I thought I’d show some examples of pictures I like from our photo contest submissions. There is still time to enter, just tag your instagram pictures with #sendasignal before Friday at Midnight Pacific and we will announce the winner of the proof print from our sold out screen print edition.
By @jdorfer77
By @gittestark
By @ivan_satoshi
By @brianellin
By @furlycurly
Post ride shower beer by @glenner75
It looks like this weekend is going to be a good one. What bike plans do you have? I’m headed to Bend to ride mountain bikes with my wife for Mother’s day, while some very good friends watch our little ones. In the spirit of enjoying the warm weather on two wheels, we decided to have a photo contest. Here are the details:
Tag your instagram photos with #sendasignal and we will pick our favorites. The winner will receive an artist proof of the latest silk screened poster we did for NAHBS this year. These posters were a big hit and we sold out of the edition less than a week. This is the only way to get one of these prints!
Get the free download of instagram here. And follow us @signalcycles.
The photo should somehow capture your bike adventure or the spirit of riding. Be creative and remember Nate and I have art degrees, so we know a thing or two about deciding good from bad. The photo contest will close next Friday May 18 at midnight (Pacific). We will announce the winner on Monday. Enter as many pictures as you want, and help us spread the word. Thanks!
Another week gone, and we have been feeling the fire burning under our toes. Nate has been furiously brazing and finishing a couple of sweet bikes. I have been working on getting a few Saltzman bikes together. There is energy in the air at the Signal shop. Every year after NAHBS it seems like we have a re-introduction into the world that lasts longer than we would like. Just getting back from the show and jumping into production mode is difficult.
This red city bike is the latest complete bike to roll out of the shop. It is a 2×10 with downtube shifters and a dynamo front hub powering a Schmidt light. The brakes are handled by Paul Components. The wheels are rolling cushy thanks to slightly wide H son Plus rims and Jack Brown 700×33 tires. With these rims they measure closer to 35. We build the bike with internal routing and a matching stem to give a nice integrated feel. The bike is headed to its owner in Jakarta Indonesia, so we will likely never see it again.
Nate and I were talking about how this kind of bike is kind of becoming a signature style of bike for us. The light mount, Shimano/Paul/Brooks/Chris King/Nitto parts package and the city riding position. It just feels like this bike is very “Signal.” Full set on our flickr page.
This video is pretty remarkable. Each of these shot had to take a lot of time and planning. The video is a promotional video for local tourism, but I’m noticing a lack of anything bicycle related other than a shot of mountain bikes being carried away from Portland on top of a car. Mountain biking is the worst in Portland, not something I would try to use to attract visitors. Instead of all the freeway shots, it might have been cool to see a few seconds of the waves of bike commuter traffic on the Hawthorne, or up N Williams.
But I didn’t make the video. And it is an impressive piece of work.
Our friend Jay stopped by the booth with his cool Canon and Zeiss prime 50 1.4 lens and took these shots of our booth. I want a camera that shoots video!
We are back from Sacramento, and the buzzing in my ears from the busy weekend at NAHBS has subsided. We had a great show this year. We got to share a wall with Curtis at Retrotec, and Jeremy Sycip. Across the aisle was Rick Hunter and Mitch Pryor of MAP cycles. Without exception these builders are the quiet type who let their work speak for them. They all make beautiful bicycles and it was a pleasure to share a corner of the show with them. And what a show! We were completely slammed on Friday and Saturday. We managed to sell our Saltzman to a shop owner in Osaka, Japan on the first day. The screen prints were a big hit, I think we ended up bringing about 10 back with us. They are available on the web store.
It was a busy weekend for sure and we made some new contacts and had a chance to deepen ties with old friends. Thursday night we got to watch Jason French give his first ever karaoke performance at Hamburger Patty’s and it was quite a hit. Speaking of French, he commissioned a bike and trailer from Ira Ryan and Ben Leonard and it won a deserved Best City Bike award. There was a lot of work into that project, it’s got to feel very validating for those guys.
All in all Sacramento was a fun venue. Being able to drive in one day was really nice. Next year is Denver. I’m not sure if Signal can do 6 years in a row of NAHBS. After some time to recover we will probably start the planning.
Our 4 bikes for the show:
Much more photos on our flickr page.
Thanks for the support.
We landed in Sacramento after a 12 hour day in the Sprinter (thanks Brett F of EVT for the loan) after arriving in Sacramento we met up with fellow Portland travelers Ira Ryan, Joseph Ahearne, Mitch Pryor and Ben Leonard in our room for a beer. Tomorrow will be busy building up out booth for the show. We will be posting pictures all weekend.
NAHBS 2012 is starting!
It’s almost time for the big show. NAHBS is starting March 1st this year and we are busy making sure all the loose ends are tied up. This year we are positioned right next door to Jeremy Sycip and Curtis Inglis on a 20×20 island. But before we go, Ira Ryan and Ben Leonard have decided that the stress of attending NAHBS wasn’t enough. They decided to put on a pre-NAHBS show up here in Portland to let locals get a glimpse of some of these beautiful show bikes. The pre-show event is this Friday from 6-10pm. It’s five bucks to get in, but if you want the inside scoop, you can pay an extra $5 at Westend bikes for a VIP ticket and get in at 4pm and have access to some free beer as well as a less crowded venue to scoop out the bikes and builders. I helped out by designing the show poster:
Eric from Winter Bikes in Eugene is planning on joining us too, we didn’t get a confirmation before printing these up. Another event that I am really excited about going to is my friend Matt Hall’s art show at Ampersand this Thursday night. It’s last Thursday on Alberta, so plan for the crazy, but if you can make it to the Ampersand Gallery/Shop it will be worth your while. Matt made these elaborate boxes with skeletons from found animals and other objects. On top of that, he is also showing new drawings of some of the found animals before the process of stripping them to the bone. The drawings are very sensitive and remind me of Andrew Wyeth. I want to own one.
We have been playing with the Instagram app and are loving it. If you are into that stuff, look us up @signalcycles.
This week will be full of bike building, booth prep, transportation planning, and trying to cross all the other items off the list. No matter how much planning we do, it always seems to come down to the wire with NAHBS. Can’t wait to show you what we have been up to!
Mitch Pryor makes beautiful bicycles. His company MAP cycles is in the same building as Signal, so we see each other frequently. One day, a couple months ago I was talking to him about the post mount Mafac racer brakes he does. I was holding a caliper and said something about him offering his own version of the iconic brake. Looking at the Mafac mark, it is stamped into the alloy arm, I said “You could just remove the -ac and make the f into a p and you would have MAP racers.” Kind of funny, kind of serious. Then a couple of weeks ago we were talking about the upcoming NAHBS show and I asked if he was going to be making shirts. Mitch said he doesn’t really sell that many shirts. I said he should do a Mafac shirt and make the brake say MAP. I got so excited about doing it that I told him I was going to make them and sell them for him. He was persuaded to let me make a t-shirt design for him. With a little wave of the magic wand, we had a working drawing.
Mitch decided to go with darker color shirts, so I inverted the design and let the shirt color be the line for the drawing. We had them printed at Full Court Press (thanks Lou and Joe) on American Apparel US made 100% cotton shirts in black and Army (greeny brown). Mitch is selling them for $20. I think they look pretty great, but I’m a little biased. His webstore is here, they aren’t up as of this posting, but might be soon. Just email info@mapbicycles if you think you can’t live without one!
Sounds easier than it actually is. I thought I’d keep a detailed record of this one just to see if I could. After a couple hours, the reality of just getting things done makes the documenting take a back seat. We will try again soon, but for now this is the most complete documentation of a bike build that we have done in our shop. The best way to view it is to look at the photoset and select the slideshow option over on the right of your screen. I think there are a lot of detail/process pictures in our flickr stream that tell the story of how we build bikes at Signal. The trick is putting these pictures together in a narrative that easy to follow along with and interesting. I’m just going to post some of my favorite pictures here to hopefully get you interested enough to watch the slideshow:
