About Me

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Back in my hometown of Jonesboro., Arkansas, United States
My name is Dimitri Harris and I have been building frames for over 9 years now. I learned the basics after spending two weeks with Koichi Yamaguchi. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met and I am thankful to have worked with him. Since then I have just been building one frame after another and learning as much as possible along the way. I build steel fillet-brazed frames that go by the name of MEECH, which is an old nickname that I have had since I was a kid. I build mostly cyclocross frames because I love their versatility however I also do road,single-speed, and mountain bikes as well. Custom frames start around $1400. All the frames are handmade by me here in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I am insured and guarantee all of my work so if you are in the market for a custom steel frame I would be glad to build it for you. I am also building frames from carbon fiber so if you would like to ride a prototype frame give me a shout. Thanks for stopping by. You can email me at meech151@hotmail.com or call (870)897-6703 or visit www.meechcustombicycles.com Thanks.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

This Is Gonna Suck!

I waited and waited,  finally I got a vacuum pump.  The Ritchie Engineering Yellow Jacket SuperEvac.  Its a 1/2 hp 4 cfm 'genuwine awthenic' sucking machine.  I was playing around with it today doing some practice joints on pvc pipe cause I'm not quite ready to make an assault on the bike frame yet. I want it to look as good as possible, after all I'm gonna be riding this thing around with my name on it. Howard Stern's mother wrote his name on his underwear when he went away to college.  Where did that come from?  His book. Just a little trivia for you.  Today I learned that playing around with carbon fiber and epoxy resin on 95 degree days when the humidity is about 99%  isn't the best conditions.  Anyway, its cleaned up until the next attempt and I'm sure they'll be plenty more messes in the future.  The good news is that the SuperEvac pulled about 28 hg on my first vacuum bagging attempt. Thats vacuum pump lingo.  A perfect vacuum is 30 hg however 29 is about the max that you could hope for so it has more than enough sucking power.  The first part that I made actually came out looking much better than I expected when I put it in.  The compression kinda evened things out, but I still need to figure out an actual plan for laying the carbon patches down so its not just a big, uneven mess.  Practice makes perfect.  I think Houdini said that?  I also have to figure out how to get more pot life out of my resin, or wait for cooler weather.  If you've followed my first carbon build you know it will probably be the latter.  The first one is the hardest, hopefully.

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