The great champion Laurent Fignon recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. I always had great admiration for him. It’s unfortunate that he may be best remembered for his ‘loss’ to Greg LeMond by 8 seconds in the tightest Tour de France in history as opposed to the two Tours that he did will – and win with panache.

It was his loss to LeMond that cemented my respect for Fignon and the grace in which he handled it. I don’t recall him ever making excuses or saying a bad word about LeMond. That was not the way he worked. IMO, the sign of a true Champion.

Velonews has a very nice homage to him along with some photos of Laurent during his racing career. He was a beautiful rider and that can even been seen in still photograghs. I’m sure if you search YouTube  you will find video of his beautiful pedaling style and his warm smile. You can find it here – http://velonews.competitor.com/2010/08/news/racers-french-leaders-pay-tribute-to-laurent-fignon_137504

All hail Fignon.

Dave

I’m pleased to call Dario Pegoretti a friend. I get to spend time with him once a year usually and it never lasts as long as I would like. We trade an email or two and even with the language barrier one can feel the genuine warmth that comes from the man. When we do get to talk the subject most often starts with bikes but quickly shifts to friends, family, mountains, good wine, beautiful women……… etc.

With this as a background I was very pleased to see that the a film has been made about Dario. The film has little to do with bikes and it mostly about Dario and the obvious passion that drives the man. As I understand it this film is available online for a short period of time so if you can’t wach it that is most likely the reason why.

So I present to you Dario Pegoretti. Enjoy.

Dave

http://www.rapha.cc/of-steel–trailer

I just got this JK Special Terraplane back from JB and it looked so good to me I just had to share. How do you like it?

Dave

by guest blogger Karin Kirk

Early August brings Bozeman’s biggest community celebration, the Sweet Pea Festival of the Arts. It’s three days of music, dance, arts vendors and general outdoor liveliness in a lovely park setting. It’s called the Sweet Pea Festival because it’s centered around the beautiful, fragrant and ephemeral sweet pea flowers which seem to peak around this time of year. Sweet peas are a springtime flower in most places, but here springtime means snow so sweet peas don’t really get going until summer. However sweet peas don’t like heat either, so there seems to be some magical window of not too hot yet not too cold during which sweet peas prosper.

A fairly minor part of the Sweet Pea Festival is the sweet pea flower show. Upon moving here and starting our gardens I realized it was my civic duty to grow sweet peas so I set up teepee stakes and grew them in several colors. When the weekend of the flower show competition arrived, I cut the choicest stems and lovingly delivered them to the flower show tent. When I arrived, proudly bearing my flowers, the women checking in the entries looked at my tiny stems and asked in a sympathetic tone, “Is this your first time?” Hmm, was it that obvious? She showed me the real contenders, tall stems with 5 or 6 lavishly ruffled flowers in exotic colors. My flowers did look rather “quaint” in comparison, with just 2 flowers per stem.

I’m a determined gardener, so I took that early lesson to heart and spent the next 9 years trying to grow reasonable sweet pea flowers. I knew I would never have the dedication to produce champion blooms, but at least I’d like to be mid-pack rather than an obvious first-timer. I ordered seeds from several catalogs, I constructed various trellis structures. I grew them in different parts of the yard, searching for that magical zone where they would flourish. All the while, I saw nicer sweet peas casually growing at the gas station, on campus and at everyone else’s house. Worst of all, I endured condescending advice from gardeners about how easy it was to produce huge stems.

Then last year I had a breakthrough. By late June I had enormous sweet pea flowers. Long stems, vibrant flowers, the works. I cut huge bouquets and had enough to share with friends. If they were this good in June, just imagine how great they’d be by August! Well when the weekend arrived, my sweet peas had completely exhausted themselves. I couldn’t even find two decent stems to enter into the contest. Dang it.

This year I tried again, as always. I ordered up more seeds, kept better track of each variety and the timing of their flowers, and did my usual fawning over their progress throughout our fitful spring weather.

Sure enough, by early August I had some promising stems with 4 flowers per stem – a record for me. I crossed my fingers and planned to show up at the flower show again. I brought my finest stems to the flower show tent and did not get scoffed at. A good start. After I entered my stems I inspected the other entries and did not see many others with 4 flowers per stem. Most had shorter stems than mine. Hmm. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter how I did, it was just good to be mid-pack which was my original goal. I tried hard to convince myself that I didn’t need to come back for the ribbons to see how I did.  Shockingly, Dave didn’t believe a word of my compelling rhetoric.

OK, so I was dying to go back and see the results. After my initial embarrassment and years of trying the suspense had mounted. Sure enough, my sweet pea stem was adorned with a blue ribbon! Not just mid-pack, mind you! I will be quick to point out that there were Grand Champion flowers that were better than mine, but I had won the single stem competition with a spike of bright pink flowers.

At last, my civic duty to produce sweet peas has been met! And yes, I will grudgingly admit that the competitive side of me is satisfied too.

No two bikes I build are the same and that certainly goes for these two. They are both steel and they are both built using fillets to allow to to use the tube sizes and angles I feel are best for the rider and beyond that they share little.

The smaller bike in the foreground is built for a small and light rider for general road and sport use. Because of the frame size (46 cm c-c) and the light weight of the rider I chose to use old school tubing diameters – 1″ top tube and 1 1/8″ down tube. A rider this size certainly doesn’t need an uber stiff bike and would certainly get beat up by a bike with the modern ‘oversize’ tubing that is used in most steel framesets. It uses very light chainstays to also just a bit of give to allow for a nice spring to it out of the saddle and it of course uses the new Triple F Kirk dropouts. This frame weighs in just a shade over 3 lbs.

The bike in the background is of course also fillet brazed and was built that way for the same reason as the small bike – the tubes and angles best suited to the rider will not allow for the use of lugs. This bike is a fully loaded touring bike built for a big guy who will be carrying a good 75 lbs of year on cross country tours. This frame needs to be very stiff to give it good handling with all that weight on the bike. You can see it has much longer chainstays that the smaller bike (a full 46 cm long) to give heal the bag clearance and a stable ride downhill. It also uses very old school Campagnolo 1010A dropouts with the long slot (let’s the rider run it as a single speed should the shifting system die in the middle of nowhere) hooked to beefy oversize chainstays. The main tubes on the bike are ‘double oversize’  - 1 1/4″ top and 1 3/8″ down with a pretty heavy wall to keep things in one piece regardless of where the bike is taken and how hard it is used. The frame weighs a solid 4.75 lbs.

These two bikes are both good examples of why fillets are sometimes used on my custom builds. Sometimes the bikes are built with fillets just for that seamless organic look and sometimes it’s just the best way to go.

It’s fun to see these two together and a rare thing that I have more than one frame in the shop. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to let you see them together so you could compare and contrast.

Thanks for reading.

Dave

I wish I was good enough with a camera to take photos that do this paint job justice. It’s so warm and clean and classic. It’s headed to it’s new home as I type and should be there soon.

Enjoy.

Dave

I don’t normally use this space to post a link to send you somewhere else but I came across this and it was just too good to not share.

This year the Tour de France celebrated the 100th anniversary of including the beautiful and brutal climb up the Tourmalet into the tour route. Here is a group of photos taken over that 100 year period of riders conquering the mountain. If you can take your time and let them sink in. They are quite special IMO. As you’ll see things used to be even more difficult than they are now. In fact when the Tourmalet was first included in Le Tour the riders protested saying that they would die trying to get over the mountain and that their blood would be on the hands of the Tour organizers. When you see the conditions they rode in and on the machines they used it seems like less of an exaggeration.

http://www.lequipemag.fr/EquipeMag/Reportages/PORTFOLIO_100-ans-de-tourmalet.html#scroll

Enjoy,

Dave

In my 20+ years of being a framebuilder there has always been one frame part that left me cold and that has been the rear dropouts. Over the years I’ve had the chance to design a few dropouts but time and budget always compromised the design. Well being on my own has allowed me to design the dropout I’ve always wanted, cost be damned.

Enter the “Triple F’ dropout. The name “Triple F’ stands for “Form Follows Function” and as you can see there is nothing extra or blingy about these dropouts. They are designed to be as minimalist as possible while still being strong enough for the largest rider to use the rest of their lives. The Triple F is machined from 4130 steel which is stronger and more fatigue resistant than most of the stainless dropouts on the market so the chance that one will ever break is almost nonexistent.

The simple design allows for the stays to be square cut on the ends and eliminates the need to slot the stays or give them a compound angle miter. This saves a huge amount of time. In my testing and prototyping I’ve found that I’m saving about 45 minutes per bike using the Triple F compared to a Breeze style dropout and even more when compared to a traditional plate style dropout.

There are two balls machined into the dropout for the stays to attach to and they allow for stays of different diameters and wall thicknesses to be joined to the dropout and almost any angle. This makes it simple to build most any sized frame and to attach curved stays if the builder wishes. The square cut ends of the stays mean that it’s quick and easy to get the stays to the exact right length – a few seconds on the disc sander is all it takes and there is no need to file a slot deeper into the stay to get the right length. The ball and socket interface also means that the builder can rotate the stay to the desired position on the dropout to get bent or ovalized stays to be in phase with one another.

Stays can be attached to the Triple F by either fillet brazing or TIG welding. When fillet brazing the heat is applied to the concave surface nearest the axle slot to preheat the ball and then brass can be pulled into the joint. The acute angle that the inside of the stay makes with the ball allows the builder to form a large internal fillet for strength and a small aesthetic fillet on the outside to blend the stay and the dropout together seamlessly.

The Triple F is also designed to be a ‘centerline” dropout – meaning that the axle lands the centerline of the chainstay. This means that the angle that the chain stay leaves the bottom bracket is true and that the stay will not be loaded into the BB socket at an angle. For anyone that has built lugged frames with Breeze dropouts this is a big deal.

I suppose many of you are wondering why I am sharing all this detail. It’s because as of today I am offering the Triple F to other insured framebuilders to use in their own frames. Because I’ve picked what must be one of the most complex shapes known to man to machine they aren’t cheap. But there is much time and frustration to be saved in using the Triple F and and I suspect that for many builders the cost will be more than worth it. The cost for a pair of Triple F’s is $110 plus shipping and they are only available to builders who can show proof of insurance. I have a one time offer to allow builders to try a single pair of Triple F’s at a lower cost of $85.

Interested builders should contact me by phone (800 605 5475) or email (info@kirkframeworks.com) to ask questions or place orders.

These dropouts are the first in what I hope will be an ever expanding group of framebuilding parts for the discriminating professional builder. The first product was the brass barrel adjusters, now the Triple F rear dropouts and the matching Triple F front dropouts are next on the horizon.

Thanks for looking.

Dave

I was just going through photos on my machine to clean out duplicates and the such and enjoyed looking at some of them………… so I figured you might enjoy looking at them too. Some of these are old and others not. Let me know which photos you like.

Dave