Frack!

Just returned from a community meeting. Not normally my idea of a good time on a Friday night, but turns out our humble (and not so humble insanely wealthy) townsfolk have noticed explosive charges and seismic recording equipment suddenly appearing all over the place. More than one company is in town doing 3D seismic testing so they can start drilling for natural gas, a process otherwise known as “fracking,” which has some interesting side effects.

Apparently, that video’s just a misunderstanding, and what they’re doing is entirely safe, despite the fact that nobody seems to know what chemical they’re pumping into the ground. They reassured us tonight that it’s like over 90% water and sand (which is great, because if 90% of my jar of peanut butter doesn’t have salmonella, those are pretty good odds!). I guess I’ll have to go ahead and hope all that sand and water and secret sauce really are safe, because they’ve come in and started drilling before most of us even knew. Once helicoptors started dropping orange bags in your neighbor’s yard and small explosions start going off around town, it’s time to realize you’re getting fracked.

Speaking of which, I’ve hit another wall in my attempt to make a bicycle. The good news is I’ve found a potential builder; the bad news is that I need to rebuild the design in Solidworks before they’d be able to create the bike. I’d really been hoping for more of a partner with the development, but it’s looking like I’ll have to create more of a finished product before I can hand it off to a builder.

Unfortunately, this is a problem.

See, I only taught myself enough Solidworks to build the suspension system, and I don’t have a sense of how many more hours it would take me to really dial in details like how to show tubing wall thicknesses, or properly spec internal head tube details, or structurally analyze machined pieces.

Etc.

My goal was to build that suspension system, not to learn Solidworks. I did the same thing when I built web sites for Speedgoat while answering customer phone calls and building bikes back in the day: I learned how to do something in order to accomplish a specific goal. I sucked it up and adapted and accomplished something. Yay for me.

But that’s a stupid way to do things.

One personal criticism of my previous entrepreneurial adventures is that I did too much myself, and here I go again. It feels very wrong–just at it did to be developing pretty complicated data-driven web pages–but once again I’m failing to see the alternative. I’ve invested enough money into the patent process that some more money invested to see a proof-of-concept bike created makes logical sense, but a lot more money doesn’t. And even assuming I had a trust fund to burn through, I seem to have trouble finding people willing to do that little bit extra, even if you’re paying them to do that little bit extra. Part of this is probably my location, as it was in the past, but finding someone to take over a project is impossible. I end up taking my eye off the business because I’m too busy making the product.

It’s really important for me not to be stupid like that again. But I am.

This is going to require some thought. More than anything, I just want to see this frame created so that I can finally see what it can do. Preferably, before my fracking house burns down.