I’ve posted full frame specs of all 3 sizes for the cross/allroad frames I’m building this summer. I’ve still got space for 3 frames. Contact me if you’re interested. allroad@shandcycles.com

see this post for more details.

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Summer holiday….

I’m off on hols for a couple of weeks from this weekend so if you’re trying to get hold of me you won’t be able to. I’ll be checking email intermittently so send an email if you need to, but it may be a little while before I reply. Cheers.

Can you hear that? No? Me neither.

I’ve just got a nice new quiet compressor which means I can get rid of the hideous noisy thing I’ve been using up ’til now. In fact, I say ‘using’ but the truth is I wasn’t using it as the noise of the fecker is enough to drive you mad. This little thing, a Junair is mega quiet, about the same level as a fridge.

Aaahhhhh… peace….

I’m about to do a run of lugged cyclocross/all-road frames and have some capacity to run a few extra of each size to be generally available.

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I snuck out from the workshop this afternoon afternoon for a couple of hours. The sun was out and I was being distracted by Le Tour anyway so out on the bike it was.

Found some nice singletrack only a few miles from the house that I must have ridden past loads of times without seeing. Weird.

It seems that the folks behind the Rouleur magazine are about to launch a sister title for off road cyclists called ‘Privateer’. Due for release late August. Should be interesting.

UPDATE: looks like there’s a website: http://www.privateer.cc/

pic by placid casual via flickr

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long, but I realise now that I’ve battling in an ongoing internal conflict of bicycles vs bicycling.

Most of my work time awake is taken up with bicycles. Building bicycles, designing bicycles, talking to customers about bicycles, ordering parts for bicycles, staring at tubes of metal that will one day be a bicycle…. You get the idea. When I’m not working, I’m reading about bicycles, thinking about bicycles, looking on that there t’internet at bicycle stuff, watching bike racing stuff (well done Mr Millar on todays ride).

What I’m not doing is bicycling. I’ve not been cycling regularly now for way too long. I realised that I need to fix this. I can make a lot of excuses about not having time but I think I really need to make time.

So it was with this is mind that I cleared off at the weekend. I had a few projects that I was behind on that really needed finished but I decided I needed to bicycle. And it was a need. So I planned out a route and headed off on Friday to get some miles in.

Sometime around Friday afternoon I realised I didn’t have a rack for the bike I was taking (it’s got funky rack mounts to work with disk brakes so it needs a custom built rack, it seemed a good idea at the time but not 2 hours before I was about to head out!). So I gathered up some spare tubes and offcuts and quickly brazed up a rack. Not my finest work but it does the job.

Friday camp spot was just right. Nice fire pit and some quorn burgers on the fire.

Saturday was super hot and saw me heading over the hills from Pitlochry towards Loch Tay.

A long fire-road climb in really hot weather quickly reminded me how unfit I am right now. A singletrack descent from the top had me (cheerily) dodging (cheery!) ramblers and forgetting I was on a touring bike with 700x32c tyres and fully loaded panniers. A couple of hairy moments but fun.

Out towards Killin and another excellent camp spot by the river. No midges and some of Linda McCartneys best on the BBQ washed down with a can of Stella.

I took in some of the Etape Caledonia route and suffered the climb up past Schiehallion the next day. Somehow managing to avoid any of the rain I could see coming from some big heavy clouds. Quite often I would find myself riding wet roads and even though I could smell that ‘just rained’ aroma, I never actually got rained on for the whole trip.

Some brilliant weather all weekend and too many miles for my out of practice legs. I’m sure I did myself some physical good but more important was the a victory for bicycling in the bicycling vs bicycles battle.

It seems lke I’m getting asked for a ton of of forks these days. All sorts of stuff, road forks with fancy crowns, old school curved blade unicrowns and new tapered blade 29er forks. All good. I finally replaced my very old crotchety fork jig with a nice new Anvil jig. That should speed things up a bit.
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Well, it’s been 3 months since I last posted anything here and more than that since I last posted any meaningful bike/framebuilding stuff.

I have been pretty busy in the workshop over the last couple of months but I’ve been getting lazier and lazier about taking and posting pics and getting anything online. This was mostly deliberate as it can be quite distracting stopping to photograph stuff every few minutes then quite time consuming to go through tons of photos and deciding what to post online. I will get back into again though.

I’ve got a few interesting builds coming up in next few months including a cross bike for someone who’s only 5’1″ and a 29er belt-drive Rohloff mountain bike for someone who’s 6’9″! Should be fun. Also in the works is a recumbent trike, an expedition (snow) bike and a Cannondale headshock frame.

As of March I’ll be devoting much more time to framebuilding (at the moment it’s a part-time job for me) so we should see lead times for frames coming down to a more manageable level (at the moment it’s somewhere between 6 and 9 months), so if you’re thinking about ordering a frame, you’ll get it sooner.

The pic above was sent to me by Tom and was taken at this years (’09) single speed world champs in Durango Colorado. Looking out onto about 4 inches of snow here, I thought it was nice!

see you soon.