Weekend Off

Well, looks like next weekend is the one in which I’ll be finishing the 29′er frame. Paul’s wife is having a c-section and delivering their fourth on Friday. Not an ideal weekend for Paul and I to be in the garage making tons of noise.

I’ve started to look at my schedule/timelines and I need to seriously get that frame done and off to paint next week. Plus order paint masks and get the head tube badge design off to the artist.

Busy!

The 29′er

Production on this custom steel 29′er is finally wrapped up, and the paint work is complete. The bike is a tribute to a feline friend who died far too young and far too suddenly. Not only does the paint reflect the pattern of her fur, but some of her ashes have been mixed in with the black, so that a little bit of her soul is embodied in the machine.

The story behind this bike is the story behind the founding of Pallas Athena Custom Bicycles. During the summer of 2009, I had been saving money to purchase a 29′er mountain bike frame. I had been home from vacation for a week, when my cat, Mooch, threw a blood clot into her right front leg. A trip to the emergency vet, the follow-up work, testing, and eventual euthanasia (due to metastatic cancer) and cremation of my best friend, not only wiped out my bike savings, but wiped out a good chunk of our joint savings, as well. My fianceé went back to North Carolina, where she was in the middle a 5-month business trip, and I spent a lot of the next week alone in the house, grieving for my friend, and contemplating life and how it frequently seems too short.

Two months later, I met Paul Wyganowski at Minnecycle, a mini-show for local framebuilders. We got to talking, and I decided to embark on something I’d dreamed of doing and never pursued: learning the craft of building bicycle frames. I had decided that life was too short to waste time daydreaming. Right away, I decided that my first frame would be a 29′er mountain bike and it would be a tribute to my pal, who loved the outdoors and had a strange fascination with bicycles.

And so, after more than a hundred hours of work, and countless more of learning, I have a rigid (but suspension-corrected) 29′er, and the first excursion was an incredible experience. I went out and rode, and once I got past my analysis of how the frame rode, it was a time for quiet reflection. My little buddy was with me for those few hours, and as much as she changed my life the first time around, she was with me at the start of a whole new chapter.

Materials: 4130 chromoly steel, Suntour rear dropouts.
Features: internal routing for brake cables through top tube and through fork, eccentric bottom bracket, biaxial-ovalized downtube

View this bike elsewhere: Flickr, Velospace.

Of Course

I’m just wrapping up with the HTML/CSS on the new website template, and the CMS (content management system) I’m using has a new version releasing soon. So new, in fact, that I need to sit back and take stock and determine whether to push forward with the current version (which will allow for fast coding of the template), or whether I should venture into the unknown.

A Minor Update

Things are going well here. It’s pretty quiet on the frame building front, as I didn’t have a session with Paul this weekend. In the meantime, I’ve been working on other things.

The website redesign is going well. There’s some fine-tuning required for some of the layout stuff, but all in all, I’m pleased with my progress. I’m concentrating on giving it 30-60 minutes per day and if it goes well, I should be done by the end of this week. I’ll have a full write-up in here, either as a blog entry or a section in the forthcoming FAQ. Either way, you’ll end up with an idea of how it all came to be.

Yesterday, my research led me to a good image of an owl, which I’ll be using as the basis for my head tube badge. I hope to spend some serious time on that tonight.

Business cards. Need to design those and get that stuff to my letterpress geek (hi, Jenni!) so that I can have those ready for Minnecycle 2010. Should be pretty easy, now that I have my typography figured out, my logotype done, etc. I’d like to have a vectorized version of the head tube badge to put on it, too. We’ll see. I need to pick Jenni’s brain a bit as to what’s possible and what isn’t.

Paint masks. I need to spend some time in Adobe Illustrator and get the logotypes and everything else in there and then order up a batch ASAP so that they’re ready for when the 29′er goes off to paint.

Also, there’s that lugged commuter frameset I have underway. I need to figure out a color scheme for it, posthaste. I’ve already got the parts, and there’s a bunch of red anodized stuff in there. I’ve been thinking silver, but that’s awfully understated, given that the 29′er is going to be black and white.

Groundwork has been laid for tools/infrastructure/space — something I need to have some more discussions on this coming weekend — and I’m hoping that that can last me the next two years or so.

So, yeah, even when I’m not building, I’m still making progress. And that’s a good thing.

The Treehugger

This is another test post for checking out the new site theme that’s forthcoming. Please ignore it.

The Tribute

This is a temporary post. It is here strictly for testing purposes.