I love to build things, anything. I get a ton of satisfaction from dreaming something up, figuring out how to build it and then building it. Obviously I do a lot of metal fabrication, not only bikes but cars and motorcycles as well as furniture fixtures and anything else I need or want. I am also slowly becoming a woodworker and carpenter. I have a wood shop at my home. It has the basics, table saw, band saw, miter saw as well as a planer and jointer and a host of other tools. In learning about woodworking it seems people fall into one of two camps, those that want to do everything (or most everything) by hand and those that use machines. I’m a machine guy. If there is something that will give me better results faster,  I’m going to use it.

Last winter Loretta and I remodeled our kitchen. We gutted it, removed two bearing walls. We rebuilt all the structural framing including new floor joists in the room above. We also re plumbed , rewired, built all our cabinets, and did all finish and trim ourselves. With the exception of having the floor finished by a pro and having the electrical done by my friend Martin Johnson (a pro) we did everything ourselves. It took 14 months of hard work, long days and living in a mess but we go it done. Below are pictures of the job. I figured I’d share it not only because I’m proud of it but also to give you a little insight to my passion for building things. I’ll share other projects in the future from time to time as well.

I’m always looking for ways to improve things around the shop. I think creativity needs to go beyond the frames I make and should be applied to the entire business. One of the things I really enjoy is creating the “ultimate” framebuilding shop. One of the problems that I’ve been dealing with is the unforeseen consequences of too much glass. I have a  glass wall on my office and a glass door that makes up a good portion of the front of the shop. The two problems with the glass are morning sun and visitors.

The morning sun isn’t a  huge problem but to deal with it I’ve hung a welding drape on the door and that’s pretty much taken care of the problem. The visitors are another things all together. I like visitors, it’s nice to break up the day and I enjoy the company.  The problem is I don’t get to choose when people stop by or how many stop by in a day. I can easily have four or five separate visits each thirty minutes or more. That means that  I can literally loose a good portion of my production time to visitors. So what I’ve decided to do is to build a pony wall between the glass and my work area. That will allow me to put up a Do Not Disturb sign and lock the door without the weird component of the person being able to see me in the shop working.

The sign won’t go up much, but there are times that I need to get something done or am working a particularly challenging project and I don’t want to be distracted. Hopefully the wall will work and things will run a little more smoothly around here.  And to those of you that visit or plan to visit, just know if you drop by unannounced and the door is locked and the sign is up, come back later. On the flip side, if the sign isn’t up you can feel at ease knowing you are welcome to drop in. Just remember I’m at work and unless you are here on business you need to keep your visit short.

I started building Nate’s Ti road frame yesterday. It’s a classic road race frame and will be getting Sram Red parts and an Edge fork. I expect it to be very light. I should be finishing the frame this week and shipping next week so keep an eye out. I’ll post things as they progress.

Here is the titanium road bike we just finished assembling for Joe S. The front half is painted, it has the new Sram Force which looks very nice and an Alpha Q fork. We did a little test ride around the block and the Force worked very nicely. We’ll have to wait to hear how it works over the long haul. Also this week I finished Scott H’s titanium road frame and steel fork and am now moving on to a bendy MTB that I’ll be posting pictures of later in the week.

For those of you that may be interested I have a Proshop page that I use to sell blem, mistake and sample frames. I’ve added a couple so I thought I let everyone know. They can be seen here: Proshop. Once the new site it up, I’ll start including parts and other old stock items I have laying around.