Tom is your classic long torso/arm, short inseam guy. He’s been forced to ride bikes that are too short for him in order to be able to standover the toptube. Not a problem for a custom. Tom’s custom frame 54.5 cm toptube and a 47cm (C to T) seatube, allows for plenty of standover and all the reach that he needs. We coupled the frame with a custom unicrown fork using Columbus Nivacrom fork blades. It goes off to paint tomorrow where it will receive a very cool white tone on tone paint job. As soon as it’s  back we’ll post it on “Back from Paint”.

I’ll be out of the shop Friday the 13th through Monday the 16th. I’m going down to the Salt Flats for the races this weekend to help crew for some friends of mine the Montana Dodge Boys. They run a 1928 Dodge and this year a supercharger has been added which should give them at least 30mph. Should be a good time. I’ll be back on Tuesday to resume my regular schedule. Check out the video.

I won’t get on a soap box but anyone who has talked to me about building knows I don’t believe in batching frames…well at least most of the time. The notable exceptions are when I do a bunch of frames that are nearly identical or if they are promo or test frames.  So I haven’t posted a lot lately for a couple reasons. First is that I’ve been building the 10 “Carl’s Personal Blend” frames…as a batch. Because they are all based on the same basic concept I thought I try to find some efficiencies doing them in a couple batches. For the record, I don’t think it was any faster than building them one at a time, at least not the way I do it.

The second batch is carbon frames. I have a really good reason or doing the carbon frames in batches and that ’s cure time. There are four cure processes each frame undergoes. So while I am waiting for one to cure I can work on another. I can concurrently build four carbon frames and that way I’m in the carbon frame of mind, using carbon specific tools and fixtures and using my dust filter. Below are a couple pictures of some of the batches.

I’ll be out of town Friday 8/6 through Monday 8/9. Back at the bench on Tuesday. I won’t be checking my email or phone messages until I return.

Here is a titanium road frame with couplers for Nghia. It’s at paint now having custom panels done along with bare titanium and is going to look very nice.