I’m getting a little geeky these days. It’s Fall and Fall is my Winter season, and Winter is my Spring season, etc. Typically in the Fall I start turning my attention to things like my website, writing copy, taking new pictures, working on the shop, getting ready for NAHBS, etc. So one of the things I’ve done is started a Facebook page for Strong Frames this weekend. I thought it would be a fun place to put pictures and videos and also give people a opportunity to chime in. It’s a lot more interactive than my blog and seems like it might be fun. I also thought it would give Loretta and me a place to put the massive amount pictures and video that we can’t practically put in our blog or on our site. Todd (my web guy) has also set up the blog so that it posts across to the Facebook page as well as Twitter. We’ll also be integrating it with Flicker soon. Hopefully as more people start using Facebook it will replace my email list entirely. If you would like to join the email newsletter list or our Facebook page, please follow the links below to do so. We hope to see you there.

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If you use Safari and are having trouble with our new site, try clearing your cache. That seems to take care of most problems. If trouble persist, please contact me. All other browsers seem to work  fine.

So as I’m sure most have guessed, I’m not perfect. I know it may be hard to believe but from time to time I make mistakes. So for this week my mistake was to cut Dominic’s DT exactly 1cm too short. So while I waited for a new DT to arrive (I didn’t have a spare in stock) I got some work done on the next bike in queue for Tom P.

Tom’s frame is a curvy tube titanium MTB 29er. It’s really sexy and I expect a lot of people are going to contact me wanting the curved tubes. To nip this in a the bud, I’d like to say this is a special circumstance and unfortunately I won’t be offering this style as an option.

Last but not least,my sister-in-law Tamara is apparently a very talented artist, especially when the medium is a kids drawing toy. Here she is proudly displaying her latest work of art…a portrait of me. Obviously she was good to me when she did it. I don’t look nearly that young.

New site. We still have a little work to do but for the most part here it is. We’ll be posting a new Owner’s Gallery soon as well as a couple new pages on material and ordering and a few other tweaks. We’ll also be adding a lot of new images in the galleries. Loretta has been working hard collecting and editing images and I think it shows. Take a look and let us know what you think.

I’m building a lot of titanium right now. John Caletti and I were kidding that “TIG’d  titanium is the new lugged steel”. Here is a couple shots of a butted titanium road frame with custom Chainstays, BB30 and InSet Headtube, it will be coupled with an Edge 1.0 fork.

John Caletti is an up and coming frame builder out of Santa Cruz. He one of the nicest guys you could meet. I met him at the NAHBS show in San Jose and have talked with him quite a bit over the years.  He contacts me from time to time with questions about process and business and things like that. I mentioned if he ever wanted to come up and spend a little time here to see how I did things he was welcome to. Well.. he got here on Sunday and is staying through the week. Basically he’ll be a fly on the wall so he can watch me do what I do, the way I do it and ask questions. Unlike most of the Framebuilders I mentor, John is actually established, with  tooling and producing very nice frames. I think no matter how much we all know there is a lot we all can learn. John is smart and he knows how to use his resources.  So far I’ve learned a lot from him as well.

This week’s work is to put the final touches on the Extralite Steel frame with a InSet HT I built last week for Curtis and start building Dominic’s Ti frame which also has a InSet headtube. I have a loaner cutter coming up from Chris King so they both have to be complete and ready when it gets here. Then I’m going to finally finish Tom P’s curvy TT, DT,ST,SS and CS titanium 29er. Man does this frame have some work in it. It’s got a TT with a compound bend that I just couldn’t get so I finally gave up on bending the tubes myself and begged Curtis Inglis to do it… really, I begged him. He sent them back last week and they are perfect, that guys got skills! Now the frame should go very smoothly and it’s going to be very cool.

Bent Tubes by Inglis

Dominic Ready to Build