Here is yet another frameset that is on it’s way to its new home in Canada. This one is a JKS Classic with Terraplane stays and is painted in such a way that it looks dripping wet. Here are a few shots of the bike during the build process and just the other day when it came home from JB’s.

Have a good Monday and thanks for looking,

Dave

I just sent this frameset out to its new Canadian home and wanted to share the before and after paint photos. Kind of cool to look at it this way.

Thanks for looking,

Dave

Hey,

I’ve had a number of bikes go out the door over the past few weeks and thought I’d share some photos of them. This first one is a JKS X that was painted in an homage to an old school Masi and decked out with Campy Super Record, a 3T stem and bars and a Thomson post. You’ll note that the wheels in the photos don’t match – this is because I built the bike up with a rear wheel that the customer sent me and the front wheel used to set up the bike is from Karin’s bike. This saved the owner from having to send both wheels to me for the build.

This JKS X is on it’s way to it’s new home as I type and he should have it soon. I look forward it being there and then getting the ride report from the owner.

Hey Tim – Enjoy the ride!

Dave

It’s an unusual thing to be able to go out for a road ride in late November in Montana but this fall has been stange. It was in the 40′s yesterday and 50° today. I got out and went for a dirt road ride up in the Bridger Mountains and it was wonderful. No wind, warmish and cool light over the valley. This ride is short at about 20 miles but it has a great mix of dirt and pavement and little to no traffic. Leaving the house you climb steadily for about 4 miles until you are at the top of the “Grand View” area and then it rolls up and down for a few miles before heading back into the valley. It’s hard to not stop and take in the view of the valley and surrounding mountain chains when up here.

I brought Karin’s little point & shoot camera along and while none of these photos will win any awards they will give you a bit of a taste of what fall looks like In Bozeman.

Happy Holidays,

Dave

Here is a frameset that I just finished yesterday afternoon and it’s headed off to JB for paint. It’s a JKS X, with it’s XL sized tubes, that is built around Shimano Dura-Ace Di2. It makes for a super clean set up with all the wiring inside the tubes. All the wiring ports have reinforcing plates to keep things lifetime strong and there is a port in the bottom bracket to allow the wire to come out and head to the battery that is held on the underside of the non-driveside chainstay. The BB port is dead center on the bottom of the shell so that water will not collect in the shell while allowing the frame to ‘breathe’ and stay dry inside.

I look forward to building it up after JB works his magic.

Have a great weekend.

Dave

I just got this photo photo in from a repeat customer in Belgium. It’s a fillet brazed Kirk set for the rigors of commuting in Belgium – lights, fenders and all. Good stuff.

Dave

I’m working on a JKS X and enjoying the view from my shop window. There are times when I wonder why we moved to a place that has such a long winter and then I look out the window and see the setting sun on the snow covered mountains and I suddenly remember why.

Not bad I say.

Dave

It had been a very long time. The last bike race I’d done was a solid 15 years ago. At some point racing was the most important thing in my life but times and priorities change over time and without really ‘quitting’ I found that I didn’t race any more. In retrospect there were two things that kept me from racing the way I had in the past – the first being that I had developed back problems that turned out to be a few bulging discs and this made deep training less than rewarding. The other and more compelling reason was that after racing BMX, mountain and road bikes for 16 years I just didn’t have the competitive drive any more. It just seemed silly to toe up to the line when I really didn’t care if I won. In the past I wanted to win everything but at some point I just didn’t seem to care. I still loved riding my bike and riding it hard but racing just wasn’t happening.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I found out about a cross race here in Bozeman – the ‘Mulecross’ event – http://mulecross.blogspot.com/ . I’d been riding a good bit with my friend and fellow framebuilder Carl Strong and he and I talked each other into doing the Mulecross on October 29^th. As the date got closer I found myself being less excited about the event and thinking of excuses of why I couldn’t do it. The weather over the past few weeks wasn’t all that good for riding and I was feeling stale and a bit unmotivated. But the day before the event both Karin and Carl said they were going to do it so I got excited again and the race was on.

One of the fun and cool things about this event is that they strongly encourage some type of costume to be used so the night before the event Karin and I found ourselves on the living room floor making ears for our helmets – Karin made cat ears and I made bunny ears along with a perky little cottony bunny tail. Serious stuff.

Race day was clear but cold and windy and it was pretty raw to be honest. I was dressed like I was ski racing and not bike racing but once we started racing the temp was fine even in the brutal head wind sections of the course. The course itself was a mix of high-speed sections where drafting was key, very tight BMX type rhythm sections and super steep but short climbs – overall it was a really fun course.

Our event started (masters B) and I found myself at the front right after the start and the old instincts kicked in and I put the hammer down for all I was worth to get a gap and separate the men form the boys and get out of traffic. Sounds good but I went a bit too hard for my level of fitness and found myself a bit too deep in the coffin. But it worked out OK and only two of the other masters B guys caught me. One then broke his chain on a forced shift and the other guy and I battled all the way to the finish. He and I yo-yoed back and forth for a few laps and when he made his final move about ¼ mile before the finish I had nothing to counter it. I ended up finishing second, about 5 seconds down, behind Blair from Missoula Montana. I was perfectly happy to take 2^nd out of 13 masters racers considering I had done no training at all and the last cross race I’d done was back in the mid 80’s when I used toe clips and bar end shifters.

My riding partners Carl and Karin both raced and had a great time and the event has us thinking about doing a bit more riding, training for next year races – this is how it all starts.

One of the highlights for me was when I was on one of the far sections of the course and I came to one of the sets of barriers alone and in the lead and as I dismounted and ran over the double barrier one of the spectators yelled “Go Bunny Man!!” It was hard not to lose it from laughing so hard. Being called the ‘Bunny Man’ was a first for me.

It was a really fun day and it felt great to push myself so hard. It also felt good to want to compete again. I always wondered if I would feel that urge to compete again and after all those years it was back – and it felt good.

Dave

I was fortunate to be raised by an eccentric group of people. I was surrounded by mechanics, engineers, photographers, inventors, and artists working in all type of media and this wonderful group of people more than left their mark on me.

One of these people was my grandfather Ernie King. Ernie was the kind of man who could seemingly do anything he set out to do. It seemed he could make or fix most anything and he did it in such a way that made it feel matter of fact. He never bragged about the things he built, fixed, modified, or invented – these things were just there being used everyday with little fanfare. He was a photographer by profession but his real calling seemed to be that of a tinkerer or inventor. This is not to say that he photographic work wasn’t top shelf, it’s just that he wasn’t his job. He was so much more.

I loved making the trip to Frankfort, New York where he and my grandmother Margaret lived just so I could hang out with grandpa and see what he was working on. On one visit he took me with some excitement into his basement workshop (I loved it down there) and showed me his cigarette making machine. There it was sitting on its stand – there was one hopper that held the tobacco and another that held the rolled but empty papers. The papers would roll down into a catch and then a rod would stuff the tobacco into the paper. Now that the paper was full it was heavy enough to cause the lever it was on to pivot and swing down past a spinning sanding disc that would buff the end clean and then it would slide out of the lever and onto a ramp that would guide it into the waiting pack. Brilliant and simple. Admittedly it was a bit odd that I as a little kid was helping grandpa make cigarettes but it was a different time. He never allowed me to smoke them of course but the smoking of them hardly seemed the point. It was the making of them and watching the carefully orchestrated movements of the machine take place with no help needed from me except to keep the hoppers full of papers and dried leaves. It was as if Rube Goldberg was making his own smokes.

On another trip he was proud to show us his new lawn tractor. He built a small tractor from the frame up. The engine out of who knows what was cooled by a Cadillac radiator and all of this was set on a frame he’d made himself. This small tractor had attachments for mowing the lawn or plowing snow or even raking leaves. He gave me a ride on it and I was thrilled. What I didn’t understand then, as a young boy, was that very few other grandpas made their own tractors and attachments, but it all seemed so ‘normal’ to me.

Ernie was also a true pragmatist. I remember a family get together where grandma was cooking burgers on the grill. This was the era where you lit the charcoal and waited for it to get hot and then rushed to get everything cooked before the fire started to fade out. Well on this day there were lots of kids eating lots of burgers and the grill started to cool before all the food was cooked. So Ernie did what any sane person would do – he went into the shop and got his propane torch and started cooking the top side of the burgers with it while the grill took care of the underside. It made for quite a photo and I think he didn’t know why we were all smiling in such a funny way. Good burgers as I recall.

Ernie was also a fine artist who had his painting studio up in a loft looking out over the back yard, the fields beyond that and the railroad tracks still further back. There were lots of windows and great natural light for him to paint by. I remember talking in hushed tones while in that room. There was something special about it that just told you to be quiet and still and respectful. I loved that room and his art and I’m still the proud owner of a few of his paintings.

When I was a kid I rode what would become in time a ‘BMX’ bike. The BMX craze hadn’t started yet and we rode stingrays around and did wheelies on them and jumped them until they broke in two. I told Ernie about a bike I really wanted – a Yamaha Moto-bike. It was like a small dirt bike motorcycle sans the motor. It had front and rear suspension and looked so very cool. I must have bored him with the details countless times. At some point he called and told my mother to bring me out to Frankfort because there was a thrift shop that had what sounded like a Yamaha Moto-bike there for sale and he was going to take me there and buy it for me. I was over the top excited to have one. Ernie was not a rich man and I’m sure it wasn’t cheap but I guess it was something he really wanted me to have. We got to Frankfort and he took me in his car to see and buy the bike and when we got there it had been sold. I was disappointed but Ernie was crushed. He felt he’d let me down, which of course he hadn’t. We went back to his house empty handed and when we got back there he told me to cheer up because we’d make our own Moto-Bike together. What?! Can you do that? Yep. You can if you are Ernie.

My job was to find old junked frames to use as donors and then we would get together at grandpa’s and he’d cut them up and bend them and make my Moto-Bike. I found some old Rollfast 10 speeds as donors and loaded them in the car for the hour drive to Frankfort. Once we got there Ernie and I got to work. I was awestruck by the fact that he could cut the frames apart and braze them back together. Seeing him fire up the torch gave me even more respect for him. He made a rear swingarm for the suspension and a pivot that wrapped around the bottom bracket shell and then using threaded pipe and a spring from one of the hundred coffee cans full of stuff he made a rear shock. He brazed and bent and hammered and that afternoon it was done – my own personal custom Moto-bike. I couldn’t wait to get back home and hang parts on it and ride it. I was about 11 years old.

The next day the frame was married to the parts I’d set aside for it and I took it for a ride. I was by far the coolest kid on the block. I rode it everywhere and loved jumping it and the bouncy landing I got when I came down. I think I rode it most of a summer before it broke. I don’t recall what broke but I do remember thinking about how the next one could be better. But there was no ‘next one’. BMX had become ‘real’ and one could buy cool name brand bikes and being a kid I wanted the cool Mongoose and not the homemade, rattle can painted, bike that we might make together. Foolish. I wish now that I’d asked for his help in making another better version, but I never did.

What I will never forget about that was the feeling of making something, or at least of watching something being made. It was so basic as to be crude but it was beautiful too. There was a pride and dignity to it. I didn’t realize it then but this was one of the things that pushed me to make my own things and to eventually want to make things for a living. The funny thing was that Ernie always felt bad about that missed opportunity of buying me my dream bike. What he never knew was that he gave me a gift much more valuable. Ernie died while I was living in Saratoga Springs and working at Serotta and he knew what I was doing for a living but I didn’t know enough at that point to thank him. I hadn’t put 2 and 2 together and realized that without his starting push that it never would have happened.

So……….seeing as it’s better late than never. Thank you Grandpa Ernie. You did more than you ever knew.

Dave

As many of you know I have a sports car (A 2005 Lotus Elise so often seen in the background in shop photos) and I race autocross or SCCA Solo with it. The thing that was bit of a surprise to me is how many of the readers of this space are also car fans and some even race Solo. So………that said……….here is a quick review of my Solo race season.

The season started out a bit frustrating if I’m honest and while the car was quick I could never get comfortable in it. It seemed that I spent most of my time trying to keep the rear end of the car behind me and having to make constant small corrections to keep things in line – this is not the quickest way to drive. At the time I thought it was just the way that a rear engine car behaved and that I just didn’t know how to handle it. This was certainly partially true but it seemed like there was more going on. The issue was much more pronounced when I did faster courses and it felt like all I could do to keep the rear end behind me. This is not fun or fast.

At some point, about 4-5 events into the season I started to think it wasn’t just my driving technique but that it might be the car set up. I was doing a two day event in Helena, MT and day one had been very frustrating so at the beginning of day two I went against my own policy of only making one change at a time to the car set up and I changed everything in hopes of getting the car to be more stable at the limit and to have a higher limit. I adjusted both the front (much stiffer) and rear (softer) shocks, stiffened the front sway bar and added air pressure to the tires all round. And while the results weren’t perfect the car was MUCH better. The rear end stayed planted and the whole car felt more predictable and exploitable – and the limit was much higher. Subsequent events saw small tweaks of this set up and now the car handles very well on smaller, more technical courses as well as high speed courses.

With the set up changes made I was able to up my driving skills a notch and drive the car closer the it’s limit. It’s no doubt a positive feedback loop when it works right. The car is better so you can concentrate on driving it better which then points out a another small change that can be made to the set up which in turn will allow you to drive better………..and so on. This is extremely fun and rewarding in and of itself and when it also means getting better results it makes it all the more fun. The second half of the season really kicked ass.

I did 13 events in total this season – a good number considering how short the season can be here in the great frozen north. I managed to take 6 FTD’s (Fast Time of the Day) and 4 firsts in PAX. PAX is similar to a golf handicap and is a system set up so that one can compare the results of different types of cars on a level playing field. In other words PAX allows me to directly compare the results of my Lotus to cars with a more modest level of preparation (like a stock VW Golf) or more extreme levels of prep (like a highly modified 650 hp Corvette running on racing slicks) and makes it easier to compare the results of the drivers and not just the cars. As much as I like winning the FTD contest it’s the PAX award that I like the most.

Our final event of the season was on October 8th and it was cold and slippery in the morning but the sun eventually came out, the grip got much better and the event was really fun. And that was that. I think I may have learned more this season than in any season in the past 10 years. I learned about car set up, driving, and how my mind works. I love the learning part – there is nothing more rewarding for me. Now we are in transition to ski season. Now it can snow!

But as soon as the snow starts to get thin in the spring it will be back to bikes and cars. I look forward to it.

Thanks for reading.

Dave