Easter week Four posts
April 4, 2010
4. Keven's in Mexico but will be back Monday, and he's the diagatube decider, but I suspect it's a done deal. We've looked at faked samples alotta, and have just to work out the final Hunqagraphics, including which tube gets the Hunqadecal, and then, what to do with the other tube. Robert is working out these details, and he has good taste, always has.
The second proto-panniers are coming next Tues or Wednesday. Dave is working on the final details, and they're going to be fine. Fantastic panniers don't make the ride, horrible ones can hurt a ride, and these will be....good enough. One main pouch, and a pocket on the flap, and that's it. Small stuff, you put in other bags, and you organize your gear with separate stuffsacks inside--either mesh or waterproofers, depending on the weather. We'll show the details when they come in, but even these won't be final.
A new bag, called the GrabSack, is coming next week, too. And a new Vegan BarSack that's no better than the current one we're out of, but a little different.
We're working on a poncho for next Winter. Ponchos are best when they're heavy, so the wind doesn't blow them around. A poncho you can fit in your fist is too light. Ours will fill up a saddlebag, I'm sure, but it'll be the way to cross town and stay dry.
The Viyella tartans are going pretty well. It's such a great fabric, and these shirts are so crisp and soft. I'm not sure we're the right business to be selling them, but don't plaid shirts look great? Maybe you have to have grown up with them. I doubt we'll sell any to guys under 45. Women look great in them, too, as you can see on that shirt page. Some women have bought them.
Tweed bags. I'm trying to get word from the maker; not so easy. It's a different world, there. A fast response is 4 days. There's no urgency, it's a land of molasses clocks and everybody is infuriatingly patient. Sometime, we'll have them again.
Jay wants a Hunqabuckle and a Hunqabolo tie. We're looking into those. He and I and Dan-Ben-Ryan rode tonite in the hills and took lots of pictures. Dan's plan is to give a riding-photo class c/o Rivendell, one of these weekends. It'll cost something. Sometimes things do, or they don't happen. We'll keep it reasonable. Is non-free acceptable? I hope so.
Jay's working on how-to videos. Installing racks, and so on. The Silver Hupe, for sure. We have one on that already, but somebody on the forum made a comment about it that had us howling with laughter....about how hard it was to mount. Jay uses one all the time. He's figured it out, and it works well. But if you put a hundred people into a hundred dungeons with a hundred bikes and a hundred Silver Hupes and gave them a hundred hours to figure it out or stay there forever.....half would stay there forever. We'll fix that with a new video.
G
There's a new video of the Hunqapillar prototype in action here. Jay shot and filmed it by himself. There must have been a lot of running around, but you'd never know it.
3: Diagonapillargate
We need to figure out if and when to show prototypes from now on. We need pre-orders, but should overemphasize that they are prototypes and can change. We've done that plenty, but maybe not enough. It's not, from my point of view, "bait and switch." We've never downgraded anything. The diagonal tube, if that's where it goes, will be better for a rough-and-tumble load-hauling bouncy trail bike like the big Hpillar. If I thought it were ugly, that would be another thing---but I'd still look for a nice solution.
I don't THINK it's ugly, and although I don't think of myself as one who goes around categorizing things purely by looks, I think lots of bikes come up short, even way short, even nearly obscene (a little extreme) in the visuals arena. The Diagonapillar isn't one of those.
The Protopillars eventually will be sold as Protovelos, as all our prototypes are. As part of the resurrected and prototype frame sale we alluded to about a month ago either in this section or in the Knothole.
The finals will have more clearance, another key braze-on, and possibly a tube change. Here isn't the right place for those details, because truly and most respectfully we can't have it up for debate, but I want to say that the protopillars are not quite there yet, and they won't happen until they are. THe decals have already changed, and may change more. The downtube panel might even disappear. I know it looks good, but there's more to it than that. I'm not saying it will, just that it might. If that creates a rift, we'll get by, but I hope it doesn't and we aren't counting votes (because we can't).
Oh, the pros and cons of disclosuring on the interweb! I need to rethink a lot of things. Maybe we'll even have a meeting, and things will take a turn for the better.
Post 2: Dahunqadebate
The problem with showing prototypes is rearing its head, cobra-like, right now. The protopillars had parallel top tubes, and since then we've angled it down more to creat two nearly equally sized triangles, both smaller than the one before.
In matters of taste, style, aesthtics, there's no pleasing everybody, and in this case the new bike is either liked or hated, never neutraled. One refund so far and there may be more. It puts us in an uncomfortable spot, but not one we can't handle. "Not handling" it would mean what? I don't know. But either we cave or we don't, and the thing about all the 'pinions and emails is: It forces our hand, doesn't it?
I'm all for the diagonal, and it wasn't even my idea. It works. It looks different because it isn't the same as you're used to or as the prototype. Aside from that, I think it looks good, but I would, triangle-fan-that-I-am-Sam. Small triangles are good. Bikes are triangles, and the bigger frames are made better this way.
We may lose friends or fans or customers over this. Don't think that doesn't hurt and that we don't care. We do care, but we still have to do what we think is best for the bike. Thank you, if you're out there!, for understanding.
G
Keven is on vacation en Mexico. Maybe he'll address this when he gets back.
FIRST POST: 1. We got the Windshields in, and S24O buddy Sean was the first to use a non-prototype two days ago on the way down the mountain from a campout. There will be a photo of it on the site in the Windshield section soon. If any of you have pix of yourself using it---and I don't mean joke pix of sitting down in front of a big platter of ribs about to dig in, but actual riding pix, then send them in and maybe they'll go up on the site with no remuneration, but some appreciation. The best size is 505 pixels wide x 316 tall, and 72 dpi is fine, but I can fix 'em if they're even close.
2. Slightly Used is the title of a column by Rob Walker in today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04fob-consumed-t.html?ref=todayspaper
I'll repeat that address later in this post so you can keep reading now, if you have the time.
It's interesting to me on a few levels, and I bet you'll feel the same. There are parallels in our world, for sure. You want things beautiful AND functional, and as a designer/maker of record, I want it out there that I/we here shoot for both. The target isn't fixed, and often isn't obvious, and when on top of that you consider that there are targets you might not see that I DO see, and targets I might not see that you think should be targets, and may even assume I'm seeing them and aiming my best, then the whole idea of hitting THE bullseye becomes ridiculous. For instance....
Take the Hunqapillar-Bombadil/Hilsen-Hillborn combo. One of our --- it's not a problem-problem, but it's a challenge we often don't meet --- is differentiating the first two from one another, and the second two from one another.
In a regular bike company differentiation is easy. If you have two mountainy-tour bikes, you make one a dual-suspension bike, and the other a hardtail; and if you have two roadish trail bikes, you make one fataluminum with a steel fork and the other fatcarbonsnap with a carbonsnap fork.
You lay out the bikes in a lineup by category and price point, and fill them in, and make notes on the upgrades the customers get as they move up in price. That's how we did it at Bstone, and I am a thousand percent positive that's how every bike company except Rivendell does it. Our method here is less calculated. We have no yearly line up, but bikes come up as a need materializes, and then it's a matter of how we put everything possible into that model.
Since after steel and lugs, the next-most-powerful forces are versatility by means of tire and fender clearance, each model tends to get as much of that stuff as the kind of bike it is, and the kind of brake it has, allows. The Roadeo fits a 700x35, and it's a club-rider's bike. The Hilsen fits a 700x40 with fenders, because that's a great thing for a bike to do....to fit those. Why shouldn't the Hillborne also fit the same stuff?
I say it should, but then we have two bikes that are functionally the same. The Hillsen is more dainty in the details (not less tough), and I'm often in the position, as are others here, of comparing the two bikes. What do you get for $1000 more? Well, there's no way to point out the diffs without implying that the Hillsen details are intrinsically better, and I'd say they aren't, but once the cat is out of the bag, that's it. The Hilsen has skinnier and more beautifully bent fork blades. The upper and lower head lugs are better matches. The seat stays are double-tapered. The tubing is heat-treated. It's made in Japan or America, not Taiwan.
All of those things step on the Hillborne unfairly, like a beauty contest between the prettiest girl in town's going against a Venezuelan super model out for blood. It's not a fair comparison. In the Hillborne's defense, and this is where something I said earlier comes into play, there is less obvious beauty a layer or two deep. The mismatched lugs are every bit as well-made as the matched ones, and they fit the geometry (of the Hillborne) better. Originally the top lugs was designed to go with the bottom Hilsen lug, in an upsloping Legolas frame that never happened. So we sat on the lugs for three years without using them, and then came the Hillborne. It uses that top lug, the non-used Legolas lug, with the bottom lug from the Romulus, and it's a perfect solution.
Lug snobs (and don't play that game with me, because I can win if I try hard) might reel at the mix we have, but when I see the Hillborne (and now Hunkapillar, and Bombadil) head tubes, I see a nice solution, a beautiful foreign adoption in those bikes. They're my favorite head tubes these days, because of how I look at them.
Sometimes people get our frames and take a year or more to, or just plain never build them into bikes. "They're too pretty to ride" is the compliment, but it's infuriating. A bike that's too pretty to ride isn't worth owning. A bike lovingly, lavishly appointed and restored only as an object of lust with some romantic idea of gritty riding in a faraway land in a different time in a different life is pathetic.
If you get a Bohemian frame (Dave Bohm), ride the heck out of it. The bike looks better trashed than it does pristine, and that's always true, of anything beautiful. Don't keep it for fair weather club rides. I don't KNOW Dave Bohm, haven't spoken to him more than ten minutes in my life, and I don't know his frames, other than by reputation and website, as sort of the fanciest frames out there these days. I believe they're more than fancy, though; and based on the short conversation, I'm sure it would bug Dave to know his customers were preening, not riding.
One of our customers is custom knifemaker Tim Wright. Tim's knives are all you'd expect custom knives to be, and custom knife customers are as picky and weird as any colllectors of anything can be. A custom knife can be the best-made knife out there, but Tim has his own ideas about knives and what's good, and what's weird, and makes a distinction between knives made to collect and knives made to cut.
I've never met Tim personally, but over the last decade I've spoken with him for several hours, and NOT ONE of our conversations has lasted less than twenty minutes, several have been an hour long, and I wish I'd recorded every one of them. He has been a huge inspiration to me, has affected how I look at anything that's made to be used, and without knowing it he has had a strong positive affect on the bikes we make today.
He has or at one time HAD a line of knives he called "Therapy knives." After being driven nuts by collectors who, I don't know the particulars, but maybe they wanted the mother-of-pearl handles on their knives to come from 40-year old virgin clams in the seas of Micronesia---that's how knife collectors can be, it seems---he needed to make straightforward beautiful knives for himself, for his own sanity; knives where he drew the stop line short of ridiculousness. These "therapy" knives were a third the price of his customs, and to look at one you'd still stay, "Hey man, that's the best-looking non-weird knife I've ever seen."
It's a knife that make you want to cut food, and it's been used at least twice a day for five or more years. Yes, it has beausage, but beneath and before the beausage, there was super beauty, and it's not the blind, mind-numb beauty of some simple things that try to claim beauty with simplicity and that's all they have going for them; but real recognizable beauty, if any beauty's real at all. I don't think Tim Wright has a web site. I know he has no car. He lives in Sedona.
This may not work, but I'm doing my best. Here's a knife:
William Hurlow died about a month ago. I got an email two days ago saying so, and there was a story about him. Maynard once wrote about him, too. He was an English builder who, over the years, built for several makers under their name, and finally, under his own. He was the guy who inspired Art Stump, and if you're the guy who inspired Art Stump, I'd say that's something.
But Hurlow made thousands of frames, and Art Stump, just nineteen (I think that's the figure). In 1977 I was on a list to get an Art Stump, but then my Raleigh Competition was stolen from the campus of Mills College, and I had to get a new bike soon, so I got a lugged Ritchey, as my gotta-get-it-now consolation.
In looking back, I remember thinking, "it's STILL a good bike" in an apologetic way, but now when I think about it, I think it was a better bike. Tom Ritchey, by that time, had brazed thousands of frames; Art Stump: nineteen. No doubt Art had metalworking skills that predated and contributed to his frames, but Tom Ritchey was (a) No slouch, either, to say the ultra-least; and (b) had a more active torch, which counts for a lot. I got the better bike.
William Hurlow has built bikes for Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton. They prolly are equipped with full-Campy 1985 parts (I'm just guessing) or maybe Croce d-Aune from 1991 or whatever. I can see the dust on the chains now. I'm not saying Mick and 'ric don't ride bikes, although Mick certainly has the thighs of a non-rider; I'm just saying that if they do ride, they probably don't ride the Hurlows, not as their daily/or monthly rides). I can seeeee the drop bars with the levers too low, and the Benotto tape, and the Binda Extra straps. It's all so clear, but maybe I'm way wrong.
The Rob Walker column mentions a 1.2 million year old hand axe found in the Olduvai gorge, and there's a comment, a quote, from Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum of the same name. He says: "I don't believe it has any intent -- serious intent -- behind it." Because the axe (a hand-axe, remember) is sharp on all sides, which I take it to mean that, by that comment, MacGregor took it to mean, that the user would get all cut up using the axe.
Rob Walker points out to the reader, though maybe he didn't say this to Neil MacGregor, that the same axe design remained in use for about a million years, so by that measure it was successful. A good point to make, I think.
It shouldn't disturb anybody, the idea that these cave men were hacking their hand-palms as they were chopping and scraping meat off bone with these MacGregor-Unapproved hand axes. I'm no paleoanthropologist, but I've held a rock or two in my time, and it seems to me they'd grab it with a grip--maybe pressed between fingertip pads and hand heel, a grip that kept the inside sharp edge away from the inside knuckle-creases. That's the grip they used when making them, so it would have been familiar to them, and functional. Here's the address again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04fob-consumed-t.html?ref=todayspaper
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Smile Train fund is over $40K now. Shooting for $50K by month's end.
Here's a video you may have seen already:
CLICK HERE TO WATCH
Here's the link to the fund site:
http://www.smiletrain.org/
G
