A pot full of update...yummy

Hey guys and gals,

Last I checked in, I was pushing hard to get ready for the big Manatoc race weekend.  I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday alternately working/sweating my arse off with the rest of the 331 crew to pull off another successful festival/race in the Cuyahoga National Recreation area.

Overall, we had a total of 690 racers between the trail run, cross races, kids races, and the xc mountain bike event.  Add to this another 700 registered trail riders and an equal number of families/friends who came out to enjoy the event, and you can see that we had our hands full.  It was a good time, but exhausting.

What compounded the effort was the fact that when I ran from the stage Sunday afternoon at the conclusion of the awards ceremony, I had just under 2 hours to rush back home to Wooster, and get into the fire department, where I spent the next 4 and half days (I did get a 8 hour break Tuesday before getting called back in), landing me back home Thursday morning at 0730.  Thus the big empty space in the blog timeline.

Thursday I wasn't worth a poop for productivity; caught up on some emails, took two conference calls, office work, worked on assembling Chad's road bike, and then mowed my 20" long grass that had been growing maliciously fast while my back was turned the last few weeks.  I started Friday with a good nights sleep and tackled the task of cleaning up the shop...a job that had been unfortunately ignored in the rush of life the last couple of weeks.

With life back on track to start a nice Saturday I prepped and machined handlebars and worked on cleaning up the design for Martins dropouts, a tough piece as they need to have clearance for a belt cog and use post style disc brakes between the stays, a lot to try to fit into such a tight space threshold.  I'm close on making them a reality, and hopeful that they work in practice as they do on the computer.

Sunday started off with our departments 9-11 ceremony then right back into the shop to catch up on welding handlebars.

I heard from the plater today, cranks should be done by the end of the week, hooray!

I'll be finishing welding bars tomorrow and working on Martin's and Davids frames simultaneiously, as Martin's has a lot of small one off Ti parts and Davids is a more striaght up steel build.

I apologize for the lack of witty, entertaining content on the post...feeling pretty tired so just content to catch everybody up.

rody