Blog

The last time I did a drive to sell bike company t-shirts, I sold a pretty good sized batch of them. But getting them printed and delivered was a monumental hassle and took far too long. I decided to do it again — this time, using Teespring, which has a model like Kickstarter. You create your design, you post it, you set a goal for the number of sales. People come, they agree to buy. If you…

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It’s been busy lately, and I’m pretty exhausted. The last four days have been some of my most aggressive in some time — where my production queue is concerned — Thursday through Sunday, I was spending at least four hours a day in the shop, which is awesome. I’ve been pretty backlogged for awhile now, and I want to get uncorked, get these bikes out the door and onto the road. To that end,…

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So I’m writing this from between classes at Wordcamp Minneapolis — I’m here to learn how to get more out of Wordpress, which is the platform I use to run this site. Thus far, it’s been mixed bag — the first 9AM session I attended wasn’t very useful, but did go quickly, so I jumped into the last half of another talk, and it was much more useful. The 10AM session was pretty good, and I’m…

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It’s been a bit quiet around here lately. A few inquiries about new bikes and a few repair inquiries, too. But nothing jumping up and locking on. And that’s okay. The big thing for me lately has been getting back on top of the game and getting caught up on my backlog. Winter’s been dragging on and on and on and…you get the idea. With no heat in the garage, it’s been tough to…

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I briefly contemplated putting up a fancy-schmancy April Fool’s joke here, but ultimately discarded the idea. Not because I deemed it unprofessional or anything — I do love a great practical joke — but because I couldn’t get the idea of Cannondale’s failed attempt at creating motorcycles out of my head. So instead of crafting some elaborate joke, I find myself writing more about t…

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So this weekend, I’ve put together a new little bit of functionality on the site that I’ve been wanting to add for awhile now. Specifically, if you own one of our custom steel bicycles, you can type the serial number into the search box on the site (located in the footer), and it’ll bring up a link specifically to your bike, with pictures, etc.

The plan is to create a historical log for…

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I’m sure you can see the crack in the weld in that picture up there — you’d have to be blind not to. I could have just poured a little more bronze in there and no one would have been the wiser. But I would. And given that the front triangle was finished, it wasn’t a situation where, “Oh, I can just scrap this subassembly and re-do it.” No, it was having to craft a whole new front triangle.

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On Monday and Tuesday, we got about a foot of snow dumped on us which in Minnesota, in March, means that spring is just around the corner. No, seriously. Even though the Pallas Athena truckster (pictured above) is buried under the a mountain of white, and my drive to work on Tuesday required some time with the snow shovel, just to get out of the driveway, I can feel the warm weather just…

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So the other day, someone dropped by during the day, hoping to visit the workshop. I wasn’t there because I have a full-time day job — Pallas Athena is something I pursue on evenings and weekends.

To be clear, I do not have a problem with visitors at the shop. In fact, it’s something I welcome. It’s important that you contact me ahead of time, though, so that we can arrange for a tim…

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Well, let’s chalk another year up in the record books. 2012 A.D. was a crazy year — in addition to the framebuilding business, I also became a new dad (for the first time), started a new office job, turned 40, and really started building up Pallas Athena.

It was a year that wasn’t without issues, but it’s one I’ll look back on fondly. So there’s people that need to be thanked for all of…

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