October 2012 – Page 2 – CanooterValve

Ass Covering

E-commerce, Swine Comments Off

Oct 172012

Glenn Beck has launched a clothing company and it’s fucking awesome.

In fact, it’s more than awesome. It’s a sign–loud and clear–to all the poor, misunderstood Ayn Randians out there, that it’s go time. A movement has begun, a movement to “re-shore”–to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., and clearly the hippy bastards have gotten the jump on the true Drivers of the American Economy. Dudes with beards in places like Portland and Minnesota are welding up bicycle frames and selling them to people. People are making their own ceramic tiles, throwing their own pottery, and actually selling those wares on places like Etsy, no venture capital or family connections required.

This is not what the rebirth of American manufacturing is allowed to be.

No sir. The rebirth of American manufacturing will be led by true patriots. Men (sorry, women) who appreciate how things used to be. Before they were born. In movies.

Men like Glenn Beck are stepping up to make sure the shit that gets made in America is every bit as unnecessary and soul-less as the crap we usually buy from China. Stupid hippies. You’re not supposed to actually make shit by hand! You’re supposed to make commercials about how you make stuff by hand.

Preferably commercials as fucking weird as this one (the audio here’s been edited to poke fun at Glenn, but no shit, this is the actual commercial).

No, seriously. That’s a real commercial. You can see it with its actual sound–which is even funnier somehow–at the TheDailyBeast.com.

I can’t really imagine a combination of images, words and music that could better convey: “We don’t understand this whole ‘make shit’ movement even a little bit, but we’re going to capitalize on it aggressively.”

But of everything that’s wrong with this company–the premise, the racially insensitive “Indian Chief” logos, the pathetic attempt to comprehend (let alone “capture”) the actual spirit of doing something with your hands, the sheer bullshit factor and conceit of it all–this is the most amazingly wrong thing:

The “Christmas Sweater.”

Take that, anyone trying to actually make something in America. Glenn Beck, arguably the greatest comedian of the 21st Century, has created a true American company–a company built on principles, true American values, and skulls wearing Santa hats.

As batshit crazy goes, that’s fucking brilliant.

The New Abnormal

Bikes, Gadgets Comments Off

Oct 162012

Rain has finally settled in to Portland. I celebrated by overcooking a turn riding in to work this morning and sliding up to, but not quite into, a homeless guy’s tent. Only a little road rash on my left side. The bike seems to be OK, too, with the exception of one of my precious few remaining ancient Selle Italia SLK non-gel saddles. Down to only three of those, and now one’s a little frayed around the edges. Drat.

Anyway, yesterday I apologized to bike designer Helio Ascari after he sent over some photos of the actual bikes he’s designed (I’d originally questioned their existence.) They’re very pretty bikes. Still, I tend to think of bike designers as people who invent things–from tuning geometry for certain ride characteristics to creating completely original two-wheeled things.

Josh Bechtel is that kind of guy. Like his wild Bicymple or not, you have to recognize he’s made something. Difficult as it is to bring some new creation kicking and screaming into the world, people like Josh deserve a hell of a lot of credit for trying to make that happen.

Apology Monday

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Oct 152012

I took a break from Canootervalve last Friday. Sorry about that. My parents are in town from across the country and we had no fewer than three birthdays to celebrate. Part animal that I am, I spent most of their time here with the laptop on the lap, tapping away at any number of jobs that just never seem to sleep.

While I’m handing out apologies, I also owe one to Helio Ascari, model, nephew of Formula One Champion, and–it turns out–bicycle designer. A while back, I’d kicked Helio in the nards a little over a Wall Street Journal article about his bicycle designs. In fairness to me, in the article, Helio is riding a Pashley Gov’nur, lending an air of confusion to the proceedings.

Turns out, Mr. Ascari really does design bicycles. And they’re actually pretty bitchin’ for high-fashion bespokey bikes–especially the fixed gear.

Better still, Helio’s working with bike builder Gary Mathis out of Ashland, Oregon. I don’t know Gary, but his fashion sense seems decidedly more “I’m the guy who welds.”

So I apologize to Helio. Pretty cool looking bikes.

Design-wise, though, I’m thinking I need to celebrate some hard-core bike nerds this week. Engineering types. That’s on my mind a lot right now, and there’s a new character on the scene that’s done some pretty cool stuff.

The First Sign

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Oct 112012

Everything else was prologue. Today’s the day the seven went away.

Quick story, then I’m back to suspension design.

A few years back, my company took a strange phone call. We were an ecommerce bike shop, so every phone call was strange, but this one came from a friend of Floyd Landis. This friend knew my head of sales and customer service and felt compelled to call him up and inform him that Lance was fucked and that shit was about to get real. Evidence was going to surface by the pound. Game over.

Any friend of Floyd around this time must have been living a pretty strange life. This was around the time Landis was starting to get pretty fucking weird, so after the phone call and some sharing of its theme, we all just shook our heads.

Poor crazy Floyd, was the general consensus. I don’t think a single person in the room believed Armstrong was innocent; we just believed Floyd’s already messy existence was about to get a lot messier if he tangled with Lance.

And then today, this. It took a village, including Dave Zabriskie, quoted in the New York Times as “serenading Johan Bruyneel, the longtime team manager, with a song about EPO, to the tune of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze.'”

EPO all in my veins; Lately things just don’t seem the same; Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why; ’Scuse me while I pass this guy.

Is “goofy” one of the eight stages of grief? If so, I think it comes right before “acceptance.”

As yet unresolved, from what I can tell, is some serious house cleaning at the UCI.

High Axle Blues

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Oct 102012

Back in Danzig mode with a vengeance. Or a small grudge. Or just some constipation and a headache. Either way, all free time diverts to some design work I have to be doing right now. As in “at this moment, instead of doing this.”

But this round of design revisions has me remembering the original reasoning behind the placement of the lower pivots, and there’s a brief, half-assed kind of story around that.

I’d dissected the work Steve Domahidy and company had done on Niner’s CVA suspension. See, a 29er has an axle that sits above the center of the bottom bracket, unlike a 26-inch wheel bike–those have axles that are almost in line with the bottom bracket center. From a full-suspension standpoint, a 29er is basically a 26-inch wheel bike that’s already halfway through its travel. Makes it tough to get any real travel out of them, as all early 29ers FS designs realized.

By dropping the lower link below the bottom bracket shell, Niner was able to drastically reposition the center of curvature of their rear axle path. The whole arc has to be mellower with a 29er, in order to leave you room for any actual travel. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons single-pivot 29ers have their pivots further forward–often in front of the bottom bracket.

It was trying to figure out how to accommodate the bottom bracket drop (higher axles) that got me thinking about a lower link that sat in line but tracked along the chain’s path, moving with it. That position, a little radical compared to everything else that’s been done, allows for a lot of axle path options for bikes with bigger wheels while still keeping the whole system very tight and compact.

It’ll be interesting to see what tracking along the chainline even as the suspension moves will do for the ride of the bike, though. Smart people have suggested this is a very good thing, and it certainly looks that way to me, too. Tape a laser pointer to the lower rocker on Danzig and it’ll stay pointing to the place your chain makes contact with our cassette all the way through the first two-thirds of travel. Sure, it’s affected by which exact gear combination you’re in, but much less so than a lot of other systems out there.

Back to work.

Heirloomed

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Oct 092012

At some point, I have to come to terms with the fact that it’s October, I ride a bike to work in Portland, and I have no fenders. Or particularly warm clothing. This morning was cold, but still mostly dry. Wet plus cold is right around the corner, though, and will manhandle me outright.

While I’m at it, probably best to realize I’ve been using a Parlee Z3 as a daily driver. Somewhere in there I stepped from “owner of badass hot rod bike shop” to “dude with three kids” and that step is approximately three stories high. Now I’m that guy who won a Ferrari in some obscure Italian pasta company sweepstakes and drives it around town with bald tires and a grinding transmission.

I need a practical bike.

Like that $70,000 steam bent wooden Thonet up there.

It isn’t so much the bike I need, though, as the Photoshop work associated with it. Here, for instance, found right there in the FastCompany article about the bike, is what it would look like if piloted by an imaginary commuter.

And here’s what it would look like if a tiny Alejandro Valverde were to try to ride it with only a few parts of his shifters left.

The point is, instead of all this nasty business of freezing nards off riding the thirteen or so miles in to work every morning, why not just Photoshop myself doing it and make it easy?

As first seen on the Facebook page for Cyclocross.com then, here’s an image of me commuting to work this January.

Or I buy fenders.

Cross Crusade Dustup at Alpenrose Dairy

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Oct 082012

Last Friday was about as out of control Renaissance man ninja as I get. Hit the ground running with a mad scramble through marketing processes for three ecomm sites, still have development quotes for another project running through my head, and then straight into a meeting about customer service and some new management duties. Somewhere in there, I curated the shit out of some social media or something. Then it’s a manufacturing meeting about Danzig (hell yeah!) and then off to meet with the ownership of a new gym (sort of an understatement, if you could see the place) here in Portland regarding possible partnerships. From typing to talking top-swing versus bottom-swing derailleur placement to watching somebody work out on a giant spring-loaded contraption while talking merchandising: made for a long day.

Pulling in a million directions doesn’t begin to describe the current situation, but it sure felt good to go watch a ‘cross race on Sunday. Turns out it wasn’t just any old race, either.

The first race of the Cross Crusade series here in Portland is nothing short of mammoth–like “1,500 people participating” mammoth–not counting about 250,000 riders in the kids’ race. Biggest ‘cross race in the country kind of big.

It was also dusty as hell.

Even as a recent transplant and thus outside observer, studying the difference between ‘cross racing in the Pacific Northwest and the same thing back in the Mid-Atlantic states, I could tell something was amiss. This is not what ‘cross tends to look like in Portland in October.

The sudden influx of Southern California didn’t do the riders any favors, though. If anything, the sketchier sections were just a whole different kind of slippery.

Here an official patiently explains proper course direction, cracking up a rider who was already having a tough enough time keeping her bike upright. Get too far to the outside of this off camber descent and you were surfing.

This was the climb of the course. Few made it. Those who were able to stay on their bikes earned a hell of a lot of noise from the crowd.

Cross Crusade definitely lives up to the hype. What an incredible event.

Danzig in Daylight

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Oct 052012

As you read this, I’m hopefully talking about Project Danzig with some engineers. Frankly, it’ll be weird as hell to be talking about this project while the sun’s up. It’s been an underground thing for so long now that I never really envisioned actual discussions and stuff taking place during “normal people hours.” But those discussions are happening today. Here’s hoping the thing can actually be fabricated. Might take a while to sort out all the details, but I’m pretty sure it can.

Yesterday was about thirty days long, but I made some time to finish offsetting Danzig’s lower pivot housing and swingarm last night, just to make sure I didn’t run into any total roadblocks. From what I can tell, the design should be able to shift over toward the non-drive side of the bike to make a good bit of room around the chainring(s). Really just a matter of how much tire clearance you’d prefer, versus how broad gearing options you’d like. But I think the design will lend itself to really good clearance.

So we’ll see.

Timely as it’d be, what with Halloween fast approaching, I can’t quite go with “It’s alive!” just yet. More like, “It’s being analyzed by engineers to determine fabrication feasibility.” Mwooohooohaahaa!

Here’s hoping everybody has a great weekend.

Tweens

Bikes Comments Off

Oct 042012

Can’t help but spend a few paragraphs taking issue with a reprehensible letter Specialized sent to their dealers, urging them to keep drinking the red (I believe that’s trademarked?) Kool-aid–oh, and just happening to mention that Cannondale sells their bikes at Costco.

Yes, as independently reported by yours truly, Cannondale bikes did make an appearance in Costcos. But the actions of a rogue distributor selling bikes against the company’s policy–a distributor Cannondale has since reportedly shut down–is clearly not the same as Cannondale selling bikes in Costco. For Mike Sinyard to attempt to kick Cannondale in the nuts while they were already hurting would come off as shockingly poor taste, if we hadn’t come to expect it.

Specialized clearly wants to boot all other brands out of brick and mortar shops, and constantly issues the mantra-like refrain that these companies don’t have the best interest of independent dealers in mind. They’re very straightforward about wanting to take over the majority of brick and mortar stores. I suppose that’s why there so many Specialized dealers in the city of Portland. (Why, they’re do dedicated to the LBS that they just have to open up the guy down the street from you, too.)

But the lengths to which they’ll go seem strained lately, as in this Cannondale thing. Really, guys? Did you really feel good about writing that letter? Yes, Cannondale has supply chain issues, and, hey, I guess they deserve them. That’s what you get for making your bikes overseas, whereas Specialized, they, um, well . . . .

To accuse Cannondale of selling in Costco based on an unauthorized incident might be tactically opportunistic, but it’s also just cheesy. Following the criteria Sinyard applied to Cannondale, Specialized is selling their frames direct to dealers on-line. Sure, they’re counterfeit knockoffs, but–following Sinyard’s reasoning in attacking Cannondale–a bike brand is always responsible for the actions of others, regardless of whether those others are selling product to big box stores back into the U.S. without your knowledge, or selling knock-offs on the internet.

Anyway: cheesy. Believe it or not, I think more of Sinyard and Specialized than I let on, but they continue to do things that just strike me as beneath them. I’d be cool to see Specialized apologize for that letter, but I don’t think that’ll happen.

In other news, I’ve avoiding discussion of 650b bikes lately–for no apparent reason, other than I’m just waiting for them to catch on. Like everyone else.

I’d’ve thought I’d come back from Interbike bearing tales of 650b domination. Hoardes of 27.5-inch-wheeled bikes descending on Las Vegas and 26-inch-wheeled bikes on life support. Thing is, it didn’t happen this year.

Sure, there were 27.5 bikes around–some quite nice, but it was also pretty clear that this wasn’t the year. Next year could be a whole different story.

The challenge, of course, is figuring out where we’re going with all these wheel sizes. Given the amount of full-suspension bikes capable of fitting a 27.5-inch wheel into their current molds and geometries, it’s inevitable that they’ll have a much bigger presence soon.

We’ll know they’ve arrived once we see them in Costco.

Proto-atypical

Bikes Comments Off

Oct 032012

A tentative meeting to discuss creating Danzig prototypes has been scheduled for this Friday.

What’s that mean? Tough to say. This whole process is largely new to me, and happening at a particularly busy time. All kinds of projects have pulled me away from Danzig over the last six months, but I keep hanging on. The bottom line is that I’ve wanted to see this thing get made since early 2007, and I’m as close as I’ve ever been.

Might end up with some radio silence on Canootervalve while this deal goes down, as it’s only even remotely possible if done while still putting in big hours at two other projects. The ones with paychecks.

A big part of starting this blog was chronicling the development of the suspension system, so I’ll be back with an update as soon as I have more news. Assuming even I can figure out what’s going on.

Going to be one hell of a week.

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