Dragged Into It

   I have never "blogged". Never really even considered it. Never really even read blogs either.  I make bikes. Pretty much for no reason, or for any reason. Whatever. I have always made bikes. As a result I have entirely too many bikes lying around at any given time. More than I can ride. But I can't just let a neat old frame or box of parts go to waste, so I make a bike. Sometimes for friends. Sometimes for myself. But most of the time for the hell of it. People have always told me that others out there in interwebs land might be interested in the bikes I make, that maybe even a stranger might want me to one day make them a bike, which could allow me to further justify my parts and frame hoarding. So after much prodding I have started a blog about bikes I make out of stuff I find,  for the availability and possible enjoyment of those who might give a shit.

  Pictured are three of the bikes I have made recently, just to pique your interest. Now when I say I "make" bikes what I mean to say is that I "assemble" bikes. Though I would love to make my own frames and components, I have not gotten to that point in my "making". One day, maybe. I plan to post a blog about each of the bikes I have made and bothered to keep a record of, which is a small percentage of the total amount of bikes I have built, but this new digital age has made keeping a record much easier so I will promise to do so for any future bikes I make and share them here. But for now you get the bikes I have made over the last year or so.

   When I was a kid I made mostly BMX bikes, like before there were BMX bikes. My dad would weld gussets and crossbars in Western Flyers and other department store poo, I would pirate parts from cast off junk, strip coaster brakes to make  them spin better, put ten-speed seats on the pile of junk, don an old motorcycle helmet and go jump shit. Usually they broke. I did eventually graduate to real BMX bikes. I am quite ashamed to say that the first decent quality frame I ever had I stole from a neighbor kid. It was a Raleigh/ Rampar and he didn't know or care what it was but I knew it to be the steed of one Toby Henderson, one of my childhood idols of BMX. I am sure a special place in bike hell awaits me for my crime. I have tried to make amends by making bikes and giving them away any chance I get, but there is no forgiveness for a bike thief. The fact that I was obsessed with bikes and the neighbor kid rode it about once a month and just tossed it wherever is no excuse. I painted it flat black, it looked damn cool with its yellow number plate. But I had my mom try and sell it in a garage sale, the guilt of knowing where it came from haunted me so. I am horrible. I did eventually mail order a PK Ripper frame and built it with Z-rims and various "quality" parts of the day.
  At the same time that I was obsessing over popping one-footed tabletops off of curbs I discovered "ten-speeds" later to be known as "road bikes". See, not only was I obsessed with making bikes, but riding them was rather important to me as well. And my favorite thing to do was to use my bike to ride to other neighborhoods, towns even, where the kids had no idea who I was. I did this plenty on my janky BMX bikes but "ten-speeds" seem to legitamize and make this feat exotic . My first decent "ten-speed" was a John Deere. Yup, they made bikes, or at least they put stickers on bikes, look it up. The thing was French actually. For someone who routinely disassembles everything let me tell you that my first foray into the mind of a Frenchman was a little confusing. But I rode the crap out of that bike, and the little window of the world that was ten minutes of Tour de France footage on the Wide World of Sports back then inspired me to greatness, or at least to further distances on my bike.
   One thing led to another and off to college I went (and left, and went back, and left...) with a Fuji "ten-speed" (hereafter known as road bikes because I am presumably grows up by now) and several criterium wins to my name. Of course I went work in a bike shop and built bikes for customers in between assembling poo out of the box for the floor. A few of my custom creations sold, but most were just overpriced dream machines that sat, except when I would ride them at lunch. I was particularly proud of an orange SE Quadangle I built up with all black parts, including black graphite Tuff wheels. It never sold. I maintained my bike identity shizophrenia by training and racing hard on my road bikes while doing freestyle and breaking stuff as often as I could. Then came mountain bikes.
   I was slow to get into the MTB thing. It made sense, being a hardcore BMX freestyle rider and a 300+ mile a week roadie, but everytime I got on a MTB it broke. Remember that first Cannondale?  With the 24 inch back wheel?  Broke it. And those old dorky Stumpjumpers that were really just beefed up old lady bikes? Broke that too. Eventually technology caught up, but I still broke a ton of Stumpjumper frames, usually from jumping them. But the one thing MTBing did for me was gave me an outlet to vent all of my bikeness, and I got to build lots of bikes because I broke them so often. Throughout all this I gradually drifted away from racing and just rode, and built, and dug jumps. Racing became a fashion, not as fun. It used to just be other bike dweebs dotted with a few rich elitist asswipes here and there, but eventually asswiping prevailed and it became more about the gack and the pricetag and the image. Now don't get me wrong, I realize I am generalizing, but that is what one has to deal with most of the time; the general. The dirt jumps and the trails became more my haven for my style of riding. And don't think I gave up being competietive, I will chase you down and blast right by you in a hot second. But I do it in an unorganized sort of way now, without a number pinned to my ass.
   There's 30 or 40+ years of my bike history for you in a nutshell. Just so you know where I am coming from. The one thing that has always remained is that I make bikes. I have my own prejudices about what is cool or worthwhile. I have watched a bunch of trends and dead ends happen in the world of bikes since my first one in 1972 or so. Like I think the the best road bikes are the old Colombus and Reynolds tubed creations of the 70s through the mid 90s. But modern mountain bikes are far superior, as are modern BMX bikes and components. But for the road or tarck gimme that old non-indexed Italian or French stuff. So I track down the orphans, the cast off old racer junk. It used to be cheap and easy. Racers, being the fashion conscious elitists that they are, would practically give me their old Italian frames and Campy parts, but then the tarck bike hipster revolution began and goatied hip-hugger sporting guys and gals began allowing themselves to be raped for this old iron in order to display their cred. So I have had to get more creative on my accumulating, for I have knowledge. I was there. I know what I am looking at and if it looks good I snatch it quick. I have yet to jump on the bandwagon of raping hipsters' bank accounts for mid-quality junk that happens to have the appropriate stickers (have you seen what some of them will pay for a Mexican built Benotto?) but maybe I should. I would rather build bikes for people that live them, that ride the shit out of them, for myself. But I will always make bikes, I will always rescue old parts and frames when I find them. So here is a blog about the bikes I make. Each one will get its own blog so stay tuned.

-evilfirbolg