This week was copious time on the trainer, reading the QBP catalog. Calculating. Spending.

 

truing wheels!
Thank you Alex. These factory-built hummers are sturdy and will care for my girls. You get lots of donations of outdated stuff when you go 9mm QR, yo!

throwing dirt all Sunday morning

We built this in about 3 days.  Some pics ganked from Fish, Kenny and other GROAZers

The girls were not invited to this workday, with all the machinery, which made me far more productive. The vast summation of our efforts at the last workday was a gecko that dropped its tail.

This park is gonna be sick, and legal. Pinch me, this isn’t really happening. Some pics of the DH runs, also borrowed from the net.

The dirt is actual soil,i feel naked without the threat of rocks. Like a prisoner drug to the Roman Coliseum, I did not know man could build such things.

The skills area is at mid-hill, the green, blue and black lines coming down above it.

A shop stop on the way home. v-brake boss plugs removed, new used seatpost, good advice. Thanks Morgan and Rage!

maybe just a little riding

This made me happy

Previously on ‘TinyShredder‘…

G need new bike, xmas is coming, we are sick of childlike bullshit overweight cheap dumb fucking kids bikes. And with help from Rage we discovered G can fit into a 26 frame! Ahhh, adult sizes, where high-end drive trains and forks and brakes and wheelsets are so mass produced they perform featherlightly for mere pennies!

Except they have all become 27.5 wheels, with through axels and hydros, complexity and sensitivity to swallow a little girl. I saw a picture of a Felt carbonfiber 24inch-standover 29er. If I plunked $250 for a smaller crankset and $250 for a better fork, G would set 8yo landspeed records at $2k, and would kill herself turning at 4mph, engulfed by the adultness of intent and equilibrium. 4mph doesn’t sound like much, until you throw yourself at the ground from a dead stop — that’s about 4. This dilemna led to shopping for the lowest of the low-end mass produced lines for a frame and $300 into the ether of stupid. or…

or…

buying a frame!

*sigh*

The most custom custom bike build I’ll have ever done is for G.

*headscratch**facepalm* I am soooo bitter about this.

Why, bikegod, why have you let this FunSucker taketh another gift from me!!?!?!? I’ve ridden National 3 times this year. I USED TO RIDE NATIONAL 2X A MONTH!!!  

Performance 14.5 26inch frame. This is the most important thing i’ve ever bought from Performance, since a Gary Fisher Sugar3 15 years ago, a chainsuck deathmachine I finally left by the side of the road. But even Performance cant fuck up an aluminum hardtail frame someone else made and they only painted? I took it to Rage for the facing, instead of play Russian Roulette with the mechanics at Performance.

so purty, hanging next to those $2k Yetis

After I brought it home , we strolled through the garage seeing the blue and white cables on the Fatty Catty and the Bird, the blue ring on the Malice, the red grips on HeiHei. Time for a paint program!

My elevator pitch: red cranks, red rings, red shifter cable! White brake cables and fork!! Restrained and softened Hurricane G vs. the power of the Genasaurus? The middle blue so soothing.

Alana could not be bothered to heed advice for the 10th time in 5 minutes. The past 30 min the two of them with my help and zero damage removed a bottle cage from a bike, washed it, and remounted it on the new frame. It was death. G was wailing over the inherent patience and precision of bike work, and taking it out on Alana.  Alana was playing with every small, fragile, or destructive object in sight, like a cat with a feather, or nagging G to hurry up.

Me: DONT GET NEAR G WHILE SHES CARRYING HER BIKE!

Me: DONT GRAB THE SEATCLAMP WITH THE PLIERS!

Me:  TAKE THE HEADSET OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!

Me: DONT JUGGLE THE HEX NUTS AND WASHERS!

Me: DONG GRAB THE 3-in-1’s TIP WITH THE PLIERS!

Me: DONT GET NEAR G WHILE SHES CARRYING HER BIKE!

At some point, you have to let it be mountain biking, and learn your limits by wrecking.

In the last week I’ve shown them how to remove a rotor, service a cassette, mount a tubeless tire, and clamp a brake cable. But neither at the same time, and neither enough steps in sequence to complete a single task. They both will know how to build half a bike, but neither half can complete a single task without the other. its Dante-esque.

first bit of bling