Trying to do too much...

Building bike is what I do and for the most part , it's really all I have time to do. I get to ride a bit , I also have Saturdays to do laundry and the weekly shopping but it is a solid five-day a week grind just trying to keep the work rolling, even if the list isn't all that long. Stuff just takes more time than one suspects , even if there's many years of experience in the books. It's all about expectations of oneself , usually a bit higher than reasonable.
This brings me to current times and what I'm hooked into every fall/winter....cycolcross. Ever since the late '70's Iv'e been a big fan of the sport and watched it grow dramatically here in northern California. About 1998 I got the idea to try racing myself when I got involved in sponsoring a local team. At first, my racing was just me, no team affiliation and no expectations other than to have some fun and make a few people laugh. I'm not a talented rider by any stretch and my years of dabbling in other forms of bicycle racing have resulted in a big two wins in 20 years. In 2004 I, and my helper Simon Vickers formed a cyclocross team around my bikes and things changed in a big way. I was present at races every weekend and I wore the same kit as the real racers, although my racing was still pretty much a joke-trying not to be last in the 45-A masters division.
After an injury kept me out of most of the 2007 season, I decided correctly that I never belonged in an A division race and demoted myself to the 45 + B catagory in 2008. This is when things got weird.....I started getting on the podium. About 2/3 of the way through the season I did something I haden't done in 20 years-I won a race. This made me the leader of a series and I nearly won the whole four-race Peak Season series but for a bad cold during the last race. This success was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me.....I started getting a little serious about racing.
In 2009 I trained like a madman and went into the season expecting to start where I left off.....racing well and always being a threat for the podium , even if it was usually the lowest step. I was plagued by back problems and wound up just like I had started in 1998, giving a few folks laughs and finding myself behind most of the field every weekend. I decided to get physical therapy for my back, not so much for racing ( Although I can't lie that it wasn't a major factor in getting my reluctant ass to the doctor..) but for being able to get through a day of welding at the shop. My racing was making me a cripple.
After about five weeks of P.T. and doing core exercises it was time to go north to Oregon for the last big races of the season, the USGP in Portland and the nationals in Bend. Although my back was getting better , my racing was not and I had no expectations of any kind of results. I was going north to support the team and work in the pits. I was only racing because back in October I had paid the entry.
In Portland I had a pretty bad race on Saturday, crashing about 4-5 times and finishing pretty far back. Sunday I had 'good legs' as they say and was really surprising myself until with a lap and a half to go , the thick Portland mud destroyed my rear derailleur. I raced both days but had no real idea of how I would go at the nationals.
The next week I went to the nationals course and rode many practice laps in the frozen conditions , surveying every inch of the course. I didn't think I would have a good race but I at least wanted to have a safe one. When the day came for my heat , it was a clear sky but 13 degrees and very icy. I'm not used to the ice but I guess a lot of other folks didn't get the practice like me and were falling down all around me. I managed to get through the whole thing with only one really bad fall on my hip and a few stumbles. I finished without getting lapped by the winner, well beyond my expectations. I even had a race long battle with another builder, a much better racer than me, just not on that day. This was yet another thing that probably wasn't at it's root good for me.
Here it is, 2010 and I'm back racing again. After last year's back trouble, I have been doing 35 minutes of core work each morning. I'm more co-ordinated and I'm having a much less painful work day. I don't groan when I'm getting out of bed and I can actually bend down and pick up the morning paper for the first time in years without wincing in pain. There is a down side, though.....I'm racing better than ever and I won another race. The problem with this is that I could start believing that I have talent.......I cannot begin to do this as I have seen it in other folks and it is a sad sight. I may wear the same kit as the folks on the team and I do wear it with pride but I know full and well that I'm a bike builder, not an elite athlete . I do know some builders that have a legacy of great racing....Steve Garro, Scott Nicol, Rick Hunter......these guys were exceptional on a bike. Much as I love to ride and when I race, I definitely try my hardest , I know that there's a difference between me and the guys that win.
Racing is a test and not only is one's ability on trial , but one's sincerity as well. Someone who makes a sincere effort at preparation and on race day leaves it all on the course can be rewarded with a podium or even a win. Pretenders are lucky sometimes , but the cream always rises to the top. Builders can call themselves 'Master builders' but it is the folks that ride the bikes that make the ultimate assessment of one's ability to construct a truly fine machine. The saying of the team this year is " Don't start believing "........I feel it is when we start expecting too much or believing in our own legend we are heading for a bad fall. I may have had some good races this year and I might have a few more left in me but I'm not going to start believing..............

The shrinking pot

2010 has been an interesting year , at least for me. During this economic slowdown my business has not slowed down-it actually set records in terms of incoming orders in 2008 and 2009 and looked to be doing the same in 2010 until about mid August. Suddenly, the phone stopped ringing.....normally I would welcome some hours where I could just weld and not have to jump up and go to the phone every 10 minutes. Now , a typical day will be largely devoid of the phone ringing and I can merrliy weld away on the now rapidly shrinking list of orders. Last year at this time I had about three times the orders on the list as I do now in the fall of 2010. Is this the economic slowdown finally catching up with me , or did I do something to piss off the frame buying public at large ?
This is the dilemma of the self-employed small framebuilder: What ca we attribute a sudden silence of the phone to ? Economic trends ? More competition from newer builders ? Maybe our style has become outmoded as we have not evolved with the ever changing trends in bike building ? It is stuff like this that keeps people like me awake at night .......what did I do to cause this and what, if anything can I do to turn things around ?
Maybe , there's a reason I'm not really taking into account-perhaps what has caused this lull in new business is something I didn't cause and maybe it is something I can't do anything about. I know well that what I do is largely a luxury and not something of an impulse purchase.....people plan ahead to get a custom frame, way ahead in most cases. Sooo, if the slowdown in my business isn't caused by me and cannot be changed by me , what the heck do I do ? Maybe I should shut the hell up and do my job, at least while I have it. As I have said before , I'm very lucky to have work in this fickle field and the run of the last 7-odd years has been exceptional. All over the world people are looking at situations much more grave than what I am faced with-it's time for me to take whatever resources I have and do something for folks less fortunate than myself. If my business does not survive this slump I would rather go out on a note of having done some constructive and community-based work rather than having some sort of 'fire sale' or the like. Maybe a lull like this is a time when I can attend to projects long neglected........maybe all I need to do is to start restoring that old Colnago and as soon as I get about halfway though , the phone will start ringing again and all of my noble efforts will come to a grinding halt while I go back to earning a living.....or not !

This is why there aren't any pretty frame pictures

There's new noises in my shop-sounds of sawzalls and hammers banging and prying out nails. In a quest for more storage space my building superintendant has appropriated my office. I had a nice upstairs space that was part of my shop, although technically I was not charged any rent for it. I moved into this shop in late 1996 and have accumulated a lot of stuff since then. The 160 square ft. office was about 25% of my total space and it was a good place to store my old music gear that was choking my house. This photo is a view of where the office used to be, up a flight of stairs. It had a window that looked down on my workspace, a colossal 538 square ft.
This is not where you want to stand in the event of an earthquake. I have no doubt that a good deal of this stuff that used to be in the office will come cascading down with anything 4.0 or above on the Richter scale.
This used to be the office. I have no idea what it will become , but I know that I will no longer be welcome in this space. While it is always good to periodically purge and try to keep an orderly shop, this practice does not come naturally to me and I was not really ready to give up this space, especially on only two days notice. For better or worse, Rock Lobster cycles is shrinking. Maybe I'm only a Langostino now

The powers that be

Sixteen years ago I had the good fortune to to find an affordable shop space on the west side of town, only about 10 minutes by bike from my front door. The space was pretty small, about 530 square feet but there was a bonus included in the rent, or rather, not charged for. The bonus was an upstairs office of about 160 square feet that was up a small flight of wooden stairs. I don't know about you, but give a guy like me some extra square footage and enough time and I'll fill that space with lots of crap -most of which I probably should have thrown away.
Flash forward 16 plus years later and sure enough, the shop and the office are jam packed with all sorts of stuff that framebuilders accumulate : Lots of frames needing repairs that are abandoned, some day to be resurrected into rideable classics when the work load gets thin ,posters of bike racers and catalogues from bike component companies,bike magazines,jerseys-can't seem to part with them, even if the moths have eaten many holes in them......old frame drawing..on and on. In my sixteen years of occupying this space I had done a good job of filling every square inch of space and a bad job of throwing stuff out.
A few days ago the building superintendent came by and gave me a real surprise-my office was going away. The landlady was supposedly appropriating the 160 square foot office and stairwell for storage. I was to lose my universal catch-all space for all the stuff that wouldn't fit downstairs in the shop. My desk, computer , rollers , sales and tax records, shipping boxes and old musical gear would have to find a new home, most likely the recycling center at the county dump. The superintendent gave me all fo three days to re-arrange 16 years of accumulation. Saddled with this new unexpected task ,I was trying really hard not to be mad , sad and or sentimental. What I had to do was to get a lot of stuff organized downstairs and make room for whatever I felt was too essential to either give away or throw away.
With grim determination I began the task of looking through all the boxes and piles of stuff upstairs , trying to really not get too caught up in looking through memory lane and stay at the task of downsizing my substantial accumulation. Ignoring the stories in each box of stuff was pretty much impossible for me and I began to get sidetracked in looking at receipts for frames sold in years past , trying to remember the faces of the people who had ordered them. I came across names of people who have passed on, bike shops long out of business , prices that were so low that I wondered how I survived. I looked for a time at the old books but soon figured out that I could easily run out of valuable time spending the day looking at things I had ignored for over a decade. I came to the conclusion that placing the receipt books in a box and keeping to the task at hand was needed, although this sensibility did not come natural to me. I thought about all the years I had been building bikes and what all of this stuff represented to my personal history. After pondering this I had a moment of clarity, a kind of resignation that whatever value this mountian of stuff represented to me, most of it would have to go-personal history be damned.
I got in the mode of "Get rid of anything as long as it hasn't been useful in the last two years"......this amounted to nearly two truck loads. Lots of bike parts got donated to the local "Bike Church" self service bike co-op. A lot of metal got recycled-fancy US made aluminum tubing ,about the equivalent to $ 1,500 worth became $ 38.40 in recycle value. My oldest bike drawings, many of which were from the early '90's went into the dumpster . Old catalogues and magazines got recycled or went to friends. It was a blood-letting of personal accumulation like I had never had-more like something that should happen when someone dies, but I wasn't dead yet. Maybe it was the death of something else, the passing of my inability to cut loose of all the junk that I thought held my identity and told my story. I had the thought , who really cares about this junk anyway ? who wants to know in such rediculous detail the complete and unabridged archeological evidence of my time on earth ? If I had been ignoring it all these years , wouldn't it follow that even I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to it ? I started to feel pretty empty and started thinking in jest about leaving enough room in the dumpster for myself ! After all, nothing lasts forever.

Everyone wants what I don't have....

Maybe it's just me but there's a lot of chatter about the whole framebuilding question: Keep it a hobby or go pro ? I cannot offer advice on this, only personal experience. As a 22 year full-timer and former hobbyist, I have delved pretty deeply into both worlds and can't really say what is a better place to be-it really depends on your circumstances.
Back in 1978 I was a really lonely neurotic bike mechanic with nothing to occupy my time except any and all things bike. I had moved to a new town, knew practically no one and was not really good at making new friends. To add to that, I was pretty depressed and virtually excommunicated from nearly all of my family back home. I guess I chose bikes instead of drugs......or both, kind of-with the bikes being much more influential in the end. I became a hobby builder out of a drive to know all I could about bikes, right down to the way they were brazed together. I had no idea what the future held and really didn't care...it was all about the moment.
Now it is 2010 and I have been at this full time since 1988 and this week is all about fixing broken team bikes. I don't care what anyone says about building simple welded race bikes being the easy way out. Building fancy lugged frames for people who will worship and pamper their shiny expensive rigs is not easy but I don't see it as any more challenging than what i do. I build really light bikes for people that want to win races. These bikes can and do break.....not generally in a catastrophic way but more of a fatigue crack situation. I have four of them to resurrect this week , two more than I had all of last year. Backing up what I build and fixing it in a timely fashion- fixing it in most cases for no charge is what I would call, not taking the easy way out. The fleet has to remain functional and for better or worse, I'm the one who has to step up-these frames don't get sent back to Taiwan, they come to my shop.
While some folks might think I'm completely out of my mind for choosing this part of the framebuilding profession, I offer this thought : Lots of people want to do what I do- or at least what they think I do but most of them will not get the chance. They will try to create some sort of livelyhood out of bike building and realize that they cannot survive financially for one reason or another. They will have to remain hobbyists......not as bad as it sounds, but still short of some of these folks framebuilding goals they had set for themselves. The fact that I have remained viable for so many years is a testiment to something.....I'm not completely sure what but I'll have to say that a bit of personal sacrifice is needed.
One person who emailed me a number of months ago was wanting to accumulate the skills and tools to build a frame or two. This person scoured the forums and really sought out much advice from a lot of builders active on these forums. His conclusion was that a lot of these builders were unhelpful , pompus , coddled and really propped up by a huge fan-base and really weren't that great at all. He scrapped his plans entirely , disgusted and for the most part,quite bitter. I'm not in complete disagreement with him about some of what he said but the guys who actually make a living building frames are few, dedicated and willing to go to the shop on a Sunday and fix something for someone who was nice enough to buy a frame from them. This is my world-I don't need or want a hug for my sacrifice -I'm happy to be viable at this questionable trade and hope to continue as long as I can. My customers will make that decision for me but if I treat them right , I'll be able to influence that decision a little.

What we stand to lose

In the interest of providing more efficient service, large corporations are making more use of online services and phasing out having actual representatives that you can contact by phone. The new form of online commerce is the B-to-B system........no need for a phone at all-it's all done on the computer: Ordering, inventory check, shipping tracking......you name it ,you'll be able to access it right from your laptop, I-phone or whatever. I have recently been using these systems and when they work, it's pretty easy and quick.
Here's the problem for me : While the online system is really easy and nobody has to be there to answer your call ( Handy for orders that happen after work hours, particularly from companies hours ahead in time zones ) I have spent much of my work life building up relationships with the folks on the other end of the phone that B-to-B systems are replacing. I consider many of these people to be my friends-they let me know what is going on in their world.....this is what I consider the real thing that makes a life-long job more than a job -the community in the field we call home most of our waking lives.
The computer, while being a great tool could effectively take away our ability to talk to people at a great many companies-not because they don't have good people....it's because their good people are being spread too thin. The corporate board of directors mentality only sees profit numbers and efficiency ratios......there's no way they can quantify customer loyalty-nor do they seem to want to take the time. I'm profoundly worried about this trend as it means that the folks that run these companies are truly out of touch with the other 98 % of the human race that surrounds them. Call me old fashioned if you will, but I really appreciate people who answer the phone, call back and take their clients and their jobs seriously. I also appreciate companies who value good employees and find ways to utilize and reward their best skills.
As a person in the bike business, I feel that as builders, suppliers , manufacturers , sales reps , warehouse workers , we are all in this thing together and we are the ones that give it life.....we and the customers . After many of these large corporations have gone through buyouts and re-organizations , the folks at the top might not have any idea how their company came to be and what personal relationships made that possible. This is the big dis-connect ( to use an all-too-popular catchword) between the top and everyone below.
In the food supply and restaurant world there's a movement to make everything 'sustainable and local' from farming to running an eating establishment. I feel there is something to learn here for every line of work, in particular the bicycle business. Are we 'sustainable and local' going the direction we are- at least according to the corporate model-where person-to-person sales and domestic manufacturing is being phased out ? Will our business and craft improve with the trends that are set by the people at the top of these leading companies ? Are we really on the brink of losing what holds us together just so that a few folks can be proud of the profits they have secured and the jobs they have eliminated ?
Maybe I'm not the one to speak here.....I'm so primitive that i don't even take credit cards at my shop. I don't have or want paypal.....the way I see it, there's no life-or-death need for a custom bike-you either plan for it and save up the cash or you just live without it. I'm not saying that if you don't have the money, you don't deserve a custom bike..............just be thoughtful about it and realize that good things take time-time that corporate America doesn't seem to have for working folks right now.

Ralph me out.

I'll warn you in advance.....this will not be very engaging. I am heavily involved in cyclcross so this post will deal with that exclusively.
Lately on the framebuilder chat forums ( The ones I do not participate in anymore...) There has been a number of firestorms-at least, that's what I call them. Topics that get people arguing fine points. The big problem I see is that some of the folks giving opinions really don't know jack about cyclocross.The latest topic is the UCI's move to reverse their ban on the use of disc brakes in cyclocross events at the elite UCI level. Since about 99% of cyclocross racing is not at that level, most of us will not be effected by this ruling and shouldn't give a rat's ass.
Well, get on the forum and you'll see who gives a rat's ass-people who should really just keep thier mouths shut for the most part until they do some racing or work as a mechanic in the pit area of an elite cyclocross race. These are things that I have done......for about 10 seasons so far and I'm not quitting soon. While I don't claim to be any great or even average 54 year old racer ( 26th at the nationals being my best result at that level) I have been washing the mud off of bikes at some of the premiere events on both coasts. What I notice are which of my framebuilding bretheren are out there racing and being bike grunts with me. Almost all of the folks on the forum with greatly detailed arguments and engineering data on why we should all switch to disc brakes are absent......maybe I wouldn't know them if I saw them , but they are most assuredly not at the race. Why then, do they argue thier points so vehemently when they are completely clueless about the experience of the race itself ?These are folks who want to have the last word , even if it means ignoring the elemental truths of the actual subject ! Ahh, this is the essence of the internet-people who want to be right but really don't want to actually wade in the mud or beat themselves up on the bike to find out the real truth about cylclocross racing. If I were someone wanting to find out information on the forum, I think I would shut up and listen , perchance to somebody with real world experience in the subject at hand.
Year after year, I go to the nationals although not every year. When I go there I get to race but more importantly, I get to support the riders on my team who really are talented and will be in contention for medals or at least a top-ten finish. These and the folks in the pit are the ones who will give me the real world data that will help me improve as a builder, making bikes that will not hold them back when everything is on the line in a race. I'll look to my left.....there's Sacha White , ready to catch a bike and rinse the mud off of it before the rider completes the next half a lap. I look to my right....there's Richard Sachs, ready to do the same. While I might not build bikes the same way as these two builders might, I know that we are all in the same place at the same time for a reason....it is because we care. We , and other builders are there at trackside because it is a real world reality check on weather or not the stuff we do in the shop will hold up. Sooo.......all you other folks weighing in opinions on what should or shouldn't be on the bikes we build for the athletes we support-I guess you had better get your sorrel boots on and come out to the races or just shut the fuck up.
Oh, yeah.....disc brakes. hmmm, should they be on 'cross bikes ? Don't ask me......ask the guy who is trying to get the stars and stirpes jersey. I'm sure he'll give you an informed opinion, even if he isn't and out of work engineer.