When I first sat to make notes about what had happened during any given year for this series I got to 2010 and had trouble remembering anything significant. Did I do nothing in 2010? No – it turns out a good number of things got done and I just couldn’t remember them. Maybe I’m getting old.

One of the more significant changes in 2010 was also one of the bigger changes in the history of the company. When I started the company I had some artwork in mind for the logos and it was an adaptation of some logos I’d done when making custom skateboards when I was a kid. I tweaked them to work on frame tubes and was all set. I got the decals printed and they went out on the bikes and the reaction was decidedly mixed. Now I know there is no way to please everyone, and it’s a fool’s errand to even try, but it felt like the artwork might have been a dud.

O course the original artwork was very different and not at all the normal “first name-last name” in a stock font deal that is pretty common and it took some time for folks to get used to it. After a while many said they really liked the artwork. At the same time many did not and I took more than a few calls from people who wanted to know if they could buy a bike with different logos, as they really disliked what I had. This of course was a backhanded complement – they liked my bikes enough want to buy one but hated the artwork so much that they wouldn’t pull the trigger. I wanted to stay true to the design and brand I was developing and not change the artwork on a whim but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me some.

At some point I got a note from a fellow framebuilder named Jim Kish and he wasn’t pleased that my logos looked so much like his. I’d never seen his artwork before and of course when he pointed them out to me and he was right……….they were similar in concept – four letters, starting with a ‘K’, the letters all in circles and a line through them. But when push came to shove I didn’t feel that anyone would confuse my work for that of Mr. Kish so I decided to keep using them…….but it nagged at me a bit. In time I wanted a change in artwork and Karin and I started working on it. It took some time but we came up with a simple and clean design that I felt had the look I was going for – modern, contemporary, sparse, and with a strong negative space component.

So we held our breath and released the new artwork. Most of the response was very positive, some less so. The funny thing to me was that some said they wanted the old logo! Funny to me because so many said they hated the old logo. Like I said……..can’t please everyone. The most important thing is that you please yourself and hope that others agree.

We launched the new artwork at the NAHBS event in Richmond, Virginia and it went very well. We did have few folks walk right by our booth while looking for us, as the banner didn’t have the logo they expected.

new negative space logos.

New logos.

New logos.

One of the framesets I bought to NAHBS Richmond had no logos at all…..in fact it had no paint. I brought a raw fillet brazed frame to show off fillets sans paint. Fillets are funny………..once they are painted it can be very tough to tell if the fillet work is clean or if the painter was good with bondo. I can tell you I’ve seen some epically bad fillets covered with bondo and painted up nice and they look 95% the same as good clean fillets. I suppose one could argue that it doesn’t matter then – that bad fillets with good paint to cover them is just fine. But I just can’t do it so I thought I’d bring a frameset with my best fillets in the raw. I got two fun rewards for doing this. The first was I won my second “Best Fillet” award at the show. The second was much more private. I had a very well known builder, who also builds with fillets, walk into my booth and walk with purpose straight up to the fillet bike. I was busy with someone at that moment and could only watch as a the builder walked up to my frameset, took a good look at the bottom bracket and head tube joints, developed a frustrated look, and said aloud to no one in particular – “FUCK!” It’s always nice to get compliments from your peers and I think that was one. I know paint is a big deal on bikes but I would really like to see shows like NAHBS encourage more work in the raw to really show the metal work.

Best fillet award.

Raw fillets.

Raw fillets.

Raw fillets.

Raw fillets.

Raw fillets.

Raw fillets.

Speaking of paint – JB and I tried something new for us in 2010 – matte paint. I chose a light putty gray and had JB cover it with a mate clear and I loved it. It’s like a light magnet – so cool. It does a very good job of showing off the metal work too, which surprised me a bit. One of my personal bikes is matte (fillet cross with discs) and my road bike is about to become matte. I like matte I guess.

Matte paint.

Matte paint.

This was also the year that I prototyped a new version of the JKS. In time I named it the JKS X with X standing for the ‘XL’ sized tubes it uses. The larger tubes give a very responsive ride and work very well for bigger guys or folks looking for a ‘spring classics’ type bike that can be hammered over whatever is in front of you. I built the one-off prototype and left it unpainted for the entire season and frankly abused it on the worst stuff I could find to ride on……….crappy pavement, steep hills, washboard gravel…..etc. I loved it and it held up to the abuse without a single issue. It held up so well in fact that I painted it and brought it to NAHBS the next year and no one would ever have suspected it was beat on the way it was. It’s still my everyday bike and has been used as a test mule for various ideas over the past few years. More about this later. I think for me……….at 6’4” and 180 pounds……………it’s the best road bike I’ve ever ridden.

Thanks for looking,

Dave

JKS X prototype.

JKS X prototype painted.

JKS X.

JKS X.

JKS X.

Have a great weekend.

dave

2009 was a year of a number of firsts for the business –

- Photos of my work were published in a very nice coffee table book called “Custom Bicycles – a Passionate pursuit”. Cool book.
- I started my own blog on February 20th. I was hesitant to do so fearing I’d run out of stuff to say………this hasn’t happened yet.
- I built the first tandem with my name on the down tube. I’d built plenty of tandems in my previous Serotta life but this was the first Kirk tandem.
- Carl Strong and I expanded our idea of a group or guild of sorts for handbuilt framebuilders and with help from the other founding members the ‘Framebuilders’ Collective’ was formed.

Raw fillet tandem.

Raw tandem BB & couplers.

Raw tandem head tube.

Tandem under bright orange paint.

Painted BB.

Tandem Eccentric BB.

2009 was the year that NAHBS traveled to Indianapolis, Indiana. To be honest I wondered how good a choice this was considering Indy is not the place I think of when I think travel in February. But it was great….in fact one of the best shows ever. Turnout was strong but not out-of-hand crazy and sales were good. Indy turns out to be a great place for something like this even in winter with cool restaurants and clubs. You learn something new everyday.

Indy NAHBS

Indy NAHBS.

TFC members 2009.

It was the year I noted my 20th year working as a full time professional builder. I started work as a builder in October of 1989 at Serotta and with some very short exceptions it is all I’ve done since. I recall feeling a bit old when I realized that 20 years had passed but I still love the work so life is good.

I designed, prototyped, tested and introduced the Triple F dropout in 2009. The idea for the dropout came to me about 15 years earlier but this was the first time I’d had the chance to make it happen. The idea behind the design is to use as little material as possible to transition from the stay tubing to the part the wheel can clamp in to and to have this transition take place in as little distance as possible. By having them be super small and short I was assured they would be very stiff and light at the same time. Using balls where the stays meet the drops makes for a very simple and strong joint that is very quick to prep for……no slotting or cutting of the tube and no bending of the assembly after the fact to get the drop-to-stay alignment right. Lastly they needed to be easy to clean. Working in a bike shop and on race bikes for so many years made me really appreciate how much time is spent fussing to get the drops clean. But making all the curves finger sized so a rag fits over your finger and into clean everything makes keeping this tough part of the bike to clean a bit tidier.

Despite the fact that the dropout is simple in concept it was not all that easy to cut out of a plate of cr-mo steel it turns out. Makes sense when you think about it……machining steel plate into a shape with two balls on it isn’t all that straight forward.

Once I became determined to make them I made a mock-up out of big steel ball bearings, a chunk of plate and a good bit of brass filler. I brazed the balls to the plate and then started carving and taking away everything that didn’t look like the dropout design I had in my head. With this mock-up in hand I could double check all the fit up issues and be sure there would be no conflicts or interference. I then had to defining all the hard-points so I could take it to someone skilled in CAD work and have official drawings made. My good friend and machinist extraordinaire Norm knew just the guy to draw them for me. So Joe then drew them and Norm cut two pair of them for me to prototype frames with and test. I built those two bikes and brought them to the show. Once back from the show they got the crap beat out of them trying to expose any weakness or problems. A few small adjustments were made and then the good folks at Paragon Machine made tools to hold the little parts and cut my first batch. The first ones would be built into frames the following June.

A few small changes have been since then to make it easy to cut the parts or easier to build with them but the changes have been small and they are working very well. If I had to pick one piece of metal to represent my idea of how stuff should be designed and made it would be this dropout. I tried to operate on the same premise as the founder of Lotus cars Colin Chapman did – keep taking away stuff until you can’t take away anything else and only then are you done. “Simplicate and add more lightness’ as Chapman was quoted saying.

Triple F drops.

Lastly – I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a second to note something since we are in look-back mode. This past week marks the actual 10th Anniversary of my business as I started the business and became officially incorporated the first week of June, 2003. Tempus Fugit!

Thanks again –

Dave

Thanks for looking,

Dave

I think the biggest thing as far as this business goes was that the JK Special was officially offered for sale. I had no idea what to expect when it was introduced but it’s turned out very well. Over time more and more of my work has become a version of the JKS and again, over time, there have been more versions of the JKS introduced. One thing they all share in common is that they are all made to measure race bikes that are built with the best materials regardless of where they come from or what they cost. I think that at this point 70% of what goes out the door has the JK Special wrench logo on it.

First customer JKS.

First customer JKS.

First customer JKS.

It was the year of my second visit to NAHBS – this time in Portland Oregon. Being in Portland made the whole thing a bit crazy and it was truly ‘standing room only’ much of the time and the fire marshal closed the room to limit the number of folks trying to work their way through the isles. In fact at times the only way in to the hall was to wait in line and when someone left they would then let someone else in. Oddly, looking back, I think the Portland show was one of the least successful for many builders including myself. Many of us took orders (a good thing) but with it being so crowded the folks that were there with money in their pockets ready to buy got frustrated at not being able to talk to the builders and left with their money still firmly in their pockets. I recall many builders feeling as I did – that it was tough talking with one person while 4-5 were waiting to talk with you. Most got tired of waiting and walked away. Some came back when it was slower but many didn’t. Overall the NAHBS-Portland was a mixed experience due to the huge crowds. A bit ironic I think.

One good thing for me at this NAHBS was the fact that I won my first award. I won the ‘best fillet brazed award’ for a frameset that was painted a wonderful and classic white with bright green panels. At this time in the show’s history I think the awards were determined by the votes of the fellow exhibitors so it was a high honor for me.

NAHBS fillet award winner.

HUGE trophy.

Pre-show wipe down.

On the home front – after 5 years of designing and drawing each bike full size on paper by hand I switched to Bike-Cad. I’d gotten so quick at doing it on paper that I was slow to change over but in time I saw the real value of it for me – record keeping. Instead of digging through endless cardboard tubes with full-size drawings in them I could suddenly find the design in just a few clicks. Doing a lot of repeat business as I do this was a real time saver. I also liked that I could attach a dimensioned image of the design to send to the customer so that we could be on the same page and so that they could see the proportions of the design.

Late in the year I introduced a cyclocross version of the JK Special. I’d been riding and testing one for months and making tweaks and it was ready to go in December of 2008. The same tubes used in the JKS road bike, with the exception of slightly beefier fork blades, make for a very nice cross race bike.

First JKS Cross.

First JKS Cross.

Now all of the above is very good but there was one thing that happened in 2008 that I didn’t even recognize until we were into 2009 – the economy collapsed. We didn’t know what was happening while it was happening but we knew it wasn’t good. It hit home for me when I started having people put their orders on hold. I’d call or write the client excited that the wait was over and that we could now dive into their design and build and they would ask that I pass them by and put them at the back of the line. Previous to the crash this was very rare but it now seemed that it was happening all too often. In a few cases the client never called back and I’ve never heard from them again. Things were getting tough all over and only in retrospect could we see it for what it was. I’ll never forget getting a customer on the phone and telling him his time had come and he asked me to pass him by……….he sounded very upset. I asked him what was up and he told me – “Look, I just lost my effing job, my effing house and my effing wife……..the last thing I need is an effing bike!”. Point taken. It seemed like everyday I heard that a framebuilder, who just months earlier was the new ‘hot guy’, had packed it in and was out of business. It seemed that the entire handbuilt scene in Portland (a real hotbed of new builders) had shrank by some huge percentage.

Frankly it was a scary time and the path forward wasn’t clear. In the end I did the only thing that felt right – I kept on building and working to make the customer as happy and comfortable as possible. I set up the ‘Delayed Delivery Program’ to make it as easy as possible for folks to stay in the queue or get into the queue with a fresh order. In the end I think it worked out OK for established builders like myself. It’s hard to say for sure but it felt like there was still business out there and that when times are tough the folks still wanting to buy were more discriminating and went with an established and proven builder and business. This of course meant that many newer less proven guys went under and I feel their pain. In the end the pie was smaller than in years previous but the pie was now being cut into fewer pieces. Not the best thing to happen but it could have been much worse for me……..I consider myself fortunate.

Like I said – it was tough all over. I definitely want to thank those people who were in a position to stick with me during this tough time and invite those who put their orders on perma-hold to get back in touch with me when your situation improves and you’d like to pick up your order again. I’ll work with you the best I can to get things rolling.

Thanks as always for reading and of course for your interest and support.

I’d been working some with new tubesets and while I very much liked individual tubes from these sets I was not thrilled with the sets as a whole. The new hot tube was Reynolds 953 and in my opinion while the main tubes were just right the stays left more than a bit to be desired with the seat stays being too heavy and chainstays being much too light and flexible. It was at this time I worked with Reynolds to come up with my own proprietary chainstays. The new c-stays differed from ‘normal’ offerings in that they had less taper so that the small end was larger (15 mm instead of 12 mm) and the wall thickness at the BB end was slightly thicker. This made for a c-stay that was much stiffer than most any steel stay on the market and this gave the bikes a wonderful jump, snap, life….etc. when pushing hard.

I wasn’t a fan of the 953 seat tube either as the seat post fit was too loose for lugged work (really designed for TIG where one would get more shrinkage and distortion with the higher heat) so I went in search of a light seat tube. I found it at True Temper and the entire package was finally put together in a prototype in the summer of 2007. This prototype was the first bike I’d built with lugs from Darrell Llewellyn (Dazza) from Australia and the fit and look was just right for this project – simple, clean and modern with nothing precious or baroque about them.

This mix and match approach to picking the tubes reminded me of how some sports car guys were making ‘specials’ in the 50’s when the post WWII supply of race car stuff was really limited. They would take the chassis from one brand and the engine from another and cover it with simple and light homemade bodywork and have a car that could compete with the best in the world……….and these cars were often called ‘specials’. I realized I’d made something of a special myself so I named the new frame the ‘JK Special’ after my father John Kirk who, before he passed away, was a race car mechanic (hence the wrench in the JKS logo).

I rode the bike hard sans paint for many months and was very pleased with the ride. I made a few small tweaks with the lug shape and the chainstay taper/butting and I was very happy with the outcome. The prototype was built to work with the Reynolds Ouzo carbon fork and this was the first time I’d spec’d a carbon fork on one of my bikes. In retrospect this is the only thing I regret. I rode my bike with the carbon fork and it worked fine but in time I made a steel fork for it and the entire package finally felt just right to me. It both handled and rode better, alignment could be made spot on and I could make any rake I wanted instead of having to design the frame to work with a set fork rake. After coming to this conclusion I stopped offering the carbon fork as an option and since then all JKS have come with a made-to-match lightweight steel fork.

I built the second JKS for Karin late in the year and she loved it. It doesn’t get talked about much but Karin is a natural and gifted cyclist with a strong racing background and getting her thumbs up assured me that I was on the right track with the JKS. It wouldn’t be until the following year that I would offer them for sale.

JKS prototype.

JKS prototype.

JKS prototype.

JKS prototype.

This was also the first year that I attended the North American Handmade Bike Show. It was in San Jose, California that year and Carl Strong, his wife Loretta and I all piled into Carl’s pickup and drove the 22+ hours from Bozeman to San Jose. In retrospect it all went fine despite the truck developing an ignition miss just a few hours into the drive, very icy roads as we left Montana and then a storm going over the pass in the Sierras. As we got close to the Sierras we saw that the pass was in bad shape and we learned that we would need to have chains with us so that they would let us drive over the pass. So we stopped in a small town before the pass and looked everywhere for chains and finally found some. Chains in hand we drove over the pass and the roads were fine and we never needed the chains. I think it took us so long to find chains that it gave it time to warm up some and the roads melted out and it was an easy drive over the pass.

I had no idea what to expect from the show and was a bit shocked to find it was in a huge tent held up with air pressure – kind of cool and kind of odd. But it worked well and the attendance seemed strong. I’d brought just framesets and no complete bikes as they would not have fit in the truck and that was a mistake…….people like frames well enough but what they really want to see is bikes. Live and learn. This first show was a real learning experience and a lot of fun. Aside from a serious back spasm on the second day that had me bent over and looking like death NAHBS was a very good thing. I took a number of orders and shook a lot of hands and it was a very good show.

2007 would also mark the end of my using my homemade jig to set up and tack frames and forks with. I built my own tooling for this back in 2003 and it worked very well but it was dreadfully slow to set up. Business had gotten good enough that my real limiting factor was how long it took to put a frame together so I went to my friend Don at Anvil and bought his frame and fork jigs and between the two of them I saved a solid hour of time on each bike without any downside in quality or accuracy. Money well spent.

Anvil frame jig.

Anvil fork jig.

Last but not least it was the year I went back to visit Saratoga Springs and ride with a bunch of good folks from the Serotta Forum. As I recall Serotta had scheduled an open house with rides and a BBQ but they were forced to cancel the event. The guys and gals from the Serotta Forum really had been excited for the event so they decided to hold one on their own in place of the official company event. I was pleased to be invited to attend so I flew out and visited my parents, did some great rides on some of the best riding roads in the country, visited my old Serotta friends and got to hang out with Ben a good bit. It was good to be ‘home’ if you will. As epic as the riding in around Bozeman can be I still miss those roads around Saratoga. The photos below are courtesy of Dave Kraus – www.krausgrafik.com

Serotta forum gathering.

Serotta forum gathering.

Serotta forum gathering.

Serotta forum gathering.

Serotta forum gathering.

Serotta forum gathering.

The following year, 2008, would also be a year of changes………some good and some not so.

What a great color.

Dave

2006 was a good year.

One of the things that happened was that many one-time Kirk owners got in line for a 2nd or 3rd or even 4th bike. Nothing makes you feeling like you are doing a good job more than repeat business. I even had a few people get in line for the first bike and enjoy the process so much that while the first bike was still off at Joe Bell’s getting painted they got in line for a second. It’s cool that so many enjoy the process so much that they want to go through it again. To be frank framebuilding isn’t exactly curing cancer or feeding the hungry but making someone happy with one’s work feels very damn good. I still do a good number of bikes every year for existing customers and it’s always a pleasure to work with an owner a second time.

I put my first S&S couplers in a Kirk this year. I’d worked with them before but this was the first time in a bike with my name on the downtube. I very much like the S&S couplers and think the design is second to none. Solid, sturdy and free of noise and flex makes them just disappear in the bike.

S&S couplers.

Huge travel bike with couplers.

BB and coupler.

Looking back I see that over time the brand and product had developed its own look. The bikes started to look like ‘Kirks’. I can see how the choice of color and proportion influenced what the next customer wanted and so on and so forth. I don’t know that I would have been able write out the details that made a bike look like a Kirk but I knew them when I saw them. Bright primary colors and bold accents……….lots of solids and pin stripes and little in the way of fluff or extra adornment. I see now that my personal taste of simple colors and mature and refined shapes was coming through.

Candy blue and light blue on fillets.

Personal bike 2006.

Candy red over gray.

One place a framebuilder can express themselves through shape is with sidetack seat stays caps. I make my own hollow caps from scratch and never use solid prefabbed stay plugs that are cast into a fixed shape. This makes them as light and strong as possible but also means that the shape of the cap itself needs to be carved by hand. It is very tough to come up with your own trademark shape and not just copy someone else………..realistically there are only so many functional shapes one can use and still have it look unique. At some point I was shaping some caps and could see what seemed to be a new shape speaking out to me through the metal – corny I know, but true. It took a few times to get the shape just how I wanted but now I think it’s recognizable as a Kirk shape. One of the reasons it is shaped the way it is is so that there is enough cap top wrap around on top of the seat lug and cross over the top a bit. When the two caps line up this way and point across the top of the seat lugs toward one another it looks just right to my eye. It also performs an important function – the extended cap is designed to wrap over the top of the lug to give that much more surface area for the stay to attach and makes for a super strong and stiff joint that will last a life time. I’d seen too many failures of classic side tack stays where they meet the seat lug in my retail days and knew I wanted to prevent that. To this day I’ve not had a single failure. And………….I really like the way they look.

Side tack caps.

Cross bike with sidetack caps.

Great Green.

Late in 2006 I decided I would be going to my first NAHBS (North American Handmade Bike Show) the next spring in San Jose. Lead times being what they are the bikes for that first show needed to be build in the fall of 2006. Carl and Loretta Strong and I would be driving out together and we needed to be able to fit EVERYTHING for both brands into Carl’s truck so some serious planning was in order. It was very exciting to be building bikes, picking paint schemes and designing the fixtures with Carl that we would use in our booths. Carl was great to work with as always and the stuff worked great in the end…………but I’m getting ahead of myself as that it really a story for 2007.

2005 was a bit like 2004 in that it was a year of maintaining and building momentum. Business was going well and things had become more efficient with repetition, practice and the refining of my shop methods. Most of the changes I made were pretty small but in the end added up to saving big time in the shop and at the desk. Saving time without cutting any corners can be a real challenge but it was worth it to keep customers happy and the queue as short as possible……….I really didn’t want my job to slip from building bikes to managing a queue. So to this end making things as efficient as possible was important to me.

I’m pretty sure that 2005 was the first year that we offered a yearly calendar made up of favorite photos from the previous year. What should have been a small amount of work was, for some reason, a huge amount of work and time and after a few years we stopped doing it. I toy with doing it again and maybe we’ll be able to carve out some time and make it happen. One thing that strikes me looking back at some of the photos was the quality of them……….not that good really. I suppose I will think the same thing about the photos I’m taking now when I look back on them eight years hence. Or at least I hope I get better over time. We’ll see.

June 2005

July 2005

November 2005

We hosted our first open house event in 2005. I’m a big user and supporter of the then ‘Serotta Forum’ (now ‘Paceline’ – http://forums.thepaceline.net/) and the online group had had a few real life gatherings over time and Karin and I decided to host one here. We had no idea what to expect in terms of attendance but we got about 35 people overall and a fine time was had by all. We had 3 days of riding and good food and we enjoyed sharing Bozeman with the folks who came from so far away. In retrospect I wish the rides were a bit more challenging……….I erred on the side of caution with concern about how travel and altitude would affect riders and I think I took it a step too far. Live and learn I guess. The rides at this year’s open house will be more challenging and fun.

What floored me about the get together was how far folks came to be with others they knew only online before hand. We had riders come from as far away as Miami (a very long way!) and nearly every corner of the country. It was very cool that the Internet, which so many thought might keep us apart, brought us all together……..I like that it works this way.

GdB

GdB

GdB

One trend that really took hold was that so many of the bikes went out the door with the then still new Terraplane seat stays. I think a good 40 % of the bikes going out the door were built with the curved Terraplane stays. This was both good and bad to be honest. The good part is that the riders loved them and the way they rode…………the bad was that I needed to design a less time consuming way to bend the stays to the specific shape that would best suit the rider. Each set was bent as a pair that was unique to the rider (they still are) and that was a good thing but it took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to bend a set. The technique I’d come up with worked fine for prototypes but not for production even at a very low level. Late in the year something had to give and I went back to the drawing board and came up with a much quicker way to get the same exact results and much time and swearing was saved. I still use this same method today and get very good results with it and I still send out nearly 50% of my work with the Terraplane stays. I’m very happy about that.

Thanks as always for reading.

Dave