Skewer on Contador's Tour de France Specialized

The coolest thing about the skewers on Contador's bike is that they double as a toothpick.

Mad Fiber Wheel Test

Mad Fiber wheels have been out for quite a while now and i've watched a couple of videos regarding them.  They always appear to be very well built, almost bullet-proof wheels however you don't see them being used much.  What's up?  Might be the $3000 price tag.

Helpful Bike Tips from Velonews

http://velonews.competitor.com/2013/06/video/ask-a-mechanic-cleaning-and-lubing-shifters_292385

I'm amazed and ashamed that in all the years, not to mention the grungy weather and muck, that I have been riding with brake/shifter levers I have never once lubed them.  Hey, what can I say, they're Campy.

1905 Roberts Inboard

Alright, finally got the video uploaded.  Its short but sweet.  Enjoy!

1905 Roberts Inboard Motor Restored by Bob Davis

This is a 1905 Roberts inboard motor that my friend Bob Davis has fully restored for someone.  He just finished it up the other day and while I was at his shop the other day he did a trial run to make sure everything was working.  It works.  He primed it with a little gas and using an air drill gave the flywheel (if thats what it is?) a couple of turns and it fired right up.  It has this really deep slow idle that just sounds really cool.  Not sure if its supposed to have a muffler on it or not.  I got a really cool video clip of the whole thing however for some reason I can't get it to upload onto Blogger.  There may be another way so I'll keep trying.  Anyway, I know this blog is mainly about bicycles but when I get the chance to show something interesting I'll take it.  Bob Davis is one of those people that you're lucky if you meet in a lifetime.  His depth and knowledge of a lifetime of work in machining metals is second to none.  His machine shop is practically a museum.  To prove it I took these photos.  Every once in a while you meet a man...well, just check out the pics.

This be Bob Davis.  Probably the most famous person in Mountain Home but also known all over the world for his motorcycle building skills.

This is a 1930 Aerial.  Ever seen anything like this?  I doubt it.  This is really hard to comprehend however Bob just told me yesterday that there are only two, yeah 2, of these in the world.  One is in England and the other is right here.  Is that possible?  Its still hard for me to grasp.

This would be your view if you were so lucky as to ride or even sit on such a bike.  I have never touched it.  He wouldn't mind if I did however I have no business touching a bike like this as I don't even fully understand all of its beauty, but I try.  I'm a motocrosser.  That little Aerial trademark/head badge reminds me of Don Quixote.

I've posted a pic of this one before.  I think maybe this is an Indian.  I forget. Yes, it says it right on the gas tank.  

Moto Guzzi.  Gotta love anything with the name Moto in it.

One of his old passtimes.

I would imagine these posters are pretty rare.

This is not Bob here but it is the guy that he bought the Aerial from.  Now the guy keeps calling Bob wanting to buy it back but Bob keeps saying, "No, no, no."  Bob told me what the guy was offering and what he thought he could get however I'm gonna keep that silent because its not my business to be sharing.

"Hit the road Jack, and don't you come back, no more, no more, no more, no more..."

Just a few awards that he's received over the years.

This is his shop.  I probably should've taken some more pictures of some of his older machinery but I didn't want to look like a picture-taking fool, but there is alot of stuff in this shop.  If you enlarge the photo and just sort of scan around you can get an idea of what it looks like on every square foot of this shop.  Stuff is everywhere up to the ceiling.  I think he told me once that there is like 80 tons of machines and tools in this little shop.

This is just a milling machine but it has cut some really unique parts for people all over the world. It has made quite a few MEECH custom parts along with the lathe sitting next to it.  People come to Bob from all over asking him to make BMW motorcycle parts and any others that they can't find.  Most of the stuff that he shows me I really have no idea of how original it is but its more original that a one-off custom bicycle frame.  It hurts me to say that but sometimes the truth hurts.  Did I mention that Bob plays the bagpipes?

I really wish I could get the video uploaded.  It only ran for a few seconds but it was really cool to see something run that had basically been pulled out of the grave and completely rebuilt to its original state from 108 years ago, it was probably even better.  I'll keep trying to get it on here.  I may post it on YouTube.  

Thanks for checking things out.

Tour de France Contenders

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/cycling/tour-de-france/10144509/Tour-de-France-2013-the-incredible-rise-of-Chris-Froome-and-how-he-was-almost-killed-by-a-hippo.html

Chris Froome has won just about everything so far this year but its the Tour that he wants.  After reading the story above he appears to be a pretty tough dude.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/exclusive-alberto-contador--i-can-foil-chris-froome-on-tour-de-france-8673812.html

You can bet your gonna see alot of this in the mountains.

It appears as though Little Al has something on his mind here. I just included this photo to show how determined Alberto Contador can be.  If both of these guys can stay upright and avoid accidents, Contador and Froome that is, this could be one of the hardest fought tours ever.  Sounds like both of these guys have really strong teams and thats what is gonna make these guys rise above the others.

Even though Contador and Froome are considered the main protagonists in this year's race its only fair to say there are many rider's that are gonna win stages and its not fair to just omit them.  I'm guessing the main contenders aren't gonna let Rodriguez or Valverde get too far up the road and it wouldn't be too hard to imagine Cadel Evans on the podium either.  Andy's back.  I don't figure he'll be a threat to the overall but with some good legs he could mess things all up in the mountains, afterall he's got nothing to lose.  Get ready for the 100th edition of the Tour de France.  Hope its a good one. Enjoy!

meech

Anthony Moat's Custom Cross Frame

Here are a couple of pics of Anthony's frame cut and in place waiting on a little tack.  Most all this work has been done for a while however I had to do an emergency paint job for Jonathan Ruiz,a friend/customer, in order to get him back on the road race scene.  Anyway, Anthony has been super-patient and I'm not gonna touch another frame until this one is finished up for him.  Anthony had one of my earlier frames that was displayed in a Poppa Wheelies Bike Shop in Russelville, Arkansas.  Its a very nice frame but it was just a bit too large for Anthony and after contemplating making some changes to it we just worked out a custom deal and I'm gonna build him one made especially for him.  Its a cross between a cross frame and a gravel road racer, basically a cross frame with straight stays.  Hopefully I'll be getting the torch out here in a couple of hours and tacking this thing together and then I can finish it up and get ready to paint again. Thanks for checking things out.  

This is Anthony hard at play.  This was a race here last fall in I believe Little Rock.  I think they may have a gotten a few unexpected inches of rain.  

Thanks for all the patience Anthony.

Bicycle Tour of Colorado

This is Scott Taylor, an old riding buddy of mine that I met way back when we were in college.  He and I and a couple of roommates of his were always hanging out on our bikes.  We were notorious for doing nighttime rides, no lights either.  Despite moving and getting married and all those things that can change your life we're both still riding pretty regular, and Scoot (nickname because he's fast) is an avid rider of the annual Bicycle Tour of Colorado. I went with him about 3-4 years ago and it was a bicycle trip of a lifetime.  We've had some good ones in the past.  One of the most memorable was roughly 10 years ago when he called me up out of the blue and wanted to take a road trip to Taos, New Mexico.  When we arrived, Scoot had booked us a stay at an out of town hostel/campground called the Abominable Snow Mansion.  So we walk in the front door and a cloud of "freakin weird" just slaps us in the face.  Couldn't really put your finger on it but it just felt weird.  There were a handful of people just sort of laying around all over the place and it was kinda dark and dingy.  If you've ever seen the movie "A River Runs Through It" and you remember that scene where Brad Pitt, his brother, and their dates walk into that old card shack/bar and everyone just sort of stops what they're doing and starts staring at them, well it sort of felt like that.  So no big deal, we get our key and go to our room.  Everyone that we'd meet would tell us they had been there a couple of months.  They would all hang out outside under tents and canopies, some dude would be rolling up little bails of incense to sell, and another dude was making a pair of gloves out of yarn, and just stuff like that all day long.  The dude that was making gloves told me that he had been living there for, yeah you guessed it, a couple of months, and that he was just making gloves and selling them to get by.  So I asked him how much they sold for and he kindly told me around $50, so then I asked him how long it'd take him to make me a pair and he told me about a month.  "What? A month?"  Do the math on that one and see what you come up with.  Something is funny here.  Oh well, its interesting to meet all kinds but there was one morning that I didn't much care for.  I was walking out to the truck one morning and in the backyard of this place it had all these tipis that you can rent.  I noticed out back behind one of them there is this fat little indian-looking boy with a bow and arrow and he's chasing this cat around and then he took a shot at it.  He missed it luckily but then he ran and grabbed his arrow and started trying to sneak up on it again.  I could tell the cat was sketched out by this freaky little indian and so I picked up a rock and right about the time he was taking aim I hurled the rock at these garbage cans close by and rattled his nerves a little. He never even saw me and that was good because I wanted him to know what it felt like to have someone  hunting you.  Hopefully the cat made a clean get away.  You know if an indian is fat that is strike one right there.  Whoever heard of a fat indian?  Anyway, the trip was interesting and we got a couple of good rides in not to mention we climbed some mountain out there, on foot that is. Nightmare!

Check this farm out and see what you think.   Check out the video.

http://www.snowmansion.com/Lodging.html

So back to the photo.  The photo above is Scott at the top of Independence pass I do believe.  I rode up this one the year I went with him.  I believe this is the one that they did in the Tour of Colorado, or the Pro Tour Challenge I think is what they call it, a couple of years ago and it turns into hardpack dirt for the last few miles.  I posted a pic with Andy Schleck and some others laying it down.  Its a killer climb.  Scoot has been riding a MEECH for 2-3 years now and you can see he's sporting some Team MEECH colors.  Thanks for the photo Scott!  Wish I was there with you guys.

This is Scoot's frame.  Is that green or what?  This frame has about three Bicycle Tours of Colorado on it.  Scoot has been a MEECH supporter since the beginning and he's a blast to hang out with.  Thanks for riding a MEECH!

Here is another photo of Scoot from a couple of years ago.  Sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate to well in the mountains.  This photo won't enlarge for some reason.  Enjoy.

Check These Out

http://caw-designs.com/

Ruiz's New Paint

Not sure if any of you remember this frame that I built for Jonathan Ruiz about a year ago but anyway this frame was the first that i ever painted myself.  I didn't know anything about painting then but he was willing to give me a shot and while it turned out ok it wasn't as high quality as what Paul from Ace's Wild was doing.  Jonathan races alot of crits and I believe that sprinting may be his forte.  A couple of weeks ago he sent me a video of a sprint he did and somehow he managed to pull the wheel out out of the drive side dropout and it widened the dropout spacing a few millimeters as well as scraped off a little paint on the inside of the chain stays.  When I got the frame I was kind of surprised that the paint still looked similar to when I had finished it except for a handful of spots that had been chipped off from this and that.  Don't get me wrong, it had some wear but it looked cool to me because I love the look of a bike that has been ridden hard and his definitely had that look.  It actually looked more like a cross bike that had been raced hard for a couple of seasons.  So anyway I straightened the frame for him and we agreed that a new paint job would be better than trying to do touch up and match new paint to a used frame and the photos below are the result.  I've learned alot about painting since  painting JR's frame last summer, leaps and bounds.  I'm using new epoxy primer for starters, I bought some good spray guns, a compressor, and mainly I just have so much more experience from making mistakes and learning from them.  Now I have a process more dialed in with some really good painting products and it makes all the difference in the world.   I'm not about to say that I can paint as good as Paul but most of what I know I learned through him.  He has been overly helpful in troubleshooting any problems I've had and has taught me a ton of stuff.  Lots of people would not want to share the information that they've worked so long and hard to learn however that wasn't the case with Paul.  He told me everything I needed to know and helped me out whenever I needed it.  Thanks Paul!

So here it is.  This is definitely the best paint job I have done and I'm glad that its on Jonathan's frame since he was the first one to give me a shot at painting my customer's frames.  It turned out extremely well.  The lines are pretty tight, everything turned out 

even, and just overall was a good experience for me.  Is it perfect?  No, its not perfect but its as close as I've gotten yet.  As my friend Bob Davis always says, "At a 100 mph you'll never see it."  Another one of his sayings that he used to tell me when I would ask him if my fillet-brazing looked strong enough was, "You might break that if you dropped it off the Empire State building."  So far no one has dropped one of my frames off the Empire State building and hopefully if they do everybody will get out of the way.  I can always repair the frame, however there's a good chance that if it lands squarely on a really large person it might not damage the frame at all.  Lets just cross our fingers.  That might be a bad joke so don't take it too seriously, I'm only kidding.  Now lets check out this frame.

I wasn't gonna tell Jonathan this however after I finished this paint scheme I immediately thought about a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.  I always preferred Winston myself.  I don't smoke anymore but at one time I had planned on painting a bike frame to look like a bunch of cigarettes.  You know, the top tube, down tube, and seat tube.  One end would be the filter end with the beige color and the little white dots and the other end would be the tobacco end, so the main frame would basically look like 3 big cigarettes end to end.  I never got around to it.  I used to enjoy smoking for whatever reason but now I don't need it.  Its actually kinda crazy if you think about it.  Smoke is about the worst thing that you could put into a body.  

The body doesn't handle fire very well to start with since its basically all liquid, and whenever you're around smoke you're always covering your face and trying to get out of it, coughing, eyes watering, etc.  I can't even really imagine how the first person that smoked decided that it would be a good idea.  You know the first big puff that he took burned his lungs and made him cough his head off so you'd think he'd stop right there, but no, he did it again and again and somehow managed to get his friends to do it to.  They put way too many chemicals in it these days.  I imagine within about 10 years that medical marijuana is gonna be legal over alot of the U.S.  I could care less one way or another, the world could use a little mellowing out in my opinion.  Lets move on.

Front view, just in case you didn't know which end of the bicycle this was.  When I was a kid I had a friend that used to sit backwards on his handlebars and ride his bike around the neighborhood, so when he ran head on into the front end of a truck it threw him backwards through the windshield and sat him down right next to the driver.  He never even got hurt, he just told the driver to drop him off at the 4th house on the right and they'd call it even.  Ok, I'm making this up. He really did ride his bike backwards but the whole crashing through the windshield is custom fabrication.  But once he did have a motorcycle crash and spent about a month in a coma.  He wasn't quite the same after that. I had some interesting friends growing up.

This would make a great photo if I could hold a camera straight, but then it wouldn't be a MEECH Custom photography shot would it?  Actually the head tube turned out nice.

Such a lovely rear end.

I put a little royal carbonification on the chain stay for some superior slaption protection.  "So what exactly is royal carbonification slaption protection?"  No earthly idea but this should pretty much cover it if it exist.

Red, white, and black has been done quite a bit in the last couple of years however this is actually more of a red/orange.  Like alot of paint colors it appears different in certain light conditions.  Overall i really like how it turned out and I wouldn't mind having this paint scheme on my ride.

How artistic is this?  When the frame turned out exactly like this drawing I couldn't believe it.  "That boy's gonna be president."  The sketch is just for reference purposes only.  Too many times I will get a paint scheme in my mind only to forget where I'm going with it once I start painting.  The quick sketch makes all the difference in the world.

Somehow JR managed to remember that I love the Avocet O2 saddle and he sent me two of them.  Talk about getting on my good side.  First he buys a frame from me and gives it rave reviews all over the internet and then he sends me two of these.  Its all I can do to hold back the tears.  I think this brings my grand total of Avocet O2 saddles up to about eleven. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll7rWiY5obI 

Dizzy got a new bed the other day.  We were just going for our normal morning walk and we passed a neighbor's house who was having a yard sell and she just gave it to him.  I had to carry it about 300 yards with him hanging onto it trying to take it away from me.  He was like, "Hey man, she gave it to me!"  Hopefully now he will start to sleep in his own bed and give me a little more space.

NEWS FLASH:  Yesterday I saw a bear coming out of our neighborhood. I've heard that there are bears in this area however I didn't think they would be crossing the roads in our neighborhood.   Anne and I were going for a quick dip in the lake and as we pulled out of our neighborhood there was a black bear crossing the main road.  When he saw us he turned back around and shagged, back toward the neighborhood I might add.  It was about the size of a very large black lab, similar to my friend Larry Yancey's dog Huck, however I think Huck actually has bigger feet than this bear.  I may need to borrow Huck for a few days.  I would feel safer when I walk the dogs at night.  Dizzy is quick enough that he could get away however Pinky will look like a Hostess Snowball to a bear.  Huck would let that bear know that he needs to just move on down the road and let things be or things could get ugly, for the bear that is.  Alright, I'm outta hear for a while.  Tour is getting closer.  I can't wait.  I hope everyone stays healthy and upright this year.  Thanks for checking things out and I'll see you soon.  Chao.

MEECH Custom Bicycles

handmade and painted 

in 

Mountain Home, Arkansas.