Are they as strong? Obviously yes, since like custom bikes, very few mass produced bikes fall apart and almost none do so because the welds weren't done well (poor design is a whole different can of worms).

A normal custom builder spends maybe an hour a day under the hood. We do a darn good job, but we do it slowly and much less frequently - if you gave a Taiwanese welder an hour to do a single frame (I'm guessing it takes less than 10 minutes for those guys/gals) they would do a pretty kickass job making things look perfect and pretty too.

So here's the thing - you aren't paying for welding when you buy a custom bike. You're paying for custom fit and design first and foremost, and then things like customer service, warranty, cachet (in some cases), and getting to pick out things like parts and colors. If you pick any decent builder, the welding will be great - but it won't add anything to your experience once you hit the trail. A great fit and the right parts, on the other hand, will put a grin on your face every time. 

Friday, January 18, 2013

Lurks under your table

And watch out, he bites. Might need to work on that at some point.


Targeted ad mistake? Or big trouble?


You have to wonder about how you've wasted your life when you're on MTBR and this is the ad that loads.

Painkillers? Nah, man, I have a DUMMY AXLE addiction. Check it out....and that's not including the various ones floating around the shop bolted into various projects, either. 135x12? 145? 170? 110? Yep, I've got it... you don't want to know how many BMXs I've built with that 110 (zero).



Thursday, January 17, 2013

Minh

Another short-chainstay bike, this one for Minh, who already has a couple of other frames from me. He wanted to try jumping on the short-stay bandwagon, and I was happy to oblige. He didn't want to do anything weird with the chainline, but wanted the option to go super short, so the compromise ended up being that at the shortest chainstay length setting (16") on the sliders, the bike will only fit a 2.1" tire. If he wants to run something bigger, he'll have to slide the wheel back 5-10mm.



Geometry breakdown:
-For 29" wheels, 100mm travel tapered steerer suspension fork, sliders for SS or 1x use.
-70.5 HTA and 72 (effective) STA. 86mm trail.
-63.1cm front center, 103.4cm/40.7" (sub 41"!) wheelbase.
-59cm ETT, 44cm seat tube.
-32cm/12.6" BB height.
-40.6cm effective/41cm actual chainstay length (that's 16/16.1"), clearance for a 2.1 at the front, 2.4 at the back (43cm length).
-S-bend stays, full length housing/hose for the brake and derailleur.

Edit: I'm always pretty conservative about tire clearance. Here's a picture from Minh of an Ikon 2.2 with the sliders all the way forward.



Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Missing Boulder part MCLXVIII

Those roman numerals might not make sense. But man, sometimes you gotta miss a place where:

During the past year, breweries including Big Choice Brewing, Bootstrap Brewing, BRU Boulder, Echo Brewing, Gravity Brewing, J Wells Brewery, Shine, West Flanders and Wild Woods have opened in Boulder and Broomfield counties. Others such as Avery, Oskar Blues and Upslope have moved forward on opening new breweries.Several more -- including Sanitas Brewing, which plans to open a couple of blocks from Fate Brewing -- could open their doors this year.
Note that the brewery being discussed in the article is about 0.5 miles from our place in Boulder.  I used to do a birthday pub crawl on bikes in which we visited 6 or 7 breweries and never had to ride on a surface street for more than a block or so. Now I think there would be *too many* breweries to manage even a single beer at each one unless you wanted to finish the night at the hospital.

Also note that the air quality here in SLC is going back to "unhealthy" as of tomorrow. But hey, we had like 3 days of breathable air... sigh.

I promise I won't whine again until I do at least a couple of useful bike posts. Seriously. Edit: Here, I throw you bike nerds a bone.


Monday, January 14, 2013

The new hawtness - Ceramic Coatings

I'm using a cool new word I learned on the interwebs in that title. Meaning that I'm totally hip to the newest lingo.

Or maybe not. But I do have a new option (I know, I know, I just recently tried to do away with upcharge option crap) for those of you who want something blingy and newfangled (and lightweight, too) - you can have your frame (or fork, or both) ceramic coated.

The coater has just done my own FS frame (pictures coming next week when it gets here) and I've been  happy with the work he's done on other stuff, so without further ado:
-For a frame, it's an extra $210.
-For a fork, it's an extra $100.

That's for a single color. If you want multiple colors, gloss clearcoats, or other options, the cost will go up. Contact me if you want a specific idea quoted.

What do you get? Very good durability (note that I have not verified this myself yet), light weight (50-100g lighter than powdercoat, depending on the specific item and powdercoat), cool factor. Your call whether that extra cost can be justified. You can see some of what the Ceramikoat guys have done here. 

Color chart is here. They have more colors available as special orders as well.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Lee

All I have to say to preface this mediocre photo (taken before I installed the shock mounting points and cable stops) and geometry info is this: if you're going to do a 650b frame, take advantage of the wheel size. I see bikes like this or this or even this and say to myself "I could build that exact same geometry with 29" wheels". The chainstays and wheelbases are quite long, and there's really not much else to distinguish them from an equivalent 29" wheel setup in my mind.


Around here, we pull out all the stops. No 45cm chainstay monsters for me. If you're going to build your smallest frame with a 44" wheelbase... you should just give up and do it as a 29er, because the bike is going to be a total tank no matter how small you make the wheels.

Without further ado:

-4" of suspension travel front and rear.
-70 degree HTA and 72 degree (effective) STA.
-57cm/22.4" effective toptube and 62.1cm front center
-17.5" seat tube (center to top) with a very sloped/braced toptube.
-42cm chainstays, 104cm/41" wheelbase.
-33.5cm/13.2" (unsprung) BB height
-About 6.5# with an RP23 bolted on. Could whack off some of that (150g, maybe) if we had ditched the super low toptube/brace but Lee wanted plenty of standover (standover is 28").

In short, this is an all-around XC rig for the mountains around Boulder, which should be reasonably stable but also capable of being thrown around corners and bunnyhopped over logs down Todd Gulch. Lee won't fit on 29" wheels but we can get him some of the extra rollover ability this way without giving up... well, much of anything.

The bike will be a King/Enve/Easton/XX1 bling machine. Wouldn't be surprised to have the weight come in under 22# complete.
-

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Happening now in the WW shop...

Finishing up Lee's 650b FS frame (geometry geekery tomorrow, stay tuned, you nerds), and shipping out Adam's short chainstay singlespeed (click for geometry).

Specialized box contains a frame I added a disc tab to for a friend back in CO. Specialized hanging up belongs to my neighbor who doesn't have a garage. Don't worry, I haven't gone over to the dark side.



Monday, January 07, 2013

QR15 rigid fork dropouts...finally!

I spent years bugging the good folks at Paragon to make these, and thanks to someone with more pull (thanks, Drew!) also bugging them, they're finally here (after a first-round hiccup). Here's a picture. They will take Rockshox or DT 15mm axles (no Fox), they're beefy as heck, I like them. Extra $50 upcharge, but you get an axle (RS or DT, your choice) out of it as part of the deal.


With that out of the way; here's a brief rant: You do not need a through axle on a rigid fork. If you want this setup for convenience when swapping suspension/rigid forks on your bike, great. But there is really no performance benefit unless you're 300 pounds or riding a tandem or something. Suspension forks need this kind of axle because they are inherently not very stiff structures (2 pistons joined only by the crown and the arch) and adding a very stiff axle at the bottom of the fork is enormously helpful. Rigid forks do not suffer from torsional or lateral stiffness problems, so a big axle is pretty meaningless.

With that said, I'm happy to build you a fork with these dropouts either way. The 15mm axle isn't going to hurt anything, so worst case scenario, you're still good and you spent $50 on a big axle.

Saturday, January 05, 2013

Stop driving your ****ing cars

I am honestly considering wearing my welding respirator to go run errands. Come on, Salt Lake, this is the 21st century. I know it's an inversion, but we can do something about it if we give a crap.


For those who are unfamiliar, 35-55 is the "unsafe for sensitive people" (ie old folks, babies, asthma sufferers). We are blowing right on past the top of that range (50% above it!) to "might as well just take up smoking unfiltered cigarettes" and "go **** yourselves, kids with asthma"

And yes, I know that geography makes things tough here. I own a car too, but you know what? I refuse to drive it except in an emergency when there's an inversion. Ride your bike, walk, carpool, take Trax...it's not like we have no control at all over the problem.

If the winter stays like this, I can tell you that we'll be moving away in 2013, with no regrets. We knew if could be bad but wow, the reality is much worse than I imagined.

Friday, January 04, 2013

Sick kid and dead phone

I slept about 1 hour last night and we're going to be at the doctor's office for a while, so I anticipate no work getting done today, folks.

Also, my phone is dead. New one is on the way but I won't have it until Tuesday. So if you call, I won't be able to get back to you until then. Email is the best way to reach me in the meantime.

Thursday, January 03, 2013

Burnout - or why framebuilders don't last long

So I've been building frames for *almost* 10 years now, and selling them for something like 8 years. Doesn't sound like much but at this point, that makes me almost an old man of the bike industry. Why? Because so many framebuilders go out of business so quickly.

I've always wondered why that is, but after those 8 years of interacting with other builders, I've arrived at the following model.

-Start with 100 new framebuilders, all beady-eyed and eager to build bikes.

-Of our builder population, let's say:
20% are recent college graduates or dropouts living with their parents/roommates.
30% are naturally terrible at making things out of metal when they start (I was one of these).
50% don't remember trig from high school and think building good bikes is all about pretty fillets or Justin Bieber's initials carved into stainless lugs.
75% have no startup funds and have to order tubesets one at a time, file miters by hand, and work out of an unheated garaged (again, me).
80% have never run a business of any kind and are unable/unwilling to use math to figure things out - like how much money to charge, or what their costs are.
100% will sometimes screw stuff up, and 50% (or more) think they are perfect and won't accept blame for anything going wrong with a frame (whether it's a cracked tube, geometry not quite right, whatever) and will slowly (or quickly) accumulate angry customers.


And of course most builders are going to fit into more than one of these categories of doom - for example, I was a grad student living with my girlfriend, who sucked at making stuff and had no money. All of them can be overcome, but the more you have to overcome, the harder it will be, and so you see a lot of builders drop out after only a year or two - I've talked to folks who literally were unable to tell me what the difference between gross and net was, who were amazed that they still could only afford ramen after a year of building. Or folks who build *amazing* works of art - but take 6 weeks to build one frame. Guys who couldn't tell you how to calculate an effective seat tube angle, people who have only ever ridden one kind of bike but are building something else for customers, dudes who spend all day drawing up laser cut dropouts to distinguish themselves when they don't have any idea how to fit a rider to a bike, etc, etc.

I've been told that only something like 15% of the builders at NAHBS actually make money, and I'm inclined to believe it. Framebuilding attracts artists and dreamers, but then it eventually spits most of them out once they get a boy/girlfriend or a kid or two and realize that while the first dozen frames were fun, the next 50 aren't going to be, and that they're losing money on every one.

So the bottom line is that if you fight through your own shortcomings, are realistic about your goals, and are very lucky (I caught the "29ers are teh bestest!" wave, nice timing) you can make a decent living. I would guess the success rate is something like 5%, though.

Then, here's the thing - a lot of people succeed, but just burn out. It's cold in the shop. You cut your fingers on sharp metal. You answer phone calls that don't lead to sales. You watch your dumbass friends (I'm looking at you, Feldman) working at "real" jobs making twice as much money as you as they get promoted at Initech.

So the folks you see who are still doing it after a decade, or multiple decades, are talented, lucky, and also somewhat crazy (except me, I'm just lucky and crazy).

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

36er madness!


Finally working on Jay's bike (we were waiting for rims and tires). 36ers just look...weird on the fixture. Probably because of the insane head tube height (you actually have to leave the HT like 30-40mm too long and CUT IT OFF LATER because you can't set the fixture high enough!) or maybe the outrageous curve on the seat tube...


Long story short, they're fun. Except for the compound ST/DT miter. That has to be cut at _60_ degrees. No fun at all. Look at the length of that welded joint!

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

2013!

Announcements, in no particular order:

-I am eliminating pretty much all upcharges for frame options (ie sliding dropouts and such) in order to simplify things for everyone. Tired of being nickel and dimed by rapacious framebuilders? Well, I'm tired of my ongoing efforts at rapacity (which blogger apparently thinks is a word... sweet). Couplers still cost extra but everything else is included from now on. No charge for curving tubes, either, in case anyone is curious.

-The Johnny Cash black discount is staying, albeit somewhat reduced. I actually lose money on this now because my new powdercoater doesn't give me a break on black stuff like the old ones did - but it's become a tradition, so I'm keeping it. $50 off for JC (ie painter's choice) black if you just want a frame, or $100 off if you're getting a complete bike.

-I'll do a better job updating the waitlist. I've been slacking the last few months and it's only been getting updated once a week or so. I'll try to do better on that.

Here's to 2013 - looking forward to a great year!