Shift up, slow down

Alrighty then, it has been a while.

I have wanted to move away from suburbia for a long while now, and had droned on to my wife for so long that I got an 'Ah just do whatever you want' response. As everyone knows this is secret woman code for 'I have a happy and enthusiastic acceptance of your charming if somewhat alarming foibles, and shall follow you to the ends of the earth my love'.

So we packed things up and moved 385kms away to Nelson.

So far this appears to be a pretty sound move, in the first week of residency we had so much good weather that I started to question why we had waited so long. The summers in Christchurch can be pretty good, but it is a rare day that has sunshine and does not have the Nor'easterly freezing your tits off. In Nelson we got a solid two weeks of calm sunny days before the more unsettled spring weather set in. I have high hopes for summer...

Not a bad place to stop midway through your ride...

One of the joys of Nelson are the cycle trails. From my doorstep I can do a 40km bike ride that has about 5% riding on roads. If I do choose the roads, there are awesome gravel basher loops on back roads that suit the Disc Trucker perfectly, then there is the Mountainbike trail network. I did a ride called the Coppermine on the Fatbike a few weeks ago, and it was just spectacular. If you ride nowhere else in Nelson, you should do this.

One other thing I have now is shed space....... a lot of shed space. 240 square meters of shed space, to be exact.

Ample Pogward shed space, yesterday.

This picture shows all of the things that I had in my garage at home, with the addition of a drum kit and a piano, and it comfortably fills up just one portion of my sheds, about 1/3rd of the total.

Yay for me.

So as I have the space and we have mostly settled in to our new life, I have resumed the bike building;

The beginnings of a fatbike for my lovely wife, small recompense for what she puts up with I am sure.

This frame I intend to TIG weld entirely, so I am borrowing a much nicer welder than mine off a lovely chap called Alex. This welder has HF start, pulse and a foot control. This is so I do not blow big holes in those expensive tubes...

One of the things I did before leaving Christchurch was to get rid of a lot of old bike parts. As part of this exercise I built up a bike to sell as I figured I might get more money that way, unfortunately the bike I built was so cool that I could not part with it. Bear in mind, I built this entirely from parts I had lying around, I did not even have to leave the garage...

An entirely convincing parts bike build and indifferent Burmese, sometime in July.

This bike now resides at work, where it gets a daily workout.

So there it is, and rest assured you can look forward to more exciting blow by blow accounts of the trials and tribulations of Pogward Framebuilding Enterprises, there will be more to come shortly....

Mist Green and Monstertrucking

So, having been pretty satisfied with the performance of the new forks in a wide variety of situations, and becoming pretty annoyed at how quickly the current weather was rusting things up, I dropped the frame off to my favourite powdercoating outfit on Monday. I checked in on it halfway through the week and while it was definitely coloured in the manner I wanted, it wasn't as industrial as I required, so we decided on another coat of clear matt.

This morning I picked it up and this is the result;

Green Mist is the colour of choice...

I forgot to tell the chap to keep the logo clear, I carefully removed this during the assembly

2 coats tends to smooth out my lumpy welds pretty well

Lit by the last sunshine of the day - 10.30am approx.

Clearly things couldn't stay in such a bare state for long, so a couple of hours later I had this result, and to be honest I am pretty stoked with it. It needs to be significantly dirtier than this but no doubt that will come about soon;

Deeply satisfactory.

So while the fatty was out of action I was hankering for a wee bit of off road action, and the nearest thing I had to a serviceable steed was my Surly Disc Trucker. The Trucker is my go-to bike for pretty much anything, and tends to be the one that goes on holiday with me as it is so versatile. I have done a fair bit of trail work on it in road trim and it does a pretty good job.

Last weekend I took it up the hill and on a few light trails, and it performed pretty well, given I had 60psi in its essentially slick Continental touring tyres. I got a few amusing comments from the people riding the same trails on mountain bikes.

I took the guards and panniers off for my hilltop excursions...

Now I have had a bit of a thing for cyclocross bikes over the last couple of months, there is something about the do-anything, go-anywhere attitude that they have that works for me pretty well. I am even sort of planning a new commuter/cx bike for some point in the future. In the meantime I got to thinking that the main problem with the Trucker off road was the skinny tyres, and apart from that it was pretty much already a cx bike. Inevitably I started measuring clearances and this happened somehow;

That, in my humble opinion, looks the absolute tits.

The tyres are WTB Nano 2.1's, and there is very, very little clearance to the frame. Still, my initial impressions of its off road capability are extremely positive....

1000km Running Report

Long time no blog...


Not too much to report to be honest, except that sometime in the last few weeks I passed the 1000km  commuting mark on the Pogward - I have no idea exactly how far it is due to the lack of cycle computer, but it is definitely between 1000 and 1500kms...

The only niggles to speak of have been a squeaky crank and an annoying tendency for the left hand rear axle nut to come loose, the crank being the most annoying because no matter how tight I got the crank bolt it started loosening off almost immediately. I have never had problems like this with square taper cranks before, so I am guessing that the tapers on the dirty old Campy cranks must have been worn. I solved the problem by buying a nice set of Shimano 600 cranks and a new bottom bracket to suit - this has been totally sweet for a good few weeks now. One extra benefit of the new cranks is that I was getting a wee bit of heel strike on the chainstays with the Campagnolo items, this has now been eliminated which is a pleasing side effect of the change.

A filthy commuter, today.

As can be seen I also treated myself to a set of Shimano Saint pedals - I have these same pedals on the Surly now and they are very nice indeed, and should take the mountainous weight of yours truly with aplomb. There is also a sneaky Surly 42T Stainless Steel chainring hiding under the dirt and grime, this should also take many miles of punishment.

The axle nut comes loose over the course of a month or so, I might just double nut it for now, I just need to check it every couple of weeks at the moment...

This lack of exciting problems is really quite pleasing as the Pogward has had to deal with some fairly extreme conditions; snow, sleet and epic amounts of rain, so yay for me.

I have added much reflective shiny stuff in an effort to make myself more visible as you can see from the flash. This is probably pointless as Christchurch drivers are almost wilfully blind and/or careless when it comes to cyclists. I am not dead yet though, so there is hope it is doing something.

I have caved to peer pressure and replaced the BHT™ with some black electrical tape. I also bought some black brake pads, but these are to go with a set of old DiaComp brakes I just won off TradeMe, so total colour coordination will occur sometime later this week I would say.

You can see another quick and dirty project of mine in that pic, a 5 space angled bike rack. Unfortunately I have 10 bikes to find space for, so I shall build another the next free day I have. The angled thing is pretty good for minimising the space required while still allowing reasonable access, and my lovely wife appears to be pleased that they are not all draped around the garage as usual. Not as pleased as she would be if I dumped some of them at the tip I would venture, but still.

A motley collection of bicycles. I like how my wife's bike is the only one without a Brooks saddle.

I am just getting back into my weekend riding again, these rides have been pretty sparse of late due to our house getting earthquake repairs - we shifted out for 6 weeks, and the whole place was completely gutted and redone. It looks nice now, but many weekends have been filled up doing the many little jobs that have needed doing since the workmen have left. The actual work done on the house was of pleasingly high quality, although the cost of the extras we asked for was eye-wateringly steep. All I can say is; Get A Quote. Also for the record I must say that Canterbury EQR are a pack of lying, thieving, two-faced bastards whose mothers probably only bought them home from the hospital under duress.

So this morning, to the obvious displeasure of my wife who had somehow got the impression that I had agreed to spend the day in the garden helping her tidy up, I decided to ride the rail trail down to Little River and back. This was exceedingly pleasant, as only time spent avoiding something tiresome can be. The track was a bit bumpier than I expected but the Surly took things in it's stride like a true champ. Together we showed our heels to a surprising number of people on mountainbikes, which should have been more suited to the terrain...

The weather, temperature and views were just perfect;

Now with added Randonneur

A few weeks have passed in a blissful state of commute, the weather has been pretty spectacular and the winds kind. I have also gradually increased my fitness levels such that atop the trusty Surly I made it to the top of Dyers Pass without stopping once, and even passed someone! Admittedly she had a good decade on me and admitted that she was quite hungover, but still, take the victories as they come I say.

There have been many small changes to the bike, and it is now getting where I want it to be give or take a few bits here and there. I had already decided that the bullhorns were not doing justice to the classic look of the frame, so on a whim I bid on a set of Salsa Short and Shallow Cross Bars on TradeMe, mostly because they were very cheap and the right diameters for what was wanted.

This turned out a mistake really as the ergoness looked faintly ridiculous on such a classic looking frame. The reach was also a bit short for my stem, so I then decided to find the perfect bars, and an extensive internet search gave me this result;

The Velo Orange Randonneur bars along with the very similar Nitto 136A. I thought to myself that both of these would be pretty hard to find in NZ, but then I looked to see if there was a local distributor for Velo Orange, and lo! Contact Dave at Velo Ideale..... as it turned out Dave had the perfectly sized set in stock right there, so I snaffled them pretty sharpish.

They were put on last night and I am really quite pleased with the look;

A burgundy leather sofa, today

As much as this bike lends itself, I have observed correct etiquette with bicycle photography; valves at the bottom, crank aligned with downtube etc.

I painted the guards black as well, it looks much cleaner...

I love the slight upward curve of those bars

To clean up the look some more I did away with my cycle computer and relocated the light to the head tube. I also purchased those quite sexy little Tektro canti brake thingies from Dave as well, god I spend some money with that man.

My by now signature Blue Handlebar Tape (BHT™)

The stem has not broken yet, I am pleased

I reworked the Jtek Mount to be adjustable for both height and tilt, it is still slightly awkward to pull it back into 1st, and kind of in the way until you get to 5th, but I cruise in 6th and is dead easy to get there so it is an acceptable compromise.

The other slightly disturbing thing that has happened is this;

Fresh rust on a handbuilt bicycle frame, today

I fully expected it, but maybe not within 2 weeks of getting it coated. This just confirms my belief that paint is for mugs. I guess it is because the clear coat does not have an etch prime like paint does. I don't really mind as long as it does not get structural, but I am now toying with the idea of electroplated coatings. There is a particular one I have in mind, but it would mean sending the frame up to Auckland, which I am disinclined to do. We shall have to see.

A wild Bicycle appears

Having done nothing for a month, the tables have turned and I am now flying through the work with amazing speed, meaning the frame is basically complete except for the brake bridge, chainstay bridge and the brazons. I have decided not to split the seat stay for the belt drive now for a few reasons, but mostly because it would have stopped the momentum I have built up...

One thing I did this week was to check the frame geometry against the Surly, and surprisingly the two frames are almost exactly the same apart from the top tube height, the Surly being 1cm lower. This is quite pleasing, an hopefully means that I made the right decisions when I designed this frame.

Sorting the seat stays

Brazing the bottom of the seat stays

Brazing the top of the seat stays

Pretty much done :-)

Mostly cleaned up - I decided to just keep things simple with the top of the seat stays and replicate what I have done with the dropout joints.

I got so excited I decided to mock it up - OMG a wild bicycle appears!

Plenty of room for the Alfine mechanism

Still some fine cleanup work to do on all the lugs...

A recently brazed bottom bracket.

As I was so into the actual making I failed to take a lot of pics and did not document some of the important things that happened. One of these was cold setting the frame. After I did the head tube to down tube joint I pulled it about a bit with a long bit of pipe to make sure the angles were still the same after welding. I also did this once that assembly had been brazed into the seat tube/bottom bracket assembly. This is to make sure there are as few pre-stresses as possible in the finished frame, which would make the chances of it pulling things a bit wonky much greater.

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Having done most of the brazing on the frame, it is worth making a few notes on how the jig actually performed. Overall it does the job pretty well, but there are a few things that were less than satisfactory;

 - Generally I did the brazing in place on the jig, and one thing I noticed is that the big chunks of brass absorb quite a lot of heat. I kind of expected this to happen, but it made getting enough heat into the joint problematic at times.

 - Access to the side of the joint close to the jig was difficult, but because it tended to be the last bit you did things were already up to heat, so were still relatively easy to do. Whether brazing the nearside and then the farside of every joint is a good thing for making a totally straight frame is a question, but I tried to keep the brazing start points balanced where I could.

 - Once I had the main triangle and chainstays in place it was virtually impossible to remove the frame from the jig - I removed the fitting that holds the top of the seat tube, but even then it was hard. I will probably change things to improve this for the next frame.

Overall it worked pretty well though; 7 out of 10, should pay more attention in class. Story of my life really.


The lug brazing itself I am not 100% happy with to be honest, maybe I am being too hard on myself, but I felt I was getting things hotter than I really wanted in my efforts to get silver to wick into some of the joints. The simple ones with essentially the same pipe/lug material thicknesses were ok (the head tube joints for instance), the dropout joints were not too bad either, but the ones with complicated geometry and a long wicking path were pretty stressful to achieve; the seat lug, fork crown, chainstays into bottom bracket.

I think I have enough silver in there for it to not be a problem functionally, but the bit of me that wants each joint to be a thing of total beauty created with a zen like sense of competency and completeness is displeased. Still, it is my first frame, and it is all about the learning isn't it?

Anyway, soon I shall pop out soon to the ever helpful Bob, and we shall do the prep type work ie cleaning up the bottom bracket threads, reaming the seat tube, reaming the head tube and seating the fork crown bearing race.

Lazy Eyes, Real Work Commences, a New Bike

It has been fourish weeks since the last proper work on the frame, and for good reason; I have just  had my eyes lasered. This involved wearing my glasses instead of contact lenses for two weeks prior to the operation, which made it hard to wear dark glasses for brazing, and then two weeks of being careful about my eyes; ie, not brazing and filing and grinding stuff.

The first two weeks wearing the glasses was actually the hardest to deal with as I am (was!) particularly blind; 7 diopters in one eye and 6.75 in the other, which basically means I was so blind I could not really even read a book without holding it millimetres from my face. My vision was ok with contacts but wearing glasses it meant I had virtually no peripheral vision, and the glasses lenses were so thick that I would get a form of light dopplering at the sides of my vision where lines of contrast would either red shift or blue shift. Disturbing to say the least, but at least in idle times I could imagine I was a spaceship.

Anyway this meant that for two weeks I basically could not trust my vision to tell me that things were the way they actually were, and so I thought it best to leave off work on the frame for the duration.

The actual Lasik procedure was pretty quick and painless, the only stressful bits being; 1. Having your eyes speculumed open. 2. Having the front of your corneas cut off. 3. Smelling the bits of your eye being vaporised by the laser. 4. Watching the nice doctor brush the cutoff bit of your eye back on.

For a day it felt like a little gremlin had dried out your eyes with a blowtorch and then liberally sprinkled finely chopped glass fibers in there just for good measure, but I had drugs to deal with this. Overall it wasn't too bad really, and well worth the blood loss from where my fingernails cut into my palms.

So now I am back on track I have fearlessly dived into the actual frame build. This weekend I brazed the head tube to down tube joint, seat tube to bottom bracket and the chainstays to dropouts;

A bit wayward with the quantity of silver, nothing that endless hours with a riffler won't fix.

A better effort.

Another unnecessary view of a better effort.

After I washed the flux off, clearly the skills have not entirely deserted me...

It was hard to get enough heat into the dropouts without toasting the tubes, I think it went ok though...

Now I just need another fill of oxygen to proceed, those little tanks do not hold many hours worth.

As indicated I have purchased a new bike, which you have probably guessed is a Surly. This is a Disc Trucker, which the disc braked version of the Long Haul Trucker. I bought this because it seemed to be the only steel framed bike in the size and geometry that I wanted.

A Surly Disc Trucker last week.

All I wanted was a decent bike that I would be able to do long rides involving hills, but this thing has far surpassed my expectations. It is so comfortable and responsive that having had it for a day or so I actually braved going up Dyers Pass Road. The first section up to the Sign of the Takehe was frankly rather ugly, it wasn't so much a granny gear I needed but more like a crematorium gear. I made it eventually, with many pitying and slightly worried looks from the walkers passing me, I think because my breathing sounded like someone was felling redwoods with a handsaw.

Thankfully from that point on things got significantly easier, so much so that I also took in as much of the summit road heading towards Sumner as I could, and I was rather disappointed to realise that the road was closed. That was a good ride and bedded in the squeaky front brakes quite nicely.


Since I took that picture I have bought a Topeak rack and some Phillips panniers and handlebar bag, so it looks pretty industrial. I have been using it for commuting for the last two weeks as well because it makes every other bike I own feel floppy and uncomfortable. This does nothing for my FCN but it is so easy to get the power down I am scalping pretty well regardless. When the frame goes together I will be trying to replicate how I sit on this as it is so nice.

I think I am in love.