I was doing a repairs on my friend Justin’s Specialized Epic carbon fiber hardtail frame this week. Justin is fast and knows how to play rough. Somehow he broke the drive side chain stay in two places. It was hanging on by threads. Fuck it. Fix it up and get it back out for more … Read more
I’ve just completed another round of major upgrades to the Samantha frame fixture. I don’t intend on bringing development to an end as there keep being new territories to explore and old ones to remediate. It just gets better and better. Firstly, I took some time exploring parts that a re-design that would give me … Read more
I’m not good at leaving well enough alone. I get these itches and all I can do is keep scratching at them. I keep doing the work long past when the first round of payback is had, maybe getting to more unforeseen value. Everyone else gets to benefit from that. I just keep suffering. As … Read more
I wanted to improve on what I was doing with head tubes. It was May 2023 when I had moved to a modular system for IS41/IS52 head tubes. This allowed me to easily fabricate a nice head tube of any length. Fancy new head tube The issue is that all of my bikes (outside of … Read more
The other day, I was in a discussion with a student that was running some queries on my site. He told me that since starting my blog in 2010, I’ve posted, on average, once a week, every week. In blog land, that ultra marathon world cup performance. It’s been a while since my last post. … Read more
Earlier this week, I was reminded of a long dead subject. Rim brakes. More, the location for the frame mount when using caliper brakes on road bikes. I haven’t thought at all about this in over 15 years. Not seriously in over 25. This is a poignant topic for me. Long ago and far away… … Read more
Gaby (Ronen’s fiancée) came up with the idea that he needed to go to Whistler for a weekend of downhill mountain biking to celebrate his birthday. That’s a pretty nice girl for a guy to be with. Very cool. It seemed like a very short trip but I agreed to go. It was going to … Read more
I use a wildcat spec for the UDH dropouts on my bicycles. I remove the fin from the hanger as it isn’t required and gets in the way of what I’m looking to do. While this modification could easily be done using a basic belt sander, I have an easy setup for doing it on … Read more
I cry at weddings. I do. I’m pretty sure that I’ve cried at every wedding that I’ve ever attended. Windy and I were in Colorado last week. It began with an annual family reunion (her’s) in Crested Butte that included a wedding ceremony of one of Windy’s brothers that required a 4×4 offroad trek to … Read more
♫ Fly…like a G6 ♫ I chose ‘Gulfstream G650’ as the namesake for this bike as that plane is a sleek and fast corporate/wealth jet that is designed for fabulous people to move about the world quickly and without any hassle. It’s the benchmark private jet for the most elite of us equals. This bike … Read more
This is a bit of a continuation of a past post about the new mathematical considerations that the newer all-road/gravel suspension forks have in calculating bike geometry. Because the sliders are set at an angle to the steerer (and thus, the head tube), calculating the bike geometry at a given location in the fork travel … Read more
I’ve spent the past 6 or 7 years waffling about making a change in the way I describe bicycle geometry. For almost two decades, I’ve been describing front and rear centers using the conventional, radial method. From the crank axis directly to the hub axis of the wheels. This is easy and relatively useful…but it’s … Read more
In the world of flat bar all-road bikes, it’s certain. Bar-ins are REQIRED for performance riding. I wouldn’t have been this absolute a few years ago but it’s now become the primary hand hold on my bike. Facts are facts. When covering ground that isn’t extreme, this is the more relaxed and efficient position for … Read more
On Wednesday (06/19), I was doing a ride around the Tamarancho loop. Simple stuff for an end of the day ride. I was a bit frantic, though, as I was working hard trying to keep ahead of a group that I had passed earlier. I was on my 2023 M2-F2. I love this bike. It’s … Read more
When I first put Windy’s new road+ bike (the Electra) together, a lot was going on. Finishing a bike project is a messy undertaking. Several details had to be left in an early state of development for expediency, just to move on. One of those that was left for later was the dropper lever. Using … Read more
Within the 2024 PVD Samantha Frame Fixture, I designed a way to calibrate the crank shell and axle towers. The tower axis needs to be orthogonal to the plane that lays out the frame over the fixture table. While pretty important for the crank shell, it’s crucial for the rear axle axis. How do we … Read more
Like many, I have a small problem with the Rhino Cart in my shop. I love the BuildPro system and Rhyno Cart is a really good product. The issue is the flatness of the surface, specifically, I have a low drop in the middle of the raster table. I’ve known since the Rhino Cart showed … Read more
I had a problem a couple of weeks ago. I was coming off of a ride on the M2-F2. What developed through the ride was a feel coming from the cranks that was horrific. It was grinding and feeling lumpy as I pedaled. I was lost as to what it was. I put the bike … Read more
I finally got a chance to dive deeper into the all-road bar-in concept. In December, I got the bar-ins installed on the all-road bike and the value (again) was instantly obvious. It’s grown to be one of my preferred positions on the bike. This is strange because you’d think that the wide grip position would … Read more
This is a new Road+ bike for Windy. Her last new bicycle frame was the 2023 Vega MTB. That bike was named after Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed 5B Vega. In my mind, it’s one of the nicest looking bikes I’ve ever produced. It’s really an eye catcher! Staying on theme, this road+ bike is named after … Read more
The time has come for the Samantha fixture to be used to make a bike frame. Wow! Finally. I feel that it helps to show the fixture just before real use so I produced another video showing the tubes in place before tacking and how they end up being held. The ability to space the … Read more
After posting all the information that I could about the new Samantha frame fixture, I realized that an important detail was missing. How to set it up! So, I made another video where I begin with a bare fixture table, mount the tool, and set it up for use according to calculations. Since I’m about … Read more
2024-10-26 update is HERE It started as a quick upgrade to the Cyberdyne System frame fixture, back in November 2023. Snowballs snowball and the ‘quick upgrade’ became the fully re-designed fixture shown here. This project has been moving forward in plain sight, with some interim posts and videos for the last six months, and the … Read more
This is a golden oldie. About a billion years ago, I’d make special valve caps for presta valves from small dice, either six or 10 sided. Dice on tire valves is an old hot rod trick. It then got adopted by the BMX kids. It never quite made it from Vg8 to Vg5,2 Shrader threads. … Read more
It was time to interview Calvin Norstad. This January, Calvin took over from Mark (Calvin’s father) in running the whole show at Paragon Machine Works. This is some of the biggest news effecting custom bicycle framebuilding in a long time. One of the most influential and important companies has a new captain. This is important. … Read more
I have a concept that I call ‘accountability mechanisms’. It’s not too different from what others talk about. These are tools that keep me working hard and in good ways without having to ‘pay’ someone to do that. An extrinsic motivator; a teacher, trainer, or editor, would (hopefully) do the same thing but those come … Read more
Major benchmark for the Samantha frame fixture. The plates are mounted and linear motion is proven. The slop in the movement is down below 0.001″. I’m stunned it was that good without any calibration. I did do a calibration for the parallelism and height of the plates and things are looking great. There’s more than … Read more
As promised, I made a new video explaining some of the improvements to the Samantha Frame Fixture design. Not too much to write that isn’t in the video. Lots of simplification. Better in many ways.
