Monday, January 31, 2011

Greg's fork, featuring all kinds of neat new stuff

Greg is a big fella, and he wants to ride his rigid bike aggressively (more about the silly-overbuilt frame tomorrow), and as such, he needs a pretty burly fork.

Now, in the past, I've had a bit of a conundrum in this kind of situation. I could use a butted blade similar to those I use for smaller riders (ie, 28.6mm diameter, 1.2mm/.7mm/.9mm double butted) but the .7mm center section scares me for big guys. Or I could use straightgauge .049" 4130, but that's godawful heavy.


I finally got some blades that are perfect for bigger and/or abusive riders in, which is pretty nice. They are 1.3mm/.85mm single butted - so they're not as light as a double butted blade, but they're not so thin below the crown that I'd worry about putting a bigger rider onboard. Greg's fork will be plenty strong enough for anything he wants to do, and it's 1070g with an 8" steerer, so not stupidly heavy.

Oh, and I can make nice long (500mm) forks with these blades without resorting to any silly trickery, because I made sure to get them extra-long just for that reason.

So that's interesting thing #1.

Second up is that I'm switching over to using the Paragon hooded dropouts for bigger fork blades (ie, ones that don't taper) like this. Why?


Several reasons:
-They're made in the USA, unlike the Long Shen units (part number LE13-1: for you framebuilders out there, please note that I'm not stocking these anymore, so call Peter at Ceeway if you need them). That's a good thing.
-They are machined from solid (1018, I think) steel, rather than cast. Much nicer to weld.
-They look cool. Then again, who am I to judge?

On the downside, they're more work (gotta miter the blades to the correct angle, not just slap in the plug-in drops and then bend as needed) but that's ok, because there is one other HUGE plus, in my book:
-They work perfectly (or really close, anyway) with the awesome Paragon "Willits Style" ISO disc tab. I love those tabs for a number of reasons (spreading out the load from the brake being #1), but with the Long Shen dropouts, they simply won't work. With the Paragons, game on.

As an aside, it's supposed to get down to 20 below over the next couple of nights, so I may be doing mostly computer/indoor work until later in the week. Progress, in other words, may be a bit slow. Edit: They canceled school! Holy crap! It was 68 degrees 4 days ago!

Just a quick reminder

I got a couple of comments on a previous post saying that there aren't enough easy-to-find shots of complete frames/bikes/forks on the blog.

That's undoubtedly true, which is why you can click over to the Flikr page (it's also the second link over on the right side of the blog page). There are tons of neat photos of all aspects of my bikes, frames, forks, etc. And there's minimal wordiness (and no recipes) to distract or annoy you.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Call your state senator... and tell them bikes are dangerous!

Trust me, it actually makes sense (and it's dangerous, as you can see from my facial expression). You can read all about it at the Bicycle Colorado website.

If you live in CO and like to ride bikes in the mountains, spend 2 minutes to send your senator an email and let them know that they should support this bill.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Email of the week.

I laughed and laughed.

Hi,

I would like to write something about Your 29er frames at www.team29er.pl - the biggest 29er site in Poland and I hope to get much more info about it, because on Your blog there are no details, not many photos etc. Could You send me photos and write about shown frames, Your passion, history...? I'm really interested in 'Fat bike for Mike' - but maybe You've got more unusual projects?


Apparently I have been doing this blog thing all wrong - who knew?

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Well, that's not going to work...



I'm not sure how John got this, but it's the biggest 29er tire I have ever seen by at least 10%. Check out the comparo - those are the same model and size, but one is 6.5mm wider and taller. Crazy.

Of course, since it won't actually fit in the fork, it's not such a good thing. Yes, that's almost a _2.7"_ tire, folks. Which makes it, actually, not a "29er" tire at all - this sucker measures 30" in diameter.

Poetic justice for all the years I spent harassing WTB to make a 29" DH tire?

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

I hate you, Mike


While I'm riding the trainer and shivering the shop, my loyal friends are busy having fun in the sun - and rubbing it in my face. Pfeh. At least I can always call up Hassan to hear about the 15 foot high snowdrifts in Northampton.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Weekend recipe: Thai Pizza

I swear this is good. Seriously. It sounds bizarre, but it is awesome.

Walt's Thai Veggie Pizza

First up, you'll need some pizza dough. Buy some, or make it from my recipe from a few years ago. I like to make a very thin crust, so you can cut the dough recipe in half if you want.

Next up, quarter some brussels sprouts, cut up some broccoli into smallish chunks, and steam them both (together) for 7 minutes. You can cook them another way if you'd prefer, of course.

Chop up an onion and fry it in a quarter stick of butter (2 tbsp) until it's getting nice and transparent, then add 1 tbsp of sugar, turn up the heat, and cook until it's browned a tiny bit.

Chop up some seitan or tofu (about 1 lb) into small pieces.

Now make some sauce, by mixing:
1/2c peanut butter (I used the cheap Kroger stuff)
1 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp tamarind or tamarind/date (what I used) sauce
1 tbsp hot chili sauce (I used Sriracha)
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp curry powder
3 cloves garlic, minced/crushed
1 tsp sesame oil
1/4 tsp powdered ginger

Prebake the dough for 5 minutes or so at 450, then spread on the sauce and all the toppings and bake for another 10 minutes or so (pry the crust up and look to see if it's getting browned).

You can of course top with anything you want. I just happen to like Brussels sprouts.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

In which I rack my brain for something interesting to say

Dean wrote (regarding his new frame) "If you have anything interesting about it to post on your site my kids will get a kick out of it. We’re having the final fight over the logo tonight. My youngest, Cara, is all about the Monocle."

I spent all morning thinking about it (ok, not really, but I did think about it at least once) and unfortunately, I got nothin'.

It doesn't have any direct mounts, tapered anything, through axles (though the Fox fork will that's going on it), s-bendy stays, odd size seatpost, weird sized wheels or clearance for gigantic tires, couplers, rear suspension, or even sliding dropouts.


Dean and his progeny picked the Waltworks team blue, which is probably the most popular color (or a close second to the Johnny Cash black), so not even that is unusual.

The best I can come up with is that there's an extra set of water bottle bosses under the downtube, and that it's got an unusually long head tube, because Dean (shaped almost exactly like me) has huge long legs and will be sitting up really high. It's pretty much exactly what I'd build myself for a long-ride/race hardtail for riding in Colorado.

Oh, and it has a chain hanger.

Is it unique? Of course, every bike I build is. Is is going to set the interwebs ablaze with controversy? No.

The inescapable conclusion, Dean, is that your bike is boring. If you want to be famous on MTBR and/or impress your kids, you'll have to try harder next time.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Smoking deal...

As some of you know, Edge composites had to change it's name to Enve, because of some sort of European trademark snafu. Actually, that may be irrelevant - I'm not sure that has anything to do with me getting a good deal on a few of their 2010 forks (with the old graphics).

Long story short, I have a few Edge 1.0 and 2.0 forks in stock. Here's the story - you can get one of these fancy forks for cheap, cheap, cheap, if you order a road bike (a complete bike, that is) from me (and don't worry, Steve and Minh, you guys get first dibs). The 1.0s are bare carbon (no logos) and the 2.0s have a low-gloss finish and "Edge" logo (see the pictures).

Any component group you want, any color you want, etc, etc. You pick the parts, I design and build the frame, and you get an Edge 1.0 for $225, or an Edge 2.0 (better for bigger folks, as it's 75g beefier) for $200. I believe they retail for something like $700 and $500, respectively.

The forks are NOT available for individual sale, sorry. Limited (very limited) quantities available, first come first serve (meaning, you gotta have a deposit down to lock one in), blah blah blah. Drop me a line if you have questions.

Dave Bohm in the news

All-around good dude and badass framebuilder Dave Bohm of Bohemian Cycles made the news.

I had no idea that Rep. Giffords is a cyclist (it is semi-implied that she's a mountain biker?) Very cool that someone in DC bike commutes - let's hope she gets to do it many more times in the future.

Edit: Pics of Gabbie's bike here. Thanks for the tip, Margo!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

200# of steel...

I found a couple of these old steel carts on Craigslist and bought 'em for a song - planning to make some shelves for them and use them for extra storage (I need it badly) in the shop.

They must each weigh 200# - I could barely unload them from the truck, and I'm not a complete sissy. Once they're together and on their wheels, they move suprisingly easily - which isn't too surprising, given that they were built to be filled with cases of soda (how they got from the Pepsi distributor to me, I have no idea) and rolled around a warehouse.

Also, a few people asked about the fork going on Mike's snow bike, and so I took a quick picture. Ginormous tire clearance, rack mounts, disc only, etc. Nothing super exciting - but it should be good for it's intended purpose. Last winter I built about a billion of these on contract for a small company (well, ok, maybe 40 or 50) and building this one made me flash back, just a bit, to the monotony, since it's pretty similar.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Fat Bike for Mike


This is Mike's second WW frame - he lives in VT, and while a standard 29er works great some of the time, he wanted a bike for when it's snowed in. Snowmobile trails, XC ski trails, frozen gravel roads, and the occasional frozen stream descent (yes, that's what he says he's going to do. Sounds nuts to me).

Hence the Fatbike. 110mm of tire clearance in the rear, equally huge fork clearance, rack mounts everywhere, a bazillion housing guides for full-length everything, and a direct mount front derailleur.

I did a new style of direct mount for this bike - used a Paragon unit, slipped/brazed into a piece of 1 1/4 x .058 to get the proper standoff from the seat tube with the 100mm bottom bracket shell. Should be super solid and reliable, and solves the annoying problem of finding a front derailleur that will work with the wide shell/fat tire combo.


Anyway, long story short, the only snow I could find to pose it in was the rapidly decaying pile of slush at the end of the driveway. Mike has selected some horrible orange color, I believe, so he'll be plenty visible out on the trails.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Saturday rant!

Click on over to Dirt Rag and read their, um, I'm not sure what it is... "article" (? advertisement?) about the all-new Airborne bikes.

Now, we all know Dirt Rag has slowly spiraled down the overcommercialized drain on the way to becoming a clone of Mountain Bike Action or Bicycling. That's hard to watch, but on the plus side, there are a lot of better ways to spend your time these days if you're bored and want to read about bikes.

Still, I was pretty astounded by this quote:
"To create their latest models they examined benchmark models from major manufactuers, crafted a similar package and undercut the price by 20-30 percent."

So, let me get this straight: the company admits that they have zero interest in bringing something new or interesting to market. They imply that they've simply skipped any design work and copied other stuff already on the market. And their business plan is simply to be cheap.

I am not surprised by the way the company is being set up - the "just grab some generic $30 Chinese frame and throw parts on" system is standard for a lot of bike companies these days. I am fairly shocked (confused? impressed?) that they can openly say so without any marketing talk about their sweet geometry, awesome materials, whatever.

So, in a way, I'm a fan. I mean, they're not making up a bunch of gibberish to justify what they're doing - they're just saying, "Look, you cheap bastards, we'll tell it to you straight. We don't know or care much about bikes, but we saw an opportunity to make the same old crap, but even cheaper than before."

Brutal, total honesty. It's refreshing, even as what they're actually doing makes me throw up a little bit in the back of my mouth.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Back... kinda

I tried to work yesterday, and spent 2 hours making some sweet s-bend seatstays for Barry's bike... that were 1" too short. Nice work.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I took my sick butt back inside and napped. Today was better (only somewhat dizzy) and I got a little work done, and I'm thinking I should be able to get some stuff done this weekend as well. Hopefully back on track!

Anyway, that's a pretty boring post, I guess. Too bad, I'll try to come up with something entertaining for next week. Or maybe a recipe, just to upset all the bike-nerds.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Sick day, and Blair's new frame

I have contracted some variety of Creeping Crud and will be doing mostly computer work today, just FYI. Hopefully it will pass quickly. I'm not all that bummed, since it's like 10 degrees out, but I'm missing my track session with Nowork too.

Also, here's Blair's new frame. He's a strong early contender for the 2011 Kitchen Sink award, given to any bike with a ridiculous number of features. In this case: Drop bar 29er/monstercross configuration (1 point), direct mount front derailleur (1 point), full length cable housing for all 3 cables (1 point), S&S couplers (1 point), Paragon sliders with derailleur hanger (1 point), and rack mounts (1 point) for a grand total of 5.

That will be hard to beat, folks. He'd need a tapered steerer fork, integrated steering damper mount, guides for a Joplin, rear maxle, and multiple bottle openers to *really* guarantee victory, but this is a pretty decent effort.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

From Luis


A great shot of his new FS 29er. Thanks, dude!

Monday, January 10, 2011

T-shirts/Socks back online

Jeff at Alchemist is going to be handling all my clothing sales - I was just spending too much time working on shipping/packing, and it was cutting into my usual slothly beer-drinking and daytime TV.

So if you want the T-shirt and socks package, click away.

We will also be offering jerseys and shorts (as well as package deals for everything) later in the springtime.

Note that if you're getting a frame/fork/whatever from me, you can save yourself the shipping cost by just getting these items directly through me and having them ship at the same time. If not, please go through Alchemist.

Yao MIng Part 2 - Steve Chimes In

My good friend, studly Crested Butte local, and fellow frame builder Steve (who also builds a lot of wheels for me) inexplicably bothers to read the blog and was excited about the Yao Ming post - so he decided to do a *proper* design for the big fella.

First, here's the print:


And here's what Steve has to say about it:
I was reading your blog the other day and saw the Yao Ming post and you were so right! That bike was down right dangerous and Gunnar was smiling about it. I know there arent that many people in the world taller than 6'10" but clearly none of them are riding bikes. Talk about a frame building niche. So when I saw your post I just wondered to myself...could Yao Ming at 7 feet+ tall make a 36er wheel look small?

Combining this curiosity with my frame building partner telling me how good Rattle Cad is (another free bike design program), I decided to kill two birds with one stone so to speak. It turns out that Rattle Cad really has come a long way since it was released as open source code. When it was first released it made nice pictures but was useless for frame building. There are still a few things BG101 does that I find useful that Rattle Cad doesnt but it is just a matter of time (toe overlap plot, drivetrain plot, general printing is terrible, and lack of BB junction (three tubes intersecting) miter template.

As far as the design of the Yao Ming 36er goes, I didnt get too deep. I located the three contact points in space like I said in the first email. I gave him 225mm cranks (arbitrary number) and compensated the BB height for equivalent pedal/rock clearance as my hardtail. I messed around with the head tube angle and fork offset to get (maybe?) toe clearance for a size 25? shoe (about 200mm). I also shot for a trail number between 70-80mm because I thought that is what other 36er builders did. I included a suspension corrected fork (100mm) because, hey, you never know.

The tubing selection and chainstay length were just picked by eye. I tried a 2.5 inch down tube as you suggested but it just looked too fat (aluminum). So I matched it to the oversized headtube at 44mm. In the end I think Yao would approve. He is right at the cusp of making a 36er look too small, which is saying something, but I bet it would be the best riding adult bike he has ever owned.

See? Not very scientific but there it is.


Edit: here's a version with water bottles (the big kind) for perspective. From Steve:

Walt,
Im sending another version of the bike with water bottles this time to give some perspective on how big this bike is...they look like Barbie water bottles. Also, I contradicted myself, the down tube is 2". And Rattle Cad only displays 175mm cranks in this type of view. So those arent really shown correctly but the overlap I mentioned is right.



Edit 2: For those who are interested, RattleCAD can be downloaded for free here. It will run on basically any Windows machine or Mac running Parallels/virtual Windows.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Anyone need a ringer?

Team Waltworks could not get it's **** together in time to register for 24 hours of Old Pueblo. Doh.

But I'd still like to race. Need a rider for your team? I'm fast enough to race with any team at the race and not humiliate myself, have all my own lights and crap, and am mostly regarded as a pretty fun guy and not a jerk. I'm happy to race with you if you're motivated to get on a podium, and I'm happy to race with you if you want to ride hard wearing a costume and drink and party in between.

I would probably be most interested in being on a 4 or 5 person team, and I would of course pay my own entry fee and such.

Got a spot? Let me know.

Friday, January 07, 2011

Forkacopia


Wow, those colors look awful in this picture. I saw these three forks sitting in the finished-forks area (ie, leaned against the wall out of the way) and thought it was a funny contrast - small tire clearance track/fixie fork with no brake mount, snow bike fork with 110mm of tire clearance, and the 15QR fork I built for Ian. Every one totally weird, in a different way.

Thursday, January 06, 2011

Trying new things

I often run into the stereotype that all steel framebuilders (or all custom framebuilders period) are wool-shirt wearing, bearded grouches who only build lugged randoneur frames.

There is of course a smidge of truth to this, mostly because doing what you know is quick and easy. For example, I built a pretty conventional 29er SS frame for Mike C recently (it'll go to powder today or tomorrow) - I knew exactly what parts I would use, had them all in stock, and knew exactly how to do every operation needed to take the frame from a pile of tubes to a complete bike.

On the other hand, I (yesterday) built a fork for Ian that uses a 15mm quick-release through axle. This is something that I had never done before, but I felt it was appropriate for his use, not to mention the fact that these axles are becoming more and more common for XC bikes, and if I want to keep building forks for people, I'm going to have to figure them out eventually. Of course, the bearded grouch builder response would be "there's nothing wrong with a 9mm quick release"

Long story short, the fork (usually about 1/4 of the work of a frame, comparatively) took at least as long as Mike's whole frame.
-I had to make the dropouts. I *should* have ordered in some 3/4"x.120" 4130 and put it on the lathe, then tapped the other side to make the threaded dropout. Instead, I made the dropout in 2 pieces - one piece of 4130 turned out to 15mm (the slip fit) and one M14x1.5 nut which I turned down to match the OD on the lathe. Talk about a dumb way (from a time/effort perspective) to do things...
-I had to make adapters to attach things to my fixtures. The 15mm axle won't fit in my fork fixture, so I had to make a dummy axle, as well as an adapter to fit my disc tab fixture to *that*. And all of them had to be to pretty decent tolerances to make sure things lined up well, so I couldn't just slap things into the lathe and blaze away.
-After I welded in the dropouts, I realized that I needed to chase the threads - so off to the hardware store again for a ($28! Ouch!) M14x1.5 tap.

I'm fairly happy with the results, though, and the next time around, all the things I learned should make it go much quicker. There will be an upcharge ($75) for these setups, until someone starts making a plug/play dropout for them that I can just weld in (hear that, Mark?)

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

A great lineup - and a terrible photo

Not pictured is Bob's Tiemeyer. If you can't make out the lettering due to the crappy Iphone photo, that's a Primus Mootry, Zinn, Waltworks, Waltworks. Every bike on the track custom and handmade within 30 miles. Sweet!

Edit: I just remembered - a fellow on a Giant showed up at some point, took half a lap, and ate it on the banking (he was ok, just a little shaken up, and he was back out there 10 minutes later). Big-brand bikes = bad karma?