Barb's blue bike!

This is Barb's new sporty touring bike. Barb and her husband Joel are avid bike tourists and plan trips every year. Barb has been riding a cyclocross bike and "making it work" for the past few years, which means putting up with a bike that isn't right for the job. The fit was never quite right and the cantilever brakes just didn't quite have enough stopping power. So we put together this lugged steel frame and matched it to a carbon fork. We used long reach Shimano brakes to allow for full coverage fenders and wide tires when needed. Barb really wanted a kickstand, so we built in a plate that works for the Pletcher double leg stand. It's going to make loading bags a lot easier, and keep the beautiful paint job by Keith Anderson protected from dings and scratches. And to keep the cables from wearing through the paint on the head tube we brazed on some cable guide rings.


Unfortunately she isn't going to be able to ride her new bike for a little while, she just broke her collar bone. It was the result of a run in with a car door, and Barb got the worst of it. It's going to be a few more weeks until she's back in the saddle, but until then, she has a beautiful bike that she can get inspired to ride and can look forward to putting tons of miles on it. Get better soon Barb!

were on rapha's site

We built a cool bike for a cool rider at Rapha. Carey got a fillet brazed road bike with s-bend stays. Rapha picked the paint scheme and the bike was painted by Coat here in Portland. It came together beautifully, it's exactly the kind of bike that Nate and I need for ourselves. Someday we'll have the personal bike stable all filled out. Part of the deal is that we got featured on the Rapha continental website. Daniel Paisley came over and shot some amazing pictures of the garage and we talked to him about how we got started and what signal means to Nate and I. It feels like we have been in the right place at the right time a lot this year. I know it has made a difference in bringing signal into a lot of peoples view that might not have heard of us before. Any how, head over to the Rapha site and have a look around. There are some really great photos of work spaces (if you are into that sort of thing), and a lot of great interviews with some very interesting bike builders.

too soon?

Is it too soon to get pumped up for cyclocross season? I don't think so! Mostly I just wanted an excuse to post some pictures of John's sweet cross bike that's already been through one Crusade season.

We are building some new wheels for it, so it's got some mismatched stuff there, but since he's picking it up to do the Eugene Roubaix this weekend, I figured this may be one of the last chances I have to take pictures of it all cleaned up. The bike has some pretty cool features, like the seat mast. We had Flemming help us taper the inside of a Thomson seat post and fabricate a matching plug that expands the post to keep it tight in the frame.
The design was copied from a much smarter guy, Sean at Vertigo. Sean makes super clean titanium wonder bikes. His build quality can only be described as obsessive, with tig welding so clean it'll make you want to cry. The extended seat tube allowed us to route the rear brake cable through the top tube and keep the cable out of the way when shouldering the bike on run-ups. We also used Paul components direct mount canti posts on the swoopy s-bend rear end to keep the brakes low profile and increase rigidity at the post, this makes for snappy working cantilevers. John's getting two new wheelsets, both are going to be Chris King's new single speed hubs with one set of Mavic Reflex tubulars and one set of DT clinchers. Can you say suh-weet? John and I used to battle it out in the single speed race, but then this year he just got a lot faster than me. It happened to be the exact same time he took delivery of his new signal. Coincidence? Probably.

spring cleaning

Nate and I spent some quality time with a broom yesterday. The shop has been feeling a bit cramped lately, so we re-positioned a few shelves and tried to think about the flow of our work. The big incentive for the cleaning was that we are going to be included in another coffee table book about custom bikes! The Photographer was in our shop Friday for a few hours and took a ton of pictures. His background is in motorcycles, but his real passion is photography. I'm always up for talking bikes, so the interview was interesting. We just finished up an interview with Rapha for the continental project, so it seems we've been doing more talking than building lately. I noticed that an interesting thing happens when trying to explain the nature of what we are doing, I hear myself explain it and verbalize things that have been just running around in my head, and that makes them real instead of just ideas. We spent a lot of time talking about the value of goods bought locally, vs. cheaper bigger, and the craft of building anything at 100% of your ability.
Anyway, it was a good day. And we have some new pictures of Cameron's white road bike, and a couple of Carey's Rapha bike that we'll be sharing on the site soon. Thanks for reading.