Saturday, April 26, 2008

A race to the finish...

Ok, so I had one of those "oh shit" moments.

I had sent one of the teams bikes out to Rohloff for use at Sea Otter (Fed Ex screwed up and arrived two days late..ughh) and have been so busy I've not thought much more about it.

It's Saturday morning and I suddenly realize that John does not have a bike to race on Sunday now that the bike is in Cali...uh oh!

The race is a biggy as it is the first race of 6 in the Groovy Cycleworks series and an Ohio Mountain Bike Championship points race to boot. Suddenly, my task at hand turns to building John a new frame/fork/bar in less than 24 hours.

So John got what I had at hand...

I had some rims for 650b's and a rigid fork that is suspension corrected that just needed finishing, some bits and bobs from Zach, and a whole lot of magic fairy dust :)

The front triangle all welded up in the fixture


A close up shot of the bottom bracket

a nice tight bead around the top tube / seat tube junction

and then by the magic of the blog, the frame is done in fabrication and we are off to paint! John didn't want anything too crazy and quite honestly, I did not have a lot of time to work with as I have to be off to the Fire Department at 0600, so we used his colors and I threw in a bit of flair; it is one of my bikes after all ;)



So it's now 0130 and I've got about 1 more hour of frame prep post bake and then I can sleep for a couple of hours before it's off to work again :(

I'll let y'all know how the John and the bike did at the race,

rody

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's alright, you firemen sleep all day at work anyways according to Whit. By the way I just got my Mountian Bike Action magazine yesterday and it has a nice photo of one of your frames!


Cary W.