Fuck me.

The new SpeedVagens are out!

click me

And on a totally related note our bikes are coming along nicely. Both front ends are mitered and mocked up for our cross and road bikes.

Almost...

Tubes & Lugs

We've got em! Well, it's actually been some time since a little package arrived at the post office for us, these little tubes of goodness have been sitting in the basement for well over a month now. With work for both Mike and myself starting to slow down it looks like we may actually piece together a couple frames before the summer is over. The both of us still have to make up our minds about what style of frame to make, Mike will more than likely end up with a cross frame and I'm pretty sure that I will stick to a road bike to hang a Di2 group on. Now I just need to convince a certain customer of the shop to fire off some decals for us. Slowly but surely this is coming together.

Spring has sprung.

Well, spring has finally sprung and along with it has come stupid busy days at the shop, long road rides and getting dropped at O-cup road races. With the shop running full pace and the weather in our favour I have been guilty of putting the blog on the back burner for the past few weeks. A few things have been in the works over the past month or so, mainly the decision to jump in balls deep and build up two prototype/practice frames. Mike has sold off most of what wasn't bolted down in his basement to get material to build a jig and I sold off my beloved cross frame to get us some tubing and lugs. The jig is almost done from what I can tell from the daily blackberry messenger updates (see photo). The plan was originally to build single speed cross bikes but that evolved to geared bikes to integrated seat post geared bikes and now I'm thinking about using the tubes to build a road bike and integrate my Di2 group into the frame. I'm pretty sure that Mike will pull off an integrated seatpost cross bike and I will more than likely end up with one balling road bike. Anyways, the tubes should arrive some time this week so updates and pics will shortly follow.

Jigg action

NAHBS: Branding

From the kings of it.

Vanilla Custom Espresso set.

Enjoy.

Toronto International Bike Show: Fail

Where to start... Well, I guess I should start out with the positives and then make my way to the sad truth. There were three booths that I actually enjoyed and was glad to see; True North Cycles, Pinarello and Parlee. True North had a nice set up with a few of their clients bikes and a frame all tacked up and ready for action in their Anvil jig, I also must have counted 57 S&S couplers between the bikes in the booth, very sweet indeed. Moving on I stopped by the Pinarello booth and spoke with the rep for a while about which spring bike race to do; Hell of the North or Tour of Bronte. And then there was Parlee... I love those bikes and creating something anywhere close to those bikes is a definite end goal, it's just a shame that they are rep'd by a bunch of knobs. So from a bike standpoint there was some great eye candy and that's pretty much where it ends. I wasn't there to buy a bike or to get a good "deal" as I'm pretty fucking spoiled over at Via Ciclante so all the sales and hype was pretty much lost on me, leaving me in a position to see the show for what it really was, an excuse for shops to loose money and further the mentality of haggling at bike shops. There was however beer in the food court so I guess it wasn't a total loss. I don't think that I'll ever go back and pay admission again but after walking through the True North booth a total of 5 times I can see the benefit of going as a builder to gain some local exposure, but is local exposure really what we need. Given that I was there with biased eyes I was watching the type of people that were at the show and although there were a few exceptions most of the people that I saw wouldn't appreciate a custom steel bike and would move on to the cheapest and lightest piece of shit that they could find. Clearly Mikey and I need to sit down and have a beer with the True North guys to find out how things went. So, that was that. The day started out with a ride to Port Credit for a coffee run and ended with a beer at the show. I think that I enjoyed my monday much more.

True North Couplers:

Beer:

ya, that's all i got

NAHBS 2010: Sensory overload

So the North American Hand Made Bicycle Show has just wrapped up this past weekend and all I can say is WOW. As usual the normal cycling media outlets did a shit job covering it but good old flickr has a group devoted to NAHBS 2010 where people are dumping hundreds of pictures from the show. While sifting through the pictures there is so much freaking eye candy, this years big trends seem to be polished drops, brazed bar stem combos, and of course Di2 internal set-ups. Next year we are definitely making the trip.

check out the pictures yourself

via flickr

Di2: The future of clean

Just saw this pick on cyclingnews's coverage of NAHBS. Sweet, I'm loving the look of Di2 internal setup, eliminating cable stops and exposed cables really does draw attention to the frame and away from the parts that are hanging on it. Sweeet.