Reader update, Bomba-update, other

January 28, 2008

The Reader is nearly full now and nearly ready to go to the printer. "Nearly" doesn't mean "imminently" or "just around the corner," but I think it means in the mail by Feb 23. All the pages are full, the page count is right, it just needs proofreading and then all the photos have to be dealt with--collected for output to the printer, in some cases resized, and a few other things boring to anybody who's not involved in the final output or printing. The proofreading will take the most time. Every time we send an issue out, I get emails volunteering  proofreading services, but I don't take anybody up on it. For one thing, it's laid out in Quark, and if you don't know Quark, I'd have to print it out and do the changes myself, and if I'm going to do that, I may as well have locals proof it. Rich is pretty good.

For another thing, no matter who proofreads it, it's going to have some typos. No proofreader has guaranteed no typos, so I figure it's just a matter of my eight or your seven. Not a big difference there. Finally, there are some  words that I intentionally misspell. I don't do it a lot, but deep in the nooks (and this time even in the headline) there are intentional misspellings that I can't easily defend, but I don't want fixed, either. Anyway, look for RR-40 sometime around late 'bruary, early 'arch.

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We got early samples of the Bombadil badge, and on the site there under Bombadil, you can see what it looks like. It's bigger than I'd expected, and thicker, too. The radius is wrong for the head tube, but that's being fixed, and it's not a problem now because the bikes aren't due for a few months.

I think we're going with a double top-tube on the Bombadil, instead of the curvy thing we'd planned on. The curvy thing, basically a brace btw the downtube and head tube, is a pain to make and complicated carrying a frame pump. I'm not sure the extra top tube (like the 69cm and 72cm A.Homer Hilsen have) is necessary, but it strengthens the triangulation, if that's the way to put it. It firms up the front end by effectively shrinking the head tube--something not important on a normal bike, but helpful on a bike like the Bombadil.

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Our site is being refined, and we'll soon have captions on the photos of the parts, which will let us have some instructional 'fo up there. How to rig bags, racks, and so on.

Grant