Ho Ho Ho!

Merry Christmas everyone!...  But mostly to me!

Beat 737 SPD's, 99 cents!

Sakae TI Powerbulge handle bar.

Happy Holidays to all my pedal powered friends!

Life, Love, and LOOT!

Inbound, no pirates.

Continental Mountain King 2.2.  New shoe for the white EWR.

Red Altek's.  Fresh for the Christmas season. Ho Ho Ho.

eBay Oy Vey Fail!

Still aint snapping up everything on eBay, just most things.These are auctions that wandered astray.


Deore DX group.


Red SDG Comp.


Stars and Stripes SDG Comp (AKA Ventura).


Spare Turner bits. Fat people like me stock up on crap like this.


Spare Turner. Fat people like me buy whole spare frames. As a bonus, this one comes with severed human feet free!


XT pedals. First gen goodies. Useful as boat anchors.

Flea

Fleabay bonanza of the weekend!

Shimano SPD 737 pedals.

Purple threadless headset; 3 guesses what little chrome monster gets fitted with this sucker.

440 atc Kona P2II fork.

And thems that got away... Altek levers that sold for 144 to some other sweaty tramp for CNC'd goodness. So goes the interwebs shoppage.

The Robinson Project - Part 5

Decals are eradicated, courtesy of a razor blade and some Goo Gone. The fork goes to the polish first.

Like I said earlier, there is a bit of pitting here, typical of chrome work from imported vendors. Spinner makes a great fork though. It has nifty little Robinson dropouts too, which I'll show in a bit. This picture also shows the only true issue with the chrome, in the the inside of the right leg (on the left in the picture) is a little foggy, and the Robinson decal outline can be seen in the fogging. Once built, only I will know its there...

Boom! Twinkles like a diamond.

Robinson drops on the fork blades.

Robinson signature seat-stay arrangement, and again, Robinson stamped drops. Neat!

And yes, those are cantilever rim brake posts. I'll fit the hand brake and keep the coaster for her to start, but the coaster will go away after a while when she is comfortable with the hand brake.

On to parts!

The Robinson Project - Part 4

Packages have been arriving here at the spacious shipping and loading terminals of One Utahdog Center, World Congress of the Americas. I've been cutting open boxes all week it seems! Time to see, in the daylight, what the Robinson looks like...

And it looks good! A few surprises, not problems really, but indicators of how long I've been away from a BMX shop. First, yes that IS an 1.125" thread-less headset and fork setup on there! Nice!

The chrome looks good too! Some very minor pitting on the Spinner sourced Robinson fork, but the frame is nearly flawless it seems. I'll have to get the thing cleaned up though, to know more.

Here's the actual Surfer Girl that the poor kid has been using so far. 12" wheeled bikes are really suited only for training wheels. The cranks arms are so short that leverage is really challenged. There are no parts to carry over from this sucker. It has been a fine kids bike though, so to the spacious storage warehouse on pier 104 of the Utahdog World Shipping Emporium of the Western Hemisphere it goes!

And here is the boat anchor whore-in training labeled Hannah Montana donor. I already de- Hannah Montana'd it, but it is still just a POS. Just not as offensive a POS. It is SO heavy though. Shockingly heavy. I have no scale to gage where we start from, but I would love to know what the pig weighs, and how much weight I save the child from grunting around, but I will have to just judge it by hand. Not too hard to tell the difference in weight though. I'd think, like the difference between hoisting my Turner vs. lifting the Phoenix, it will be easy.

Cleanup starts. All decals will go, and the frame will be fully polished with Blue Magic Chrome Cleaner, which should tidy up any pitting spots and protect the frame from additional issues for quite a while. "And what is that little blue thing in the corner?" I hear you ask.

Just some new goofy little skulls for the bike fleet. A little VooDoo-ish maybe, but Bicycle Religion keeps me safe.

The Robinson Project - Part 3

So that's it right? Time to swap parts and get the girl riding on a bike that weighs less than she does. She's already ripping along on the Surfer Girl in the sand on the roadside yelling "I'm like a biker in the woods, I'm like a biker in the woods!" So I'm pretty sure she's motivated! (I almost typed 'stoked' there, but I wussed out)

So last week I'm on the couch clickety clickin' on eBay again, doing my usual search for Altek brake levers and SDG Kevlar saddles, and I decide to run the BMX searches again. Dyno VFR, Dyno Nitro, Robinson SST.

Ding!

Robinson SST for sale. Again, with a BIN price of $20!

Click!

Now I own TWO chrome BMX frames!

More to come! Stay tuned as we take useful purple bits from the whore-in-training branded Hannah Montana Huffy and build up a suitable shiny silver and purple bike for a sweet little girl who will, I'm sure, love to bike with her old man. I can only hope!

The Robinson Project - Part 2

I worked at a shop back in the early-mid 1990's that specialized in BMX goodies. I was never a BMX dood myself, but we sold and serviced hundred of Dyno's, GT's and other brands from back in the day. Nicely made 4130 cro-mo frames much lighter than the department store Bicycle Shaped Objects that most kids rode. They were business built machines, always with full chrome finished frames. Most of all though, they were fun as hell to ride.

Seeing the video reminded me of all of that, and an Idea was born.

I need a Dyno VFR. Even better, I need a Robinson SST.

I needed to get on eBay! So on eBay I went!

First pass, I popped in on a Dyno VFR from the mid 1990's. Chrome frame and fork. Cantilever rear brake ready and already fitted with a headset. BIN price, 20 bucks plus shipping! Woot!

A few clicks later and its on the way to the gleaming towers of One Utahdog Center, World Congress of the Americas!

The Robinson Project, Part 1

Seeing a coworker's daughter racing BMX in a video that we played at the SORBA-Jax Pedal Driven movie screening that we held a few weeks back got me to thinking again about a looming question I've had rattling around in my head as I stroll the marble floors of One Utahdog Center, World Congress of the Americas. My daughter is 5, and is nearing 4 feet tall, so the Trek Surfer Girl bike she's been using is getting a little tight for her to say the least, especially in crank arm length.

Here's a picture of a comparable Surfer Girl that I shamelessly ganked without permission from the Interwebs.

A friend of mine has a daughter that rode this interesting lump of poo for the last few years, but she is old enough now to know better, so he gave it to me. It has both a coaster brake as well as the most sloppy rim brakes around. It also weighs, and I'm not exaggerating here, MORE than my Turner 5 Spot. Unacceptable. Don't get me wrong! I like free, but I'll never understand the point of introducing your children or your wife or significant other of best friend or whatever, to the sport of cycling and giving them an inefficient boat anchor to ride. I bet 90% of guys can't understand why their wives won't ride with them, when the man has a 4$K uber-bike, and the chick has a Murray or a 60lb Diamondback.

If you are introducing anyone to the sport, they deserve the best chance available to have fun. Period.

So THIS boat anchor, is not acceptable.

So the Surfer Girl Trek is too small, and the Hannah Montana bike is a POS boat anchor not even suitable in build quality or materials to be substituted into a road construction project for use as concrete reinforcement. I don't want to spend $250 on a bike before we even know if she likes to ride, but I don't want the bike to be the reason why she doesn't like it, so there is a line to toe here...

Lets take stock. The Hannah Montana bike has black tires and purple painted steel rims with the coaster brake. It has a white handlebar and stem and a one piece crankset with a single pie-plate chainring that has a purple flower sticker on it. I also have a purple flower print handlebar pad and purple plastic pedals, a chrome seat mast and a chain. All reasonably useful parts in good shape, just bolted to the heaviest girls frame ever to sport the name of a budding porn star.

Lets be honest here... I hate how much it weighs, but even more than that, I hate Hannah Montana. So I've got the parts. Time to shed the porn star.

What I need is a new frame...

Says-It

http://www.says-it.com/

Interesting bit of marketing gizmology. Enjoy!

Lily the OBAC!

OBAC - One Bad Ass Critter.

Utah would be proud!

Goodies in the Mailbox

Shimano Deore DX pedals.

Come to Daddy... and I don't mean that in an uncomfortable or inappropriate "Penn State" kind of a way either.

Who's the twit...

...that built this thing!? I'm no engineer but there may be a little adjustment or two needed on that fork alignment there...

http://www.academy.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10151_10051_435853_-1?N=86154594+4294963200

Gotta love big box stores and their "Bicycle Shaped Objects"!

and thems that got away (eBay!)

Weekend of weirdness here at the gleaming towers of One Utahdog Center, World Congress of the Americas. I can find and bid on worthless crap better than any lonely fat bald man alive! But much like my way with the ladies, I am utter fail at closing the deal. These beauties slipped through my fingers like spilled malt liquor and tears.

Dean stickies. Feed the lonely geek within. $8.49.

SDG in dirty red. This one was advertised as being "perfect for that fixie project" so you know I had to try to save it from hipster oblivion hell-fire and damnation. $55.

Grove Hammerhead bar stem combo. Rough but sweet. $100 bones.


Boom!

Last but not least, Salsa Ala Carte, unmolested by the minions of the Debil from Wisconsin. $305.

Fear the Debil!

An eBay Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! To celebrate the holiday I bought some worthless crap off the interweb.

Black Altek levers. I'll ride these like a lonely chihuahua rides a throw pillow.

Classic Continental Navigator tire.

XTR m910 rear hub. The prettiest hubs to ever strut the XTR moniker. Sweat it.

Now get off the computer and go eat some turkey with your family already.

Santos in October

Rolled into Santos on Halloween weekend to do the unofficial Ride of the Living Dead. We didn't get too far, as my riding partner pooped out about 15 miles in, so it was a stretch to get to 30 much less 50+ miles. Oh well, everyone has a crappy day on the bike now and then.

Entering Christmas yellow alternate from the new Ross Prairie trail head trail.

Lots of flowy pine needled trails in Santos. Its a hoot!

I was on the Phoenix.

Open fields near the mid point trail head.

Not all marked trails get full maintenance it seems. This one is over run with black berries and prickly pear cactus.

I posted a while back about "Scrub Restoration" at Santos, and here is the result. Apparently 'scrub restoration is a euphemism for rape and log the woods.

Random reinforced concrete in search of a well meaning artificial reef program perhaps?

30 miles isn't as far as I'd wanted, but hey, everyone has a bad day on the bike now and then.