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....