My post here awhile back about my BMX coach Joe got me thinking – none of us would get very far without the support of others. We all truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

One of the giants in my life is Ben Serotta. I’ve written some about how I came to work for Ben (http://www.kirkframeworks.com/blog/2009/03/07/history/) back in 1989 and it was a bit convoluted and messy. The short of it is that I was approached and hired by Ben’s right hand man – a guy named Rory. I’d given notice at my bike shop job and was excited to start work at Serotta in a very few weeks and called Rory to get advice on housing in the area. He told me there was going to be a slight delay in my starting but nothing was wrong and asked if I could start not in 2 weeks as was planned, but in 4. Ok…….that will work. Not ideal but it will work. And then the delay turned into 4 weeks and then 6 and 8 and I knew there was no job for me and I stopped calling. During this time I’d never had a conversation with Ben aside from the initial interview.

I move on thinking the Serotta gig is in the past and a few years later I get a call at home one night from Ben Serotta. He told me he’d just heard how I was treated a few years before and wanted me to know that Rory was long gone. He apologized and asked if I’d consider interviewing once again for a job. Frankly I think this took balls on his part. He had no idea how I’d react and thought I might tell him to step off. But he was sincere and genuine and it just felt right so I agreed to interview. This was the moment when I learned that Ben was a man of ethics and morals. He didn’t know me from Adam and no doubt could have not made that awkward call and just gone down the list to the next name – but he did make the call.

I did end up working for Ben the second time around and frankly it was a mixed bag at first. It was a tough place to work and the work was hard and fast. I didn’t see Ben much back then as he spent most of his time in the office or on the road promoting the brand. But there were times I got to see how he worked and to work along side him. We were always a bit short staffed on the production floor and if someone were out sick we would fall behind. In these cases Ben would pop into the shop and pull on some goggles and fire up the torch. I recall thinking that I doubt he knew how to do braze well after all the time at a desk but I was flat out wrong. He would fire up the torch and make it scream and get the job done. He was fast and efficient and most of all comfortable doing the work and one could see it from a distance. I liked very much that he wasn’t above getting his hands dirty to help out. His actions and demeanor taught me a lot.

Over the years I worked my way up in the company and my relationship with Ben had its ups and downs. I’ll bet there was a time where both of us would have said that we didn’t care for one another very much – we butted heads a good bit. But I was young and cocky and trying to make my mark on the world and probably didn’t see things as they really were. One thing I realized that Ben and I had in common was that we both wanted Serottas to be the best money could buy – no holds barred. Our common goals lead to our working closely together over time and I’m proud to say that out relationship shifted and morphed and we became friends.

Over time my job changed from being the custom builder to being the head of the R&D department. It was here that Ben’s shoulders got wide and I stood on them in a big way. Ben gave me a lot of room to develop products and was always there for me. He bumped me back on the proper path when I started to go in the wrong direction and yet somehow never got in my way. When I had the idea to make a road bike with a passive suspension (arguably a kooky idea at the time) he listened to my reasoning, saw the passion I had for the idea and then set me loose to work on it. This is extremely unusual in the bike biz where money is tight and each investment needs to pay for itself in very short order. The Hors Categorie took 14 months to develop, test, and produce the tooling for and he could have cut me off at any time – but he never did. His experience that told him that it was worth the time and effort and he let it all happen. I will always be grateful to him for that. He gave me the room I needed and helped me learn to think critically about design and the business of framebuilding.

I had been with Serotta for about 9 years when Karin and I visited Montana on a ski vacation and we fell in love with this place. It was very hard to walk into Ben’s office and give him notice that I’d be leaving the company but I knew it was the right thing to do. I gave about 8 months notice and worked very closely with Ben to hire and train my replacement. When I finally did leave it was with mixed feelings but Ben was very supportive through the entire thing. Since then any time I needed anything from Ben he was there for me. I feel I can say with certainty that without Ben and his support, guidance and friendship that I would never have been able to do what I wanted to do when I grew up – become a professional bicycle framebuilder.

I don’t get to see or talk with Ben as much as I would like at this point. Being busy as we both are and living 2500 miles apart has a way of cutting down on the face time. I do get to see him when I travel to NAHBS each year and we seem to pick up right where we left off the year before. In a perfect world I’d be able to work on a joint project with Ben at some point. That would be fun.

Thanks Ben for being my giant.

Dave

Travel bikes really do rock. If you travel and like to stay fit or explore by bike while away from home is sure is nice to have a real proper fitting bike that is fully “LHR” (long hard ride) worthy. I’ve been building a good number of bikes with the S&S couplers built into them and I’ve shown in this space how that kind of work is done. It’s very simple to build them in from the start – you install the coupler into the tube and then treat it like any other tube during the build and ‘voila!’  – you then have a bike that breaks into two pieces and then will fit into a 26” x 26” x 10” hardcase that you can fly with and just check as luggage. Pretty cool.

There is of course another way to do this and that is with an existing bike. Karin has family that lives in Europe and she likes to visit and have a bike there to use for rides in the Alps. So a number of years ago we took an old rattle-can purple Serotta we had hanging on a hook and put some budget parts on it and shipped it over so it would be there for her visits. It’s old and heavy and doesn’t fit that well but was fine for riding to a coffee shop. That said it falls way short when she brings it into the high Alps. So we decided to take her old Kirk and cut it up and install couplers in it for such trips and I thought I’d document how that retrofit is done.

The first thing is to set the jig to match the built frame so that once you cut it in half that you can properly orient the two halves relative to one another. This is a very important step.

Next you need to decide where the couplers will be inserted and then cut out the chunk of tube that the coupler will replace. I’ve marked this with special high-tech masking tape where I will cut the two pieces out and then into the vice it goes for the cutting. Way back when it bothered me to take a perfectly good frame and pass a saw blade through it but now I don’t think twice about it. Measure twice – cut once as they say.

The 35 mm pieces that get removed are then set on the shelf as an interesting conversation starter until I get tired of cleaning around them and toss them in with the other steel into the recycling bin.

You can see in the photos that I have set front and rear ends of the frame into the jig to check that the tubes have the proper gap between them. This part looks odd.

Now I dry-fit the couplers in place and put the whole deal in the jig to make sure everything is just right before brazing them in. With that check done I move onto cleaning everything very, very well. The frame has rust proofing goo in it that needs to be removed and everything needs to be sanded and cleaned and re-cleaned. I also clean the couplers themselves well and install the ‘work nut’ onto them. It’s a simple nut that can go through the brazing process without getting messed up. The pretty nut will replace it later.

With everything very clean and ready to go I slop flux onto everything and place it all back in the jig and carefully braze both couplers in. The photos show the after effects of this with glass hard flux coating everything. I also change the cable routing at this time both on the top tube for the brake and the head tube for the derailleur cables. I remove the treaded adjusters and replace them with split cable guides to make the whole thing easier to deal with when packing/unpacking. Once cool it goes into a hot water bath to soak the flux off and then everything gets cleaned and polished.

At this point it’s ready to have repainted. Karin tells me she’s thinking it will be red this time. It’s hard to picture her on anything but a light blue bike – we’ll see.

Happy Travels.

Dave

Once you see the leaves start to fall and cross bikes hit the dirt you know it’s fall. While a bit early this bike will be ready for cross riding soon. The paint scheme is the result of a collaboration of the owner, JB, and an artist named Mark Lueck. It’s one of those paint jobs that draws you in and makes you smile as you find more  and more to look at. Fun stuff.

Dave

I realized this morning that it’s ben a few days since I posted anything here. I’ve been at the bench working hard with my nose to the grindstone tying to get a bit ahead of schedule so that I can take a few days off without holding up the queue. It feels good to get lots of  bikes out the door and off to JB.

So here are a few photos of a few of these recent bikes. One a JKS Terraplane and the other a fillet bike with XL tubes. I have some painted bikes coming back from JB this week and will post those when they come in.

More later – thanks for looking.

Dave

Over the years, between racing and framebuilding, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with some wonderful people. As some of you might know I started in this business by racing BMX as a young man.  At the age of 17 I left home and moved from Central New York State to the Panhandle of Florida and right into a hotbed of BMX racing. I lived in the very small military town of Niceville (I couldn’t make up a better name) and raced my BMX bike all over the Florida Panhandle. At some point I met a good ol’ Southern boy named Joe who had a kid that was also racing. Joe was a 45ish year old (but very high mileage) little bearded man who had muscular dystrophy and I later came to find out was also an alcoholic. His southern accent was so thick I couldn’t tell what he what he was saying a good part of the time. He walked with a big limp and could barely even ride a bike but he had a real eye for good riding and knew how to motivate a young man like myself to work harder and ride smarter. There were times when he knew I was having trouble making ends meet and he would tell me to come out to his place for some sprints and training on his back yard track and then to stay for dinner. It was really just his way of getting me to stay for dinner and have a real meal. In time he became my coach and I traveled with he and his family to events all over the southeast chasing fame and glory and really tall trophies.

I wanted to be one of the big names like Greg Hill or Stu Thompson but in retrospect I didn’t have what it took to do that. But Joe believed in me and put a huge amount of time and energy into my training and racing. Many long nights at the track (racing was done at night, under the lights, when it was cooler) with Joe having me do starts over and over and over again until they looked just right to him. He had a very good eye and knew when it was being done right. We started having some bigger successes and traveling farther to events and attracting attention from teams that wanted me to race for them. This was what might have been the golden age of BMX racing, before freestyle became so big, and the big bike companies put a huge amount of resources into racing. Lots of money was changing hands. I dreamt of being on the receiving end of that money and Joe was doing his best to coach his son and I to that end. The only real way to get there was to win enough to get the attention of a major factory team that would pick up the expenses for racing and travel. Racing 3-4 times a week and traveling 6-8 hours each way on weekends becomes very expensive, very quickly, but was needed to reach that top tier.

Joe and I met with some smaller regional team managers at some of the big races and while their offers were better than nothing they wouldn’t pay as much as we needed to make a go of it so we held out for something bigger. Then Joe got us a meeting with Gary Turner. Gary Turner was the ‘GT’ of GT Bicycles and they were the 800 pound gorilla at the time. If anyone could afford to send us around the country racing it was going to be Mr. Turner and his company GT. I was very nervous and was scheduled to race my preliminary motos that morning before our meeting and knew I’d better kick some butt so I could tell Mr. Turner that I was doing well and had a good chance of winning that weekend. It’s hard to ask for money when you stunk it up just an hour earlier. My morning races went well and soon it was time to meet with Mr. Turner. Joe got me cleaned up and told me to come with him. It was obvious to anyone that knew me that I was very I was nervous. It was certainly obvious to Joe and he told me to relax. Joe knew better than I that winning races was only part of what Turner was looking for and that I needed to look confident and relaxed so that I could give good interviews and represent GT well. But I was not confident and relaxed – I was gripped. The time came for us to meet and Joe and I started walking across a big grassy area outside the track – I think it was in Memphis – to meet Mr. Turner. I could see Turner from a long way away and we waved a hello and Joe slowly limped his way across the clearing. Joe then stopped and turned to me and looked me right in the eye. I couldn’t help but think, ‘what the hell are you doing? – let’s not keep the many waiting’. Joe looked me in the eye and with the thickest southern drawl one can imagine asked me a question. “ Do you know what a ‘buddy’ is?” He then answered his own question with “a buddy is a wart on the dick of a dawg” and had the biggest shit-eating grin on his face.

What the hell was that about? I’m so confused at this point and we start walking toward Mr. Turner again. We get close and there are smiles all around and Joe reaches out his hand to Turner and greets him with “Hey Buddy, howz it going?” I started laughing out loud. In fact I could not keep a straight face at this point. All my nervousness was gone and suddenly it seemed so much less important. The meeting was fine but in the end went nowhere but I will never forget Joe and how he took care of me and taught me how life worked. In that one short ‘Buddy’ moment he taught me that some things are not as important as they might seem.

In time I moved away from the area but went back and visited a number of years later and Joe wasn’t doing that well to be honest. His kid was off at college and without the focus of racing he’d fallen off the wagon and was drinking again. Not good. That was nearly 25 years ago now and I suspect that Joe might no longer be with us at this point. He’d lived a hard life and had some very bad luck……….but he taught many of us so much. Thanks Joe. I think of you often.

Dave

This one now lives in the heartland of the good ol’ US of A. I look forward to seeing it all built up and under it’s owner.

Dave