I was turned onto this by Tom of Butte.

I’m not big on riding exposure, but you have to if you ride in the  mountains. Add to that some snow and it takes a lot of confidence to remain tranquil. Being a dirt bike rider as well as a mountain bike rider another consideration is getting your motorcycle back on the trail if you happen to go off. You might not get hurt but you might have to hire a helicopter to get your bike.

I just finished up Jack’s frame and sent it off to paint. This is the first frame I’ve done with the optional ($125) Dave Kirk dropouts. The frame looks awesome and the dropouts are a very clean design that I think really contributes to the overall look of the frame. In this case Jack also decided on long taper chainstays so it has a really classic look.

I just finished up a Custom Blend Steel road frame for Don. He’s about as close to home as we’ve delivered in a while. He lives in Hamilton MT. That’s in a valley called the Bitteroot and is where my Mothers side of the family is from. It’s also where Loretta is from and her Father currently runs the family farm. They have a calving operation as well as pigs, veggies and chicken. He actually grazes a lot of his cattle on property owned by Charles Schwab and Huey Lewis. We spend a lot of time in the Bitteroot and hopefully we’ll see Don when we’re there and maybe even go for a ride.

I just finished up Tim’s Custom Blend Titanium with double butted TT and DT. It’s getting Campy Record and Hed Ardennes SL’s. Very nice!

We’re sorry to announce that we will not able to attend NAHBS this year. We have, are, and always will be big fans of NAHBS. We had every expectation of being there but things have suddenly changed for us and for the better. The reason we’re not coming is because we’ll be moving shortly and have a lot of bikes to build prior to our move. We just can’t take the two weeks needed to prepare for and attend NAHBS while still meeting our commitments to current customers. We will truly miss the show and seeing all our friends.

So why are we moving? Let me give you a little background (you can see the full story here, http://www.strongframes.com/my_story/my_story/). About 14 years ago we had a fairly large business building about 250 Strong Frames a year in addition to Ibis Cycles LLC and several other brands. Our total output was just under 1000 frames a year. What we learned from growing our business is that my place is at the bench, not in the office. I’m not cut out to run a large business with employees; I just want to be alone in the shop building frames. In 2004 we decided to shrink the business back to a one man (and women) frame shop.

In 2001, while still building quite a few frames and employing about a dozen people we built our current location. It’s a custom 7000 square foot mixed use space with shop, office, retail and residential in downtown Bozeman. After we shrunk the business back to a one man (and women) shop we rented our extra space to several businesses and worked out of a small portion of the building. But what we really wanted was a framebuilding studio at home. We dreamed of a small building behind our house among our gardens. We called our dream the “10 Year Plan”. It would be a place providing us with privacy, simplicity and would allow us to build fewer frames so we could ride our bikes and travel more.

A couple of summers ago we finally got the nerve to put our building on the market. We were a little worried because of the soft economy but we finally sold it. As a matter of fact we sold it to another local business in the bicycles industry, http://www.twenty6products.com/. We couldn’t be happier that the building has stayed in the bicycle family.

So what that means to us right now is that we are leasing back our space for three months while we build our new dream studio. Mid April we move from our current location and spend a couple months finishing and setting up our new space. During this time we will still be taking calls and orders and doing design work. Once we put the final touches on Strong Frames new home we’ll get back to building frames. We plan to be up and running again sometime between mid June and mid July. So while we’ll have a couple months down it won’t delay any deliveries, so if you were to place an order today you can expect a lead time of about 8 months.