31 Mar 2012

eRichie posted this link to an article in VeloNews, and there’s a subsequent ‘discussion’ here on velocipede salon.

I essentially concur with most of what Caley has said in the article. My surprise really is that it’s kind of arbitrary what NAHBS is called - it has traction now, people understand what it is - so whether or not the word ‘Handmade’ appears in the title is kinda irrelevant.

The use of the term ‘Handmade’ as per the title of this blah, is both banal and anachronistic. Every bike frame ever made has been ‘handmade’. The construction methods may differ, but someone has put the thing together, and thusfar, completely automated processes from start to finish just don’t exist. Making bikes is a human endevour, and funnily enough, humans make bike frames.

Of course the problem of all this, is the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’.

What people fail to realise, is that the set-up of NAHBS essentially completely ignored the dialogue that was happening on the framebuilders Mail List when talk originally started of putting a show together. If anyone had probably a good day to spend going through the archives, you could find many people - myself included - who thought the whole idea of ‘handbuilt’ was a bit, well, banal and anachronistic. And look at that, it still is.

What especially shits me is the way that people attempt to rewrite history to cover up their failings.

“It was only in the second year of the show when we grew to 95 exhibitors did we really start a mission statement”

Really?  I asked for one on the 14th Feb, 2008, when I was not allowed to even ask to come to NAHBS because “I didn’t build my own bikes with my own hands in my own shed” -

Still waiting for a Mission Statement and Selection Criteria document from you. If you could send them our way asap, that would be great.

Regards, Warwick

NAHBS started in 2005. By then, the show was 4 years old, with no mission statement, and no selection criteria. For those four years at the very least, the show was Don Walker’s own personal ego trip. FYI I never did receive any documentation from Paul Silbeck or Walker.

If we invited all the companies that you listed, the show would lose its focus, which is the framebuilder. It would be on par with that other industry show in Las Vegas, and that’s not what I want the show to become. I want it to stay true to its roots and mission, promotion of the framebuilder.

(Notice lots of the usage of “I”.)

Really?  Because in the first and only copy of the Selection criteria I managed to get my hands on, NAHBS had ridiculous clauses such as if framebuilders outsourced to other framebuilders, or were contract fabricators to other companies, they couldn’t promote that side of their business at NAHBS! I’m sorry, NAHBS is all about ‘the framebuilder’? Fuck no, it’s not.

It’s shoddy and hotchpotch, is what it is. How many decades is it going to take for the thing to adequately and professionally represent the custom bicycle industry?

So, for SEVEN years now, I’ve been saying that NAHBS focus should be as a forum for small businesses whose primary focus is on custom made bicycle products - a counterpoint to Interbike. It still isn’t in the purest sense. And because the NAHBS powers-that-be didn’t bother to listen to anyone when he started the show, things like the aforementioned article will continue to surface.

Having said that though, Caley Fretz’ article does have some frankly bizarre statements in it.

Relative to these works of craft, huge Asian bike factories are more akin to massive, human-powered copy machines. They pump out duplicates, not originals.

Because of this perception, major bicycle brands won’t detail the origins of the vast majority of their frames, which are not exactly romantic. Asia is not a classically dreamy cycling location, nor are these factories romantic places. Brands seek to maintain their own Myth of Origin, associating themselves with a more romantic history rather than their more pragmatic economic present.

I agree that there is a ‘romance’ associated with the ‘myth of origin’ - or maybe more appropriately the ‘myth of the man in a shed’ - but there is a portion of the buying populous in the WEST whom are just as facinated in technology and in awe at what is possible in a production environment. Heck even a seasoned Industrial Designer like myself never fails to be in awe at what is possible through mass production. It makes handbuilt custom bicycles by the ‘man in the shed’ often look little more than ‘cute’.

Asia is not a ‘classically’ dreamy cycling location……to the West. Try telling that to 2+ billion Asians. You know, that place that has infinitely more bikes per capita than the US, where cycling is not just a leisure activity for the upper middle classes….that sort of thing.

Posted by thylacine @ 9:18 am

18 Mar 2012

Everybody’s friend and mentor Mr.Sachs posted this link on Faceborg today, so I thought I’d share.

Custom-Frames-Versus-Production;Bikes-Gear

You know, when you’ve been doing doing things for long enough, the same old dialogue pops up time and time again. In industrial design, it’s “Form vs Function”, in fashion design, it’s “Does my bum look big in this?”, and in custom frames it’s “Why should I buy a custom frame?”. As if production bike manufacturers have ever had to answer that question.

In the video link above, there’s some good points. Gary Smith from IF was the most polished and I appreciated his embracing of the need for aesthetics, which I’m sure those more engineering dogmatic framebuilders would wince at.

To be frank, from Day One I’ve never been one to shy away from the notion of custom bikes being about the things are you can’t quite put your finger on. Originally, I was all about the matrix of form, fit, function, and getting a balance, but these days the aspect of custom bicycle frames that is THE ABSOLUTE CORE for me at least is emotive. The fit and the function is a given, simply because nobody goes to a custom bicycle frame shop wondering if the thing is going to work. It’s the nuances, the variables that keeps things interesting, and hopefully that’s true of both the customer and builder….because let’s face it, if you’re not interested in that, I’ve got a great production bike that’s one of 5,000 identical copies and a copy of 1984 that should make you really happy.

One of the things that always strikes me about Richard Sachs blogging and interviews, is that he never shies away from saying “Custom bikes will not make you faster”. Originally I thought this was next to sacrilegious- how can you make a self professed ‘tool’ for racing that has no performance benefits? One of the reasons is of course is that it’s nigh on impossible to put a real-world number on a performance benefit. Sure, you can test and say ‘this component with theoretically save you 5w at 40kph over 40kms’, but then you have to actually apply that to the road. If you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, it doesn’t matter what you’re riding because on that particular day you ain’t going nowhere.

And this of course is where my ‘emotive’ argument comes in. Whilst it’s possible to get a psychological boost knowing that your $3000 wheelset was tested in a NASA wind tunnel and will save you 10w or whatever, the psychological boost of meeting and talking to the guy who is designing and making your bike and who himself is a ‘lifer’ just like you, is much more ‘base’ and deeply felt. It’s not basic instant gratification - the bike equivalent of a fast-food salt/sugar/caffeine rush - but an emotional investment. When you’re connected to an object and the intimate process of the creation of that object, it’s much more rewarding, and it’s that feeling that’s worth exponentially more than losing 10g off your stem, having 10w quicker wheels, or whatever. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that mainstream bicycle companies have to use (in many cases) pseudo science and what is seen as ‘performance enhancing’ materials and the ridiculous pursuit of light-weight because what else do they have? In 12 months time the suger rush will have worn off and the average consumer will be just as hungry - and funnily enough - no faster than they were the year before.

So then, custom bikes can make you faster! Well no, but they can create within you a psychological environment to bring out the best in you (and not just in the performance sense), and the biggest (but less glamourous) performance enhancer is you, not the bike.

Then again, for the majority of people who don’t race, ‘performance’ is not actually something even worth considering, so this for me only reinforces the importance of the emotive and humanist aspects of investing in a handmade custom bike.

So, the next time someone asks you “Why get a custom bike?”, don’t shy away from the emotive arguments. Because at-the-end-of-the-day, they’re the best argument you’ve got.

Posted by warwick @ 12:00 am

06 Feb 2012

This week there’s been a minorly major kerfuffle regarding the SRAM PR and Marketing department, and them promising new 2012 (or 2013…or something…nobody can figure it out) SRAM Red components for show bikes for NAHBS - Noticeably Independent Fabrication and Richard Sachs. It turns out that both entities ordered the latest groupsets only to realise they are somewhat further down the pecking order than they realised. Here’s a picture of what they likely won’t be getting. You’ll notice the frame is not a custom US made jobbie.

It’s kind of ironic that any company would justify the pulling of supply right before a trade show using the word ‘fairness’ in any context (especially considering a non-affiliated SRAM ‘bro-buddy’ seems to be able to procure a gruppo) and also considering that ‘fairness’ plays pretty much no part in the general zeitgeist of corporations - the ‘fair’ quickly get assimilated or turfed out.  It’s difficult to label SRAM as a ‘underdog’ when it’s a multi-million dollar company supplying a huge chunk of the mid to high end MTB market, and numerous teams on the Pro Tour. In the same way it’s hard to call Apple the downtrodden second cousin. So in this way perhaps, this situation while no means being an isolated incident, is perhaps just the blinkers coming off - “Yes custom bicycle frame industry, you are not that important, despite the fact that you think you are. Now piss off.”

In fact, this leads me back to something I thought of when I first decided to pursue this fool’s errand - A custom builders’ buying co-op.

The problem when dealing with component suppliers, is that they won’t listen to you unless you wave a heap of cash in their faces. Yes, there is the exception (Think of the Velocity’s, White Industries, Pauls of the World) but generally unless you live in the same town, or the sales rep you deal with still retains a modicum of humanity, you’re SOL. Heck, we’ve been trying to sell Enve components here for what must be 5 years now without a single fork being sent, yet someone like Maietta can buy 20 NOS just by being in the right place at the right time. Never sold a single Shimano gruppo I actually bought from Shimano. The list is long. Oh so long. I’m pretty sure dealing with this shit has taken a couple of years off my life.

The crux of the issue is buying power. Even if you sell a thousand frames a year, that doesn’t even register on the scales of most companies. “Oh, you want 3 gruppos? Sorry, that’s not enough for it to be worth our while - we have a MOQ of 10 gruppos per model, and that entitles you to 5% off wholesale.”  ’Wholesale’ in Australia meaning “More expensive than what you can get via mailorder anyway, and even more expensive again when you factor in GST and freight.” It’s an endless fucking nightmare (excuse my French) everytime someone wants a complete bike.

How to end this nightmare? A very communist and un-American buyers’ co-op.

Well obviously for anyone starting such a thing, it would be the start of a nightmare most probably - akin to herding the cat herders who herd cats, most of whom have ADD and refuse to believe in dogs.

Nobody probably remembers - and I’m recounting this as a complete outsider looking in so excuse me if the details are skewed - of Easton deciding baseball bats were boring and that there was this new thing called ‘mountain biking’ we should get into. The vehicle they used to design and develop their foray into cycling? The custom bike industry - Yeti, Chris Herting, Frank Wadelton, Mountain Bike Action magazine, etc. etc.. Exciting times, no doubt.

“History is full of occasions when two parties with radically diverse backgrounds have gotten together to create something that actually represents the best interests of both of them… the Yeti Bicycle Company and corporate giant Easton Composites is [one].  The union is one that not only represents the interests of both parties involved, but also every mountain bike enthusiast around the world who is yearning for What could possibly be one of the greatest performing mountain bikes ever made.” - MBA June 1989

Of course this is just a bunch of marketing waffle, but it brings up an interesting point in the P&A Supplier vs Custom Bicycle Industry (CBI) dynamic, and the is the use of the CBI in product development. To be honest, I’m not sure why this doesn’t happen more. You see it on a small level with things such as Sean Chaney of Vertigo Cycles prompting headset makers to make a ‘tapered’ headset for 44mm headtubes, Mark at Paragon I’m sure getting a lot of valuable input from his target market, and KVA kinda sorta not really doing it, but not really on a level I think that could make for a good organised (and I stress ‘organised’) symbiotic relationship.

During the past year not doing very much it’s made me think about the environment in which the CBI exists, and what the heck it’s all about anyway, and I’ve sort of come to a conclusion that it’s actually even less about the bike than I previously thought. And not just from a practical perspective either, in so much as you don’t even spend half your time on the actual frame - most of your time is spent doing everything else. Initially one of the ‘buzz phrases’ I used to banter about the place was that the CBI was cool because it was the cheapest form of cutting edge mechanised technology you could buy, but the reality is that it’s not. Custom bikes are about personalised service, individuality, sustainability, and lifestyle. If you want a cutting edge bike from a technological sense, you want an off-the-shelf bike. Custom bikes just aren’t cutting edge. Sure, you can access some of the best welders in the world, welding with high end steel and titanium, but this is not cutting edge, and in many ways, it’s kinda retro. Aside from Bamboo composite frames, it’s difficult to look at any custom frame and see some technology long since relegated by the technoists. Even custom carbon frames are not terribly edgy.

Therein lies the rub. If you’re not at the coalface of technology, if you’re not placing big orders, then the big component manufactures only have emotive reasons to be dealing with you (in the current environment), and that’s a pretty shitty place to be as it takes a lot more work attempting to canvass and stay in the good graces of the myriad of component suppliers. To rub salt in the wound, the past has shown that even if a company does invest in an industry in a ‘mutually compatible’ way, there’s every chance they will do an Easton and abandon said industry and move production overseas once they’ve ridden the coattails of said industry and got their foot in the door with the major OEM’s.

Posted by warwick @ 5:01 am

18 Jan 2012

I just stumbled upon this write-up by the online retailler Competitive Cyclist. I subscribe to their email newsletter and a simple word got me to click-thru -

Merlin.

At one stage, there was only Merlin. If you lusted after a Titanium bike, it had ‘Merlin’ on the downtube. With so many Ti builders now struggling for a piece of the pie, Merlin was one of those brands that honestly I hadn’t thought about for quite a few years. I don’t know the details of what’s happening with them at the moment (I’ll investigate further after this post), but this blog post from Competitive Cyclist just reinforces what I’ve been saying since NAHBS inception, about how amateur and myopic the thing is.

It’s been a yearlong struggle trying to nail down our goals for the resurrection of the brand: Is an art project OK, or should we pursue financially viability? Is it reasonable to maintain Merlin’s fanaticism for titanium, or is moving into carbon inevitable?

It was a debate with a deadline because of a daydream I couldn’t shed. I wanted to officially and pyrotechnically re-introduce the brand and unveil our design concepts in March at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS) in Sacramento.

NAHBS seemed like the perfect place for our kickoff. It’s a show that celebrates craft while simultaneously extending a big middle finger to the bike industry. There’s an appealing lack of retailer politics and the tedium of distribution and market talk. Like nearly all the brands present at NAHBS, Merlin would put the customer first, not the bike shop.

Ah-HA! But it doesn’t. It’s a tool for Don Walkers’ “You’re either with us or against us” conservative xenophobia. Welcome to the North American Lathe Owners Show.

We contacted the show about reserving booth space. But its reply was heartbreaking. Registration was limited to brands conforming to, among other things, these regulations:

“FRAME BUILDERS: PRIMARY DISPLAY BIKES ONLY (YOU BUILT THESE IN YOUR WORKSHOP).
No bicycles are permitted in any frame builder’s booth other than those built by the exhibitor, and if branded, bearing the exhibitor’s brand.
No sub-contracted bicycles are permitted. Not even those by a current-year NAHBS exhibitor.”

This last section I believe is a new edition. So, to put this into a real world scenario - Say for instance you build TIG bikes and you’re exhibiting at NAHBS, if you collaborate with say a fillet brazer on a new product, or you subcontract a sub assembly for a full suspension bike like a swingarm, neither of you can promote that fact. Retarded.

Given the vast untapped capacity for titanium bike production in the US, we never gave a moment’s thought to anything except subcontracting Merlin’s production. Doing otherwise would be staring into the economic abyss.

Here at Competitive Cyclist we keenly appreciate Merlin’s past, we’re consumed with a passion for riding….But when it comes to what we don’t know, like sourcing flawless raw material and the meticulous manufacturing, there’s a great deal of underutilized capability available in America. To develop that expertise within our four walls would be plain dumb.

Yes indeed it would. You didn’t think supporting US micro-manufacturing would be something NAHBS would want to support, did you? How naive!

One man in a shed = good.

Two men in a shed, letting someone else do all the tedious design, sales and marketing = bad.

And so the end of my NAHBS dream upended my vision of what Merlin may become. The one-time titans of Ti are breathing their last breaths. For a reason. The Independent Fabrication buzz from 2009 has seemingly vanished. What in the world is going on at Serotta? Doesn’t the resurgence of Litespeed rest purely on the back of carbon? What percentage of Seven bikes are Ti? The remains of Titus were bought by whom? And who with a taste for Ti wouldn’t just want to buy a Moots?

Well, not me. I’d rather buy an Alliance, Vertigo, (neuw skoul) Eriksen or Steve Potts (ould skoul). I do have to add that this last paragraph doesn’t really make much sense to me though. Those established brands are probably doing okay, but perhaps people are buying direct or thought their LBS and not places like Competitive Cyclist. The pressure on these small micro-manufacturers must be huge too - yesterday I walked into a bike shop (very rare occurrence as I hate them and they smell of rubber) and there was a full carbon Merida road bike, a 1100g frame with Ultegra Di2 for 3k+ change. Heck, if I knew nothing about geometry and were stupor-fied by the 543 times it said MERIDA on it, I’d think that was a pretty good deal, too.

Anyway, that reminds me. Geometry. In my size, these guys get it as right as it gets - Volagi bikes.

Top Tube - 596mm. Good.

Head Tube - 237mm. Good.

Seat Tube Angle - 72.75. Not the best, but workable.

Chainstay - 414mm. Acceptable. At least these change depending on the size.

These guys were brought to my attention when the owners - ex-Specialized employees - were taken to court by said company for contract infringement. You know you’re a potential threat when the company you worked for tries to bankrupt you - nice job guys. For the record Specialized won and were awarded ONE DOLLAR, which in layman’s terms means technically they were right, but the court finds their trying of the case as contemptible, and gives them a whole buck for their trouble. Personally I would’ve liked to have seen the Judge Judy version, especially if there was one where she swore. Specialized is officially on my shit-list, especially with douche-y comments….

“This lawsuit was a matter of principle and about protecting our culture of trust and innovation. We respect the ruling of the court in our favour. We are very satisfied with the outcome and the damages set at $1.00. We really want to put all our passion and time into growing the sport of cycling.” - Mike Sinyard

Laughable. Choi had a good comeback -

“We think justice was served. I want to tell the cycling world to breathe a sigh of relief, too, because we can still paint bikes red.”

Well….maybe not a good comeback because I hate red bikes almost as much as I hate white ones.

Posted by warwick @ 11:17 pm

10 Jan 2012

I was just reading this article after reading this response by everyones’ friend and mentor Richard Sachs. Despite my lifetime in the bike industry and 20 years as a design professional, for some reason I still have issue with the Establishment having a passive-agressive dig at the noobs. You’d think at my age I’d be stroking my beard, nodding my head in agreement on how there’s just too many ’sandwich artists’ (love this term!) polluting (mostly Portland) our beloved custom bike industry. You’d also think after having been burned so often despite my best efforts by framebuilding contractors that I’d be pretty damn brutal when it comes to recommending noobs, but I just can’t. The world needs noobs.

There’s two avenues of responsibility here in this discussion that I think are of equal importance.

The first is ‘Representation’. Start-up framebuilders need to project themselves as such - in virtua as well as in their pricing etc. - and need to adequately inform buyers of their experience, their background, and back up the talk with action.This takes time and there’s no short-cuts.

The second avenue is that of ‘Caveat emptor’. If you’re going to ‘invest’ in a noob framebuilder as a customer, do your homework and jump in fully with the knowledge that you are an ‘Early Adopter’ and there are risks pertaining to that. If you decide to go with a less established builder, you go in ‘eyes wide open’.

The world needs noobs and early adoptors, so I have no problem whatsoever with either.

Honestly, I think that if those two simple ‘Avenues of Responsibility’ are adhered to, then given time as with all things, the wheat will separate from the chaff as it were and an environment will be created where talented noobs will be ‘allowed’ to flourish, and the smoke and mirrors people will fall by the wayside, as they have always done. In every industry. Since the beginning of time.

I think the problem is with The Establishment, is there is a lack of understanding that in the ‘modern age’, there is -

1. More than one legitimate way to enter the custom bike industry
2. There is virtually no way to apprentice or traineeship in the custom bike industry
3. Self promotion and knowledge of social media is absolutely crucial

1. People in general have to understand that at the core of framebuilding is the very simple (and yet very complicated) act of sticking 8 tubes together in a reasonably straight and neat fashion. We’re not talking rocket science here, it’s a basic trade - simply learned but hard to perfect. Of course it’s very easy for me to say this because I’m not a framebuilder, but I have met in my years many people who are not framebuilders who could easily make a bike frame with very little if any training. There’s even people I’ve met who just have excellent hand skills whom I think could make a solid, sellable frame in very, very little time. People who come from engineering and design backgrounds, jewellery-makers, mechanics, machinists - there are so many ’satellite’ industries which could easily produce a framebuilder in a very short period of time - not to mention people with just flat-out talent. Nobody should be putting framebuilding on such a pedestal as to make it un-attainable by people unless they follow the ‘one true path’. This is Pro-Establishment drivel.

2. You can’t complain that someone hasn’t walked the ‘one true path’ when there isn’t one. There are no 1970’s style English apprenticeships to be had, you can’t fly to Taiwan and go work in a bike factory, and no established builder is going to take you on. I find it rich when established builders complain about noobs not doing traineeships and going to UBI when a) there isnt any traineeships, b) They’ve never ever had an apprentice thenselves, and c) when did doing a course not be a valid thing to do? Please, go to UBI, go do Dave Bohm’s framebuilding course, because everything is learning - just don’t think the learning stops there.

3. After selling custom bikes for the past 10 years, I can tell you, I spend less than half my time actually designing and documenting the frame.  Most of my time - and if you ask anyone, even the ‘Do everything yourself’ builders - they will concur. “It’s not about the bike” said Mr.Armstrong, and he didn’t know the phrase would have such universal application. You can’t bemoan this fact - you just have to look at it as a potential fast-track - because that’s what it is. The real reason why the Establishment often bemoans social media is because it makes what took them 25 years these days only takes 5. It also smacks of self promotion - not something your average engineering based mindset thinks has any value because you should ‘make it and they will come’. Over the din of the white-noise that is our modern life, I can tell you now. They won’t.

Posted by warwick @ 1:13 am

26 Dec 2011

About a week ago, one of my favourite grumpy ol’ bike builders, added to his already superb back catalogue of rants with this pearler. As is customary with most rants, it’s important to firstly express how qualified you are by prefacing the rant with qualifications consumate to the length or intensity of the rant, and in this respect Bruce firmly trumps all-comers by having being building custom bike for nearly 40 years.

However with this, also comes the customary rose coloured glasses as well as a more conservative approach to the concept of what you are doing and saying is right, and has never been more right. Bruce lists these items as being what he feels are key innovations of the past 40 years -

Think about these modern innovations that we take for granted:

Phil Wood - first modern commercial sealed bearing parts (hubs, bottom brackets). Also an early disc brake design.

Giro Helmets - Jim Gentes, first of the current style helmet makers (as in 1 piece polystyrene molded helmets).

Bruce Gordon Cycles - First adjustable fit Tubular 4130 Chromemoly touring Racks.

Salsa Cycles (Not Salsa since Quality Bike Products bought them) made it acceptable to have TIG welded Frames and Stems (vs lugged or brazed).

Paul Turner, Rockshox - First Shock Forks for Mountain Bikes.

A group of independent builders (Mostly in Northern California) that invented the Mountain Bike. People argue who was first, but it’s irrelevant to this discussion - the sport was born in CA.

The first derailleurs came from Frenchman Paul de Vivie in 1905, and while Simplex introduced the first cable operated parallelogram derailleurs, it was a little Japanese company named Suntour that invented the slant-parallelogram design we still use today.

“If we don’t support the small, creative companies in this country (or Europe for that matter) they will cease to exist. This not only includes frame builders, but clothing, accessories (HandleBra anyone?), drive train and the visionaries that are still creating their newest ideas.”

“As a business, I’m not afraid of competition, nor are any of the people I know who actually make their own shit. However we cannot compete with $.50 cent an hour labor, poor environmental regulations and continue to make bikes at our current level of quality….don’t think that someone in a Chinese factory making a $1.00/hour is passionate about bikes like I am, or all the members of SOPWAMTOS for that matter.”

“And I am not alone. Each week more people want to know about SOPWAMTOS. They are excited to be able to finally have access to these small manufacturers that love bikes and building precision parts or intricate accessories. Most of these items cannot be scaled into the millions of units and resold through the bike industries current dealer/reseller network at an acceptable profit margin using US labor. Or at least that’s what companies like Rapha (with their pro-China campaign) want you to believe. We are putting together a group of manufacturers that are ready to prove that theory wrong.”

Posted by warwick @ 3:21 am

30 Oct 2011

Recently I was linked to a review of sorts about a colleague’s custom bike frames. I use this term loosely because I don’t really know him but our business (or lack thereof) theories are similar. One of the things that urks me - especially in regards to US and Aus bicycle media is the lack of intellectual rigor when it comes to reviewing product. It seems that - especially with online media - all you need to become a ‘journalist’ and/or a ‘product reviewer’ is the right combination of geek, wealth, and the desire for self promotion. The best media doesn’t reign, just the loudest and the most self-interested.

The ‘review’ on this peers product was little better. There were a few home truths in there, but then also comments such as -

Gone are the days where pro riders used to secretly, or not-so-secretly in some cases, have custom bikes made for them and rebadged with their official sponsors’ logos. Sponsorship contracts have become so large and important to the bottom lines of teams that this practice is now economically impossible.

This is largely true, however it does not extend to components. Parts such as tyres, saddles, and numerous others are systematically ‘camouflaged’ with sponsors logos despite not being sponsors products. Frames would probably still be ‘badge-engineered’ if they weren’t carbon - it’s pretty hard to disguise a carbon frame despite the fact most of them look like they came out of the same mould anyway.

The decision to use aluminum to create this racing machine was a simple one: Aluminum provides the optimum characteristics necessary in a race frame.

Firstly, ‘Aluminium’ is a noun, so it should be capitalised. Secondly, this is highly debatable. I’ve still yet to experience an Aluminium or Scandium frame that I think provides the optimum characteristics for a race frame. They’re still too harsh for me, and one of the advantages of Aluminium is the ability to make the shapes more aerodynamic of which this particular frame takes no advantage of. For my money, USD2800 would almost buy me a Titanium frame from a good lower profile custom builder, and that’s where my money would be for a race frame. They just simply ride nicer.

Virtually the entire pro peloton competed on bicycles with aluminum frames because they had ideal performance characteristics.

This is patently untrue. The big Taiwanese manufacturers realised after Klein and Cannondale emerged to prominence in the late 1980’s that Aluminium was cheap and more importantly, light, and THAT was a major selling point and point of differentiation from the 80 year dominance of steel. 7005 series tubes were even better because they required no solution heat treating and so were even cheaper again. Cheaper tubes, cheaper processes, Giant’s ‘invention’ of ‘compact’ frame sizing (originally came in only three sizes), nice big tubes for big graphics - these were the reasons for Aluminium. Performance came a distant 5th.

And then there’s this paragraph -

The Xxxx is designed for stiffness, robustness and longevity, not to be the lightest bicycle possible. But, the most recent complete bikes we’ve built have ranged between 14.5 and 17 pounds depending on build kit and size. We spec the Xxxx fork with a 1 1/8” to 1 ½” tapered steering column with each Xxxxxxx frame. Presently, every frame is built to order. Current lead-time on Xxxx is 4 to 5 weeks unless otherwise noted.

Sorry, “We spec”? Who wrote this blurb?

And this is my main issue with online media - there is essentially now no ethics, no quality, little transparency. I honestly can’t see how you can have a magazine or news service, and then sell the things you review. In the previous life of the media, where there was division between advertising and content, if things were ‘advertorial’ there was something there informing the reader that the thing they were reading was an advertisement.

This magazine in my mind can no longer inform, review or comment upon any bicycle because they have a conflict of interest. It’s not enough for owners and editors to think to themselves “well, we’re honest people, so what” - the seed is there. Everything you comment on is now suspect.

Why does the bicycle industry not understand this? Or perhaps it’s just the New World of the online media, where news and media outlets are just not staffed by anyone who has any media training, nor have they spent a single second thinking about ethics and the duty to their readers. The classic example of this was when cyclingnews.com put together a pair of Independent Fabrication bikes - one 26″ and one 29″ - with the aim of coming to some conclusion regarding wheelsize. What happened? The ongoing test ‘magically’ disappeared from the website. Complaints from non 29″ wheeled bike advertisers, perhaps?

In defence of the unnamed website in question, they DO attempt to mostly have either editorial that isn’t really product based, or ‘product releases’ that are simply a regurgitation of a press release, but they do still venture into suspect territory -

Over the past few years, we’ve used pretty much every cross tire on the market and we’ve come to understand what tires do well and what they don’t. Let’s just say we have our opinions and we’re sharing them with you now.

Unfortunately, this ‘opinion’ only extends to the one brand they actually sell.

This sort of thing is all over the web. The other stream of this kind of blurring of the lines, is the prevalence of the ‘expert’ online product reviewer. There’s numerous of these types of people in the online bike world who seem to have essentially built a career based on the fact that they are wealthy enough to buy pretty much every new product that comes to market, and combined with their flair for self promotion end up in a position where companies give them stuff to ‘test’ based on what seems to be little more than web traffic through their site.

The main issue with this of course, is that what you get is an unedited, unmoderated, one persons highly biased opinion on product they get for free. The companies advertise on their website, give them free product, flatter their egos with ‘involving them’ in the product development process - *shazam* - instant ‘guru’. I’m actually surprised some parent company hasn’t set up their own ‘internet guru’.

One persons’ opinion on something can never be particularly balanced. If said person has a preference for a particular style of riding, or a particular style of product, they’re going to be intrinsically biased against anything that doesn’t fit in that criteria. You could argue that people are smart enough to see that, but if people aren’t smart enough to realise that some ‘news’ services have almost nothing in common with the proper news services of the past - the ‘traditional’ ones where there was no advertorial, where things were fact checked, edited, scrutinised - then it’s hard to see where the current generation of cyclists will be able to make the distinction if they’ve never actually experienced real journalism.

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I do really miss the journalism style of the the 80’s and early 90’s Bicycle Guide. Can you imagine in this day and age having articles on frame alignment, or bicycle reviews where they ask the frame maker why they chose one tubing over another, or print things such as when they ask a question “He pauses, and it is clear he is almost rankled….”, or actually measure the angles on a bike rather than reprint them from the catalogue.

You should ask yourself why that’s the case.

Posted by warwick @ 12:25 am

05 Sep 2011

Well well, what a crap week.

Last Tuesday night I was all geared up to jump on the new bike for it’s inaugural ride off to go play Badminton in Niddrie, when on the way there I got a strange burning sensation in my gut-area. By the time I got there, it was bad enough that I couldn’t play, so I limped home.

My 1am that night, I was in the ER of the Royal Melbourne.

Diagnosis? Acute Cholecystitis.

Essentially, I have Gallstones. Really had no idea what that was, or what or where a Gallbladder is, so goodonya, Wikipedia, for helping me out there.

I can’t say I recommend this. 12 hours in the ER, in the most intense pain I’ve ever experienced (you know when you see in the movies people whimpering and curled up in the foetal position on the floor and wondered to yourself “Wow, how much pain is that?” That was me.) was not exactly what I’d planned for the week before my holidays. Things were exacerbated by doctors and their general lack of communication ability - and also the fact that in 5 days I’ve seen 5 separate doctors - in that on Friday whilst dropping Junior off to Childcare it was becoming obvious that I probably shouldn’t have been discharged.

You see, the issue is, when you have experienced 8/10 pain, having a bloated tummy and a bit of a ‘weird’ sensation and the odd twinge in your gut barely registers, and when you only get that sensation when you’re standing up, but you’re lying down in hospital coming down after three whacks of Morphine, you feel more bored than anything else and definitely ready to go home. So, after my 12 hours in the ER, I was keen to get out of there, and though feeling no worse than I would after a hard ride or my regular Badminton session, I thought I was fine. What I wasn’t told - and what my star of a local GP told me on Friday (Dr. Skehan, you’re a legend) - is that I should’ve essentially felt ‘back to normal’. I didn’t. I felt…….fat. Like I’d been punched in the gut. Not in anything that I would register as ‘abnormal pain’, but not normal, either.

So Friday night, I was back in hospital. Insert sad face here.

Problem is with hospitals, is that they’re full of sick people. The food still sucks, you have to pay for TV which is transmitted on actual CRT TVs (remember those!?!), and the beds are made from some unique form of concrete sponge. There’s no public wi-fi either, so unless you’re so sick you can’t recognise the outside world, hospital is boring and oppressive. I was actually in more pain from the bed and my lack of caffeine than I was for the raging infection in my gallbladder.

Without my first eBook (Game of Thrones), Zombie Gunship, and a Sleepy Smurf figurine to keep me amused, I’d be typing this from the Psyche ward!

Anyway, I wasn’t going to turn this into an essay, so I’ll stop now and direct my attention to bikes.

So, if you have a pending order or if you’ve ordered some H+Son rims, there’s a 95% chance nothing is going to happen there during September.

The rims are due for delivery sometime in the next 48hrs, so my chances of getting them in the mail before I leave for the US on Thursday are slim. If any customers are desperate for them, you can call me to arrange pick-up on Wednesday evening, but obviously if you can avoid doing that I’d appreciate it.

If you have a current or pending order, I’ll attempt to communicate as per normal (apparently they have the Intarweb in the US), but apologies in advance if it’s not as prompt as usual. I’m actually going to focus on the holiday part of my holiday and try and get better rather than do my usual trick of doing the opposite.

So, for everyone else, Thylacine Cycles will be CLOSED from Sept 7th through to Sept 30th. Please also note that I do have to go see the Doc again when I get back to reassess my ailments, so October might be a little bit patchy as well.

Posted by warwick @ 12:53 am

30 Aug 2011

Having a ‘Not Quite Spring But Close Enough’ Clean Sale here at Thylacine HQ.

If you’re in the market for a unique frame, please be sure to check out the following eBay auctions. More to follow…..

Arete SL 29er, Medium size.

Tephra SL, 60cm (-ish).

Posted by warwick @ 12:21 am

29 Aug 2011

I’ll make no attempt to cover up the fact that I’m definitely one of those mechanics with a shit car, or plumber with leaky taps, if you prefer, type person. When you spend enough time on other peoples’ bikes, the thought of doing pretty much anything to your own just smacks of being forced to do your homework or wash the dishes, so it’s really only when the squeaks of the drivetrain din above the blaring of your headphones that you think “Maybe I should squirt some shit on the chain?”.

Earlier on in the week I finally got my Tephra XK, which is a KVA Stainless Steel based Cyclocross frame, so this was good motivation to strip the commuter and move the parts over that I was going to move, and add the new ones specific for this frame. My ‘daily driver’ for years now has been one of the very first Thylacines - a Tephra SL - built sometime back in 2004. It started off it’s life as a straight road bike, then converted to a flat-bar road bike, and finally to a drop bar commuter. I have no idea how many kilometers this thing has done, but suffice to say from a guy who doesn’t drive, it’s done a fair few.

The one thing I have to praise big-time, is Dura Ace 7700. I have absolutely smashed my 7700 gruppo, changed the chain, front small chainring, and cassette a few times, but it just keeps powering on. The rear derailleur after a swap of the pulleys looks brand new, and the shifters just keep on going, clack after clack. They’re sloppier now than when they first came out, but that’s probably fixable if I could be bothered. It’s the last of the classic Dura-Ace and I really can’t think of any reason to change it.

The only issue I have now is the cranks. Seriously, I put these things on half a decade ago and left them there, and when I pulled the non-drive side off, the neon green Shimano grease was still neon green. The drive side however, when I tried to back out the self-extracting crank bolt, the outer plate that it pushes against jumped it’s threads. Of course, as with all shit mechanics I don’t have that specific tool, so looks like another trip to Cyclic is on the cards.

Part of me wants these cranks to be toast, but another half doesn’t. I wouldn’t mind something a little stiffer, but they’ve been so bomber it seems a waste. The other problem is, as a lifetime Shimano user, I wouldn’t actually mind trying some Campag for a change, so if I go some Campag cranks, I’d have to change the drivetrain over. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

Okay, quick visit to Evan and Cyclic, a few bashes and scratches later and the cranks are off one frame ond onto the new one. Not so bad afterall.

Now, come brief comments on the new bits.

SDG Bell-Air saddle (brown/brown) / Fizik microtex bartape (brown).

• In case anyone cared, the colours of these two match perfectly, making the Fizik a great tape for those wanting an alternative to leather. I just wish it had a little more stretch to it. The Bell-Air saddle looks wicked - now I just have to hope the shape suits my butt, but after a quick tootle it seems pretty damn nice. Time will tell.

Posted by warwick @ 6:58 am

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