New Employee

He was so eager to start work that Edwin Cooper Bailey joined the world eight weeks early, on Friday, January 13th, 2012. Four pounds, twelve ounces and 18 inches long. A score of 8 on his Apgars test. Excellent prognosis. He just has to spend several weeks in the NICU.

Pallas Athena's newest employee!

Black Friday Acquisitions

So last Friday, I did the unthinkable. I ventured forth and did some Black Friday shopping. God help me. During Thanksgiving Day at my mom’s place, I happened upon the Home Depot ads, which showed a 26-inch, 9-drawer roll-away tool chest for $149. The store opened at 5 a.m., so I got up at four, got my shit together and rolled over to the Shakopee location. I was around 20th in line when the doors opened, and the line stretched back 100 people or so. I bought the chest and got the heck out of there.

Around 8 a.m., I decided the deal was too good to pass up and went back and purchased a second one.

Two new tool chests.

I tore up my knuckles while installing the casters, and then spent some serious time organizing my shit. The one on the left is all framebuilding — tubing, components, welding equipment, and metal fabrication tools. The one on the right is all bicycle-specific tools — my old Park AK-32 kit along with all the other stuff I’ve acquired since I bought it in 1999.

Pretty glad I went and got these. Yeah, they’re inexpensive and their quality isn’t what I originally had in mind, but combined they’re still less than half the cost of what I had been looking at, with much better total storage volume.

Things and Stuff

• T-shirt sales have been coming along just fine. If you’re going to buy, you should do it soon! Orders close on Friday the 11th. I’m in a position where I’ll turn a little bit of profit, which will be rolled over into some equipment. You could also help spread the word by sharing on Twitter or Facebook.

• You know what else would help? Selling those two frames that I posted about on Monday. Maybe I’ll post them on Pedalr or something.

• I’ve “discovered” 8020 extrusion, and I’m highly intrigued. It’s an aluminum product that has channels cut in it. Those channels are a standard size and allow you to attach other 8020 components, or machined parts to the frame. Think of it as an industrial version of an Erector set. I’ve got an idea for how to build a custom stem fixture that would be pretty minimalist, so I may take a shot at that in the coming months. We’ll see. I’ve got some other very interesting (to me) ideas in mind for the stuff, including using them as workbench frames. That might be priority numero uno for this.

• In the part of my life where I contribute to the economy (other than the new house we purchased this year, and my occasional order from Enco, Home Depot, or wherever for framebuilding gear), we purchased a new car this weekend. The primary reason, of course, was the baby that’s on the way, but I’m not going to complain about it having a ton of space for bikes. While I refer to the silver monstrosity as “Babystar Galactica” or “the Family Truckster”, it is going to be nice to have around. It gets much better mileage than my WRX did, doesn’t eat premium-only gas like the WRX, and with the roof rack coming (2-3 rails) and a trailer hitch, I could probably get everything to a trade show in pretty short order.

• Also, bike has been added to the queue — the AGRS men’s winner was formally announced last week, and Jim Bell will be the proud new owner of a custom Pallas Athena, per my sponsorship of that event. Congrats, Jim! Now answer the email I sent you!

Hey Hey

Been awhile since I’ve updated here, and for that, I apologize. I know some of you are keeping tabs on Pallas Athena developments via the blog. As many of you know, I’m going to be a dad, and that’s been a big focus lately. (Yes, I read pregnancy and parenting books.) A future Pallas Athena employee!

That said, however, things are progressing nicely. I’ve been building frames, and have been talking to people about frames. The garage is getting to a point where I’ll be able to hang out and build during the winter months.

And to raise some cash for some equipment, I’ve created a t-shirt design and am selling them via PayPal. Every order helps!

Minneapolis Institute of Art Show

I’m not at the show tonight because I’m working at the bike shop tonight and I am preparing to move across the city next week. However, it would behoove you to go and see my compadres Josh of Three Stars Cycles and Alex of A-Train Cycles. Both are exceptional builders and great friends.

Show information.

New Website Coming

Expect a new website coming in the next few days. I’ve been working with A-Train on his, and it’s been giving me ideas for mine. It’s not my highest priority at the moment, however, as my wife and I are packing up the house to move across town. And I’m getting the fonts I used to design back and on the web, so that’s sucking up quite a bit of time — when I’m not in the workshop or filling cardboard boxes with stuff.

It’s been a productive morning thus far, though. I got up, cleaned up the place for a showing of our place to a potential renter, took my acetylene regulator to the welding place to have it rebuilt and picked up a loaner. And my next stop is the bike shop for my shift today — gonna be a long one. Typical 8-hour Saturday, followed by a few hours of stripping, cleaning and re-waxing the floors.

Been Awhile

So with the advent of my email marketing, I’ve kinda died off with the blog posts. Bad framebuilder! Bad! I’ll try to get more posts in here to help fill in the time gaps between newsletters, though.

What’s been going on? Well, a lot, actually.

• First and foremost, my wife and I are in the process of buying a house. We’ve gone through most of the stuff thus far — it’s down to the appraisal (cross your fingers that it comes in lower than the sale price), and closing on the 28th of July. We move on the 29th. The big plus for this is that it has a heated garage, with three bays, one of which will become my workshop. Expect pics and a blog post about that sometime in early August.

• In the process of getting my cold-setting rig set up. First and foremost, I need to get ahold of a bottom bracket post. I contacted Bob Brown at A-train‘s but was politely rebuffed. Bob apparently has quite a bit on his plate at the moment, which I can identify with. (See also: house, above.) So I need to track down someone with a lathe to build a post for me.

• I’ve also been helping A-train with his website — we’re building a new one for him — and it’s been a fun process. It’s inspiring me to build a new one for mine. And I really need to get on the ball with that one.

• I’ve got a few things to finish up in the shop tonight and prep to go to paint and powdercoat respectively. And this weekend, I’ll be plugging away at a new batch which need to be done pretty quickly here. Expect more photos in the future.

Second Chance Contest

This contest is only for people currently registered for my email newsletter. The contest email will be going out approximately 5-6 hours after this post is scheduled to deploy, so you might be able to sneak onto the list.

The prize: as last time, the prize will be a custom rear rack for your bicycle. It will be made from 4130 chromoly (3/8″ tubing) and will be powdercoated in your choice of color.

How to enter: when you receive the email newsletter on June 7th, share the newsletter with your friends by using the links for tweeting about it, liking it on Facebook, or by forwarding it using the Forward to a Friend button in the email. For each instance, you will be entered into the contest, up to a maximum of three entries.

The drawing: approximately one week after the newsletter goes out, I will tally up all the data from the report about how the email was shared. I will put all that information into a spreadsheet, just like last time, and then ask my wife (who is unfailingly honest) to pick a number from 1 to number of rows in the spreadsheet. Whomever is on that row will win the prize. The winner will be contacted by email. Additionally, that winner will also be announced via the July newsletter.

Good luck!

Contest Winner

So the first bike rack was won by Sam Hulin of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as announced in this month’s email newsletter. Those of you that find it odd that a Minneapolis-ite would win it should note that over half of the people who registered for the contest were from Minnesota. I credit that to Minneapolis Bike Love, a local online community of cyclists, that’s one of the tightest I’ve seen. And they came in droves and registered in droves.

The traffic spike associate with the contest entry.

So, what I did was to download the entire mailing list, and I stripped out anyone who was outside the registration window. This left 106 people. I asked my wife (who is very honest and had not seen the list) to pick a number from 1 to 106. (She picked #32.) I then looked at the list, and determined the winner based on the row number in the spreadsheet. So congrats go to Sam!

So I announced the contest on Twitter and Facebook a few times, in addition to a short-duration, low-budget Facebook ad. I also mentioned it in a few Livejournal communities, a couple of sections of BikeForums.net (the Commuting and Touring sections), and on my personal blog.

In addition to Minnesota, common states were New York and Ohio. From overseas, I saw registrations from Canada, Iceland, and France. Pretty cool stuff!

What’s Shakin’, Bacon?

So things are crazy in the personal life here, but I’m still finding the time to get out to the workshop and build frames. This, of course, makes me very happy.

The big news is that in August or September, I’ll be relocating myself and my fledgling framebuilding business to a house in the suburbs. That means that the next three months are going to be very, very busy — between buying a house and prepping for Minnecycle and keeping up with customer purchases, I suspect that I’m going to be pretty swamped. That’s okay, however. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the summer.

Right now, besides bikes, what am I working on? Well, working on a new design for this site, a mobile version of the site, and preparing the infrastructure for the upcoming show. Oh and prepping the next issue of the email newsletter, which will be coming out in early June!