Ever Wondered What It Takes To Design And Hand Build A Custom Bike?
i'm on my way to eugene oregon to visit commotion cycles headquarters looking to meet up with his founder and owner dwan shepard and pick up my new bicycle frame it's been a long time dream of mine i have a custom fitted bicycle made by them last november i met up with brian cannon their sales manager with whom i spent part of a morning going through their thorough fitting process this bicycle frame has been made to fit me as close to perfect as possible so i can continue bicycle touring this amazing planet while sharing my adventures on my youtube channel fly scout rider and so i drive over to key west airport where i get on the first of three flights to get to eugene come along and get to know dwan sheppard and his one-of-a-kind top-notch american bicycle company i finally made it to eugene oregon i'm here with dwan shepard he's the owner and founder of commotion cycles here in eugene and uh he's kind enough to take the time to let me ask him a few questions or so he says there's a lot of them so so let's get started by asking you what niche is commotion cycles in we're a small company we just have 18 people working here when you're a small company you have to recognize uh you're not gonna you're not gonna be in every bike shop competing with trek and cannondale specialized so what we do is we try to identify parts of the bicycle market that the bigger companies are not addressing and really they're they're looking for things that they can mass market and for us it's the opposite we're looking for opportunities to meet the needs of cyclists who cannot find what they need um you know from the likes of those bigger companies and uh for us that has meant tandem bikes you know we do a lot of touring and adventure type bikes of course you know custom fitting is a big part of what we do to some degree these larger companies do a bit of that but they don't do it to the extent that we do they don't offer the range of options that we do such as specialty drive trains like pinion gearboxes roll off multi-speed hubs sns couplers for travel things like that you know being able to offer those options and you know provide alternatives to people looking for something a little more specialized for what they want to do has you know helped us build our own reputation and you know increase our reach around the country and and to some degree worldwide so dwan going back to the origin of commotion cycles uh there's this name that keeps coming up my research is gary hill who is he and has he has he become an influence since the his departure and your entry into the inception of the bike shop that he and you worked on during the 80s yeah gary has definitely been a mentor to me i met gary i think in 1982 or 83 when i was working at a bicycle shop here in eugene he had a frame building shop here where he made custom bikes very much a one-off operation he made a living by doing that and and doing other you know fabrication and maintenance things for small businesses in west eugene he had come around to various bike shops offering a frame building class and i i took his class from him after after he offered to do it on a pay-as-you-go basis and i think i paid about six hundred dollars to build my own frame in his class with a couple of friends subsequently he offered me a job so you know i finished my friend my frame and i soon found myself working part-time for gary helping him build frames and and do other light fabrications so you fell into a passion for building friends i did you know and and to be honest it was something i really uh did not expect to like as much as i did i didn't expect to have you know any sort of talent for it but gary thought otherwise and that's how i found myself working for him he then wanted to get out of the the bike side of things altogether and go and work for this other company that he'd been doing contract work for so he offered to sell me his business and i said to him are you kidding i work for you i don't have any money i checked in with one of my friends who i worked with at another bike shop and uh he and i went in together and purchased the business which was just a small you know it was pretty pretty small operation thousand square foot shop you know an old atlas lathe and a mill drill machine and some files a couple of rudimentary frame jigs a set of brazing welding tanks yeah i've read about worship your thousand your original shop that you bought from gary and uh i'm just intrigued as to what the atmosphere must have been like those first three years it's pretty garage like yeah um i mean you guys are late 20s you're just hanging out yeah building this and that just repairing frames you know giving it a whirl let's see how this goes and in the first couple years we well the first year we we sold six bicycles uh so you can imagine what kind of living you can make off of that for two guys we kept our jobs working at another bike shop so it was a part-time gig we did lots of frame repairs at that time in the late 80s a lot of people were converting their mountain bikes from uh roller cam or u-brakes to cantilever brakes so we had lots of lots of uh nishikis and and uh you know gary fisher's and richie's and whatnot coming in uh getting brake conversions you know small amount of work so there were these two guys friends of yours that you brought in because you couldn't afford your uh pay scale to buy the shop and it was uh butch boucher and then it's hard to pronounce this uh yeah we were all co-workers um at this other bike shop dan uh taught himself how to how to do machining and he kind of became the the expert on maintaining the machine tools and learning how to operate manual machines butch learned how to build titanium frames and he also specialized in doing finish work on uh bicycle frames yeah there wasn't social media per se at the time in the early 90s but uh he was more involved in reaching out to bicycle publications uh marketing angle yeah the marketing angle yeah so where the name commotion cycles come from butch and i had had built our first tandem frame um and we had tossed some different ideas around for names uh we thought about just using our last names if the company grows you don't want people saying you're coming to the front door and saying i want to talk to boucher or shepard you want a name that is representative of what you do not representative of yourself so we decided to uh invite our friends to uh a uh dinner potluck party and it was you know it was a name the bike party so we put our tandem frame number one on a table and we handed out notepads and we said write down 20 different names that you think would be great for this bike or this company and so we had a lot of great suggestions many of them i've seen since then on names of internet startups or car models really you name it so i think we came up with some good ones but uh the clear winner the applause winner was was uh co-motion i love the name really nice i think invokes you know of course it was a tandem frame you know helps envision the idea of two people working together but it can also mean you and the bike yeah totally in motion together i think it's been great so at some point in the first three years of your startup you decide to move to a 3 000 square foot shop what happened to instigate that movement our local competitors at burley bicycle cooperative put on a tandem stage race my former partner butch and uh and our mutual friend raced in that stage race on our tandem number one and they won it there was a reporter from uh winning bicycle racing a very good slick magazine that was reporting on bicycle racing in the us and abroad and they did a story and did a follow-up interview with butch and myself where they featured the bike so people you know kind of got the idea that we weren't just making another tandem we were making a tandem that was going to have the characteristics that a racer might be interested in to me it seems like three years in early 20s maybe coming into your 30s you immediately find success enough to grow and go into a new shop and then three years go by in the new shop from what i found out and it's just the three of you and then you decide to do your first hire which was bob westman who's still with you after 28 years that's right how did he come about and what did he bring to the equation you know he's just a great guy with the biggest heart in the world super hard working everybody loves bob you can't you can't not love the guy he came as a bicycle mechanic you know he had some wrenching skills from working a few bike shops in kansas and texas he saw an ad that we ran in the local paper and answered it and we liked him and offered him the job and at that time he was he was about 30 i guess and comes the year 2000 we're looking at only 12 years since your inception and you end up building this building behind us 13 000 square feet at that time did you ever imagine that you would ever reach that kind of success i mean you were a mid-20s guy making fifty dollars a week with gary and doing work time part work at a bike shop you're broke right and now 12 years later you're create you're building a insane shop like one of the best shops in the country no i i i did not envision that i you know when uh we started the company i i thought you know let's see how this goes for a couple years and you know if we ever get to the point of making 50 bikes a year i'm going to be thrilled duane it seems to me that at the core of your company is the high level of manufacturing and the quality that you guys try to produce and i see that your bicycles don't skimp out at all every aspect of the bicycle building process is taken into consideration without exception and with that said you have double butted tubing you have created and developed through your machinery here i would believe it's a cnc machine the cnc router you've created a shifting mechanism for customizing the pinion gearbox shifter so it can accommodate the components that you want to put out yes so starting out with a explanation of double butted tubing can you explain to us what double but it means basically a double butted bicycle frame tube has a continuous outer diameter the welded areas need to be strong enough and thick enough to withstand the heat and the uh the intersection you know they need some extra oomph to be able to really connect that tube to its adjoining tubes it's thicker at the weld zone uh and typically it's you know 100 to 150 millimeters from that weld zone before it goes into a thinner zone again the outside diameter of the tube doesn't change but the wall thickness is thinner so it might be eight tenths of a millimeter thick at the welded ends and then it's you know if you measure 150 millimeters in from that it's going to be in the thin zone which is uh typically a couple of tenths later so six tenths of a millimeter thick in the thin zone would be a typical top tube on a on a road bike it's a tapering effect and what about the zonely butted tubing so what we mean by zonally but it is um on a on a tandem frame for instance we've made the argument that you can make a much stronger bike by having a continuous tube from the head tube all the way to the rear seat tube with the the front seat tube uh basically intersecting but piercing that tube which is a larger diameter in that zone in the middle of the of the tube is a is you know a thicker section just like the the thicker ends that are welded on a typical double butted tube so because there was no name for that kind of tube we call it zonally because you have three distinct zones or you could call it five distinct zones there are three heavier zones and two lighter zones and this is reynolds cycle tubing from england that produces these so reynolds was the first company that we worked with to develop those tubes we also worked with truetemper for many years we've worked with a lot of the tube manufacturers why is this so important for you to build your bicycles with chromoly steel why not go with aluminum or titanium well we do build aluminum bikes it's a small percentage of what we do steel has uh the most versatility as a as a material to build bicycle frames um out of you know in my mind all of the available materials to build a bicycle frame um think of it as a you know as your palette uh from which to you know if you were the artist and you you want to paint a landscape you want the best palette that you can get for specialty bikes like tandems and you know touring adventure type bikes the right ability the repair ability steel provides the best options one of the things that drew me to come to commotion out of many things was the fact that you guys build the frames yourselves and that you have your own welding process and without giving any details of your welding secrets what in a simple way differentiates commotion cycles from any other manufacturer of bicycles either here in the us or anywhere else we concentrate more on the processes and just make sure that you know our equipment is set up properly and the processes that we go through are thorough and consistent we have crew here as you mentioned you know we have people that have been here for many years and they're very proud of their work going into the components that you guys offer your with your bicycles starting with the co-pilot uh component can you fill us in a little bit on or a lot of why the co-pilot is such a sought-after component for your bicycles yeah so you're talking about the s s coupling the couplers uh which are made by sns machine out of california um i met steve smiling at the interbike show in about 1994 95 i think he he was showing these uh these amazing stainless steel couplers that he had designed so i started thinking let's make some frames with these and so we were not the first company to build a frame with the s s coupling but we were the first company to begin offering a selection of bikes that could be ordered with that coupling as a stock offering my friend steve hoff he flew out to north dakota this last summer to cross north dakota and to south dakota with his commotion cycle he has the couplers and the the co-pilot and it was really easy just for him to fly into fargo we put the bike together and no time at all he we went to the post office sent the the carry case to pierre south dakota and a week later when we got there went to the post office picked it up put his bike back in the bag got on a plane got home and very simple yeah it's a great product does it add a significant weight to the bicycle uh the couplers weigh about four ounces each on average um you know the the ones for the bigger tubes like on a you know a tandem or a triplet they're they're a little bigger and heavier but on your typical single bike you know they weigh about together you're going to have two so they're going to weigh about eight ounces which is a lot less than this so i uh noticed when i was here in november getting fitted for my bike that you had cnc machines here and i was educated by brian your sales manager that you guys make all sorts of parts for your bicycles here in-house you're not really trying to grab parts from different companies you're flat-out making your own your own components yeah that was a that's been an incremental process we got our first cnc machine when we decided to tackle the the periscope project with a dual telescoping seat mast system which makes it super adjustable so you can you can start a kid as the stoker on the back of a periscope tandem at about age four and then the bike is adjustable until the kid is as big as as the parent you know or whoever is riding uh in the front of the bike after making the special collars and seat masks and parts that were necessary to build that system we started looking around and thinking hey you know what if we solved this problem over here by making our own part rather than you know searching and finding the best match we could find for the idea that we had you know and you start thinking about making the quantum leap and thinking well if i had the perfect part what would it be the possibilities really open up when you have cnc equipment when i saw the cnc machine i i was thinking to ask you which parts are you actually producing and then i walked around your shop and i noticed that there's gazillions of boxes with all kinds of parts you know you start thinking of well how can i make this part better um how would you know having a a drop out that really suits the the angles of the frames that we're producing be different from this cast item that's been made in japan or italy for 30 years and uh and then you know there are other other things happen that um that sort of force your hand like uh all of a sudden through axles become prevalent do you want to you know wait for the industry to produce the right dropout for you or do you want to create one right now that suits your frame and addresses the you know the concerns that you have about the methodology that we use to put our frames together you know to be in control of of as many steps of specking and and building the frames as possible when i saw the stainless steel drop out for my divide i was just like sort of divide pinion is that what you're yes yes okay so i was i was blown away i was like this is a that's a very special part the divide pinion essentially has the pinion gear box um which is a 12 or 18 speed internal gear box that's mounted in the center of the frame basically where uh frame typically would have the bottom bracket shell but um so the the wheels are essentially single speed wheels and in the case of the divide pinion you have a drive belt instead of a chain and a sliding assembly to enable that adjustment tension adjustment that you need to have it also has a a semi-vertical slot so that if you have a flat tire you need to pull your wheel out you take the through axle out you don't have to do any sort of tension adjustments the the wheel comes out of the frame and detentions the belt at the same time and when you replace the wheel the belt is also re-tensioned at the same time that's a fairly complicated dropout to make but in use it's very simple the thru axle is supported by parts that slide within a receiver assembly that has adjustment screws and locking bolts and that receiver assembly is 17 for stainless steel the sliding parts that receive the through axle are anodized aluminum changing subjects to components that you actually bring into commotion cycles from outside sources one of them is the steer stopper which i'm an ex huge fan of it's a must have uh component for me on my bicycle i use it constantly every day i have a million reasons why i like it but other than the steer stopper and the sns coupling what other components do you bring in from outside sources well i mentioned the pinion gearbox uh the roloff speed hub those are both the german-made transmission alternatives and uh you know they're beautifully made there's a lot of appeal to a lot of folks who want to get away from derailer systems if you're attracted to a bicycle transmission that does not have external cogs and you know a greasy chain and um you know the exposure of those parts to the elements you may well want to consider an internal gearbox like the pinion gearbox or the roll-off speed hub main difference being that the roll-off contains those parts in the rear hub the pinion gearbox is is more of a central part of the bike it's attached to the frame as i said the wheel set is essentially a single speed wheel set we try to be neutral and just talk about the pluses and minuses of all these these uh components because nothing is perfect it's just good to know what your options are and for us we like to offer those options still sell a lot of bites with the derailleur system and it remains the most economical if you're familiar with the components and the maintenance required they're they're very simple and relatively easy to get along with i'm very familiar and i maintain my my drivetrain my derailleur drive drive train while i'm touring all the time and i'm good at it i've gotten good at it because you have to do it so many times yeah but there's a lot of times where i'm stuck in rain in a rail trail and it's just grinding away back there and yeah and then i to find wait until the rain stops so i can get the sand off the chain and the derailleur and the yeah and then lube it up and then i'm back to feeling okay that alone is a huge part of why i'm so attracted to the opinion gearbox understood absolutely i thought i was just destroying my drivetrain makes me think about one of those pinion gear boxes i wouldn't uh i wouldn't mind having one of those someday there's another component that i find extremely important as i like to write with my lights on all the time i really like having my headlight on so you got the pathfinder package is what we call it yeah and i did that on my on my my bike now that i've toured twice across the us with that's another component that you bring in what percentage of the bikes are coming out with the with the hub with the dialogue it's not a high percentage it's it's maybe 20 25 you know for people that do extended touring uh off grid it's extremely attractive um because you can you can charge your phone or your gps unit you know charge your headlight while you're riding in the case of our pathfinder package it comes with a headlight so you can run the headlight as as much as you want to or you can flip the switch off if you want all the power diverted to something else i i use it strictly for full-time lighting at my uh my headlight it's a i hear people all the time telling me that they're coming down a trail and they see me a long ways away just flashing out them so yeah lets them know the the last part of the manufacturing part of your factory here is the paint booth and the painting process when i was here in november brian showed me how far you guys take painting yeah the bicycles um blown away for us being able to offer all kinds of paint options and multiple colors and you know different effects on on the bikes that we produce we have much more flexibility to do that with these downdraft type paint booths without a doubt the paint job is representative of what's underneath the paint because i've seen the frames in the raw form and after they've been sanded and or or polished and ready for pan they're just a phenomenal build what we want to do is create bicycles where the functionality of it is it's is its beauty and where its purpose is well defined and it um you know it really what really shines is how it serves the purpose that it's intended for to me going through that process creates the the beauty of the bike we don't set out to simply make pretty bikes well they're pretty i know they're more functional i know i know what you're trying to say but to me without a doubt it's a it's a it's a work of art they're beautiful bikes too to see and before the paint job goes on you know uh when things are are you know simple and to the point and you know not over developed um i i have always appreciated that and that's what we strive to achieve here as well so going into your models i i cannot wait to ask you this question because you have i believe 11 single bicycle models i think nine tandems or so and then there's the periscope models too many yeah too many to count i mean i don't i don't want to like go through every model and but like the overall picture of why there are so many models can you explain why there's so many models and i gotta say when i look for the model that the first time i looked at the website i was like like where do i start and that this is 10 years ago right and it's taken years of looking at the website and actually learning more about cycling because i'm sort of new to cycling that i started seeing through the the pictures of the bicycles and reading the details and going oh i see where this is going there's this wheel size there's this drive train there yeah it's all very organized in the in in your process but it's still 11 bicycles for singles you know if somebody comes along and says well could you make me a bike like that but with uh with 29 inch wheels uh or gee i really like your uh your americano but uh if i could have that with a roll-off hub instead of the derailleur system that'd be the bike for me for the periscope you know we've talked to families who wish they could have a bike that works for them as a as a couple the parents say and they wish they could have a quick adjustment to get their their kid on it each model is really intended again going back to the function of the bike to to meet that purpose for instance we have a a touring model called the ochiko it's it's designed to work for smaller statured people you know 29 inch wheels are really difficult to work with for a person who's under five foot tall you have to really compromise on geometry to accommodate a small person on a bike with oversized wheels like that so it has a 650b wheel set which makes it easier to build a bike that has lower standover clearance because everybody should be able to step off of their saddle and put their their feet on the ground and have some clearance over that top tube if you're doing a lot of world travel say in the southern hemisphere i'd probably recommend a bike with 26 inch wheels rather than 700 or or 29 inch wheel or 650b like the pangaea because um 26 inch tires are pretty easily available worldwide and 650b 700c 29 inch in some parts of the world it can be tough to get tires every one of those models is is um addressing one thing or another you know let's talk about what you're going to do with the bike you know how tall are you where are you going to go with this bike juan with that said about the models uh and talking about my confusion when i first looked at the list of different single bicycle touring models and different single bike models that you have that are not bicycle touring and i had this confusion but once i started cycling and i realized what i was looking for what i what in a bicycle not necessarily one of your bicycles and i looked at the divide the 29 inch divide i was like boom that's the one so i can see we're having a lot of those models are good for people that know exactly what they want in their bicycle so would you say that most of your customers are cyclists who have somewhat uh uh some experience in cycling where they are more prone to know to know what it is that uh they're looking for and frame and components and this and that or are there also people who come to you that are looking to bicycle tour per se for the first time and they don't want to go with a lower grade model out there and just flat out start without wasting any time and becoming a commotion cycle of a customer we definitely get both you do we're more comfortable talking with someone who has some experience because it's it's more relatable you know let's say if they're looking for a touring bicycle if they've been out there and experienced you know the typical problems with you know the bicycle handling the touring load without wobbling or you know they've had wheel failures or maybe bought some off-the-shelf bike and tried to you know put a roll-off hub on it or something like that then it's easier to talk about how our bikes you know solve those issues and and we can demonstrate that with a quick test ride and you know show people what we do and why we do it i find that to be a great place to be a place where somebody who's already had a bicycle and have learned the ropes to some degree realizes that there's something more functional for their purpose right and that's who you guys are yeah and you know and we're if i may say so we're good at those conversations you know we we everyone on my sales team has some experience with with touring and uh you know with tandaming and road riding mountain biking you name it um and so it's easy for us to you know to have those conversations about you know what the possibilities are and what we can do here at commotion to give you the best cycling experience you know you can you can have so how many dealers are there in the united states and how many states actually every state with some dealer um you know there's that we have different levels of dealers you know we're happy to work with people that don't have a commotion dealer nearby they can contact us and you know initiate an order and we'll help them find a nearby dealer that we can deliver the bike to that's what i was going to ask you next in november i finished my tour in california and flew here with my bicycle and met up with brian and i did that because brian said that it would be great to look at my bicycle and see and interview me and the extent that he took to interview me about my bicycle and my fit to it and what i liked i didn't like and then did the the form to measure my reach and all 16 points i think it was that you and if to me i was i was able to do it but there's other people out there that might be far from a dealer or just cannot come here like i did is there is are those people able to call here and be directed through your form and through questioning to fit themselves to our bicycle we do everything we can to uh to work with people to accomplish those things um and uh you know we can direct people to experienced fitters if they're not comfortable with the measurements that we asked for although we you know we've developed that form to virtually do what we would do if we were with them there's a long list of reasons why i wanted a commotion bicycle and including the pinion gearbox capability the wider tire i mean all the all that we talked about all these components that you make in-house the welding the tubing the the length that you guys take but at the very top of the list if not close to the very top is the fact that i was able to be fitted to a bicycle and i spent months in a daily basis all day long cycling on on the roads and i want to be like as close to perfectly fitted to a bicycle as i can be and there isn't that much option for that in the united states we're always looking to in that recommendation you in the middle of the range of possibilities so that you know let's say you know two weeks after your initial setup you you want to have a little bit more reach it's just a matter of picking a stem with another centimeter of reach yeah the time that brian spent with me interviewing me it's not just uh measuring me it's asking me all these questions and making sure that he knows what i'm looking for and and he explained this that there's adjustability to the end result of the fitting to the frame what has driven you from a a shop kid an annoying shop kid is what you what i read you quote you were quoted for saying one time yeah you're this little snotty kid in a bike shop trying to figure out how to change the tire fill a tube yeah two everyone's got to start somewhere right to being broke yeah in hail's uh shop learning how to do frames and then all of a sudden three years in boom you find success go to 3 000 square foot shop 12 years later from the inception of the company you're in this massive incredible energy efficient building getting insane accolades for what you've accomplished and what your company's accomplished the commotion customer is like when you meet one of them they're just static about their bicycle yeah it's pretty fun what's at the heart of the result of the success of all this that's a good question diego um you know and my my stock answer is i don't have any marketable skills so this is all you're good for you know you got to be able to to i think you know and i i haven't had a real job for 34 years so correct me if i'm wrong but i feel like you have to you have to be able to you know look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and and uh and you know feel good about what you've done um and uh this is this is what i have to offer and i i feel i feel good about what we've done here i like writing my own ticket someone asked me what my biggest fear was and and i said um um insignificance i i have some sort of drive to have some sort of significance what we do as we talked earlier about is it's very niche oriented so i know that you know whatever renown that we have reaches a very small audience and i'm totally fine with that i'm not out to be uh famous or anything i but i um i do have some drive to have some kind of impact and i i don't know if that's an aide in everyone but you know that maybe that's the driving force i i couldn't tell you what a great american story of passion and perseverance not not willing to do anything but in excellence and and to be a progressive thinker like you've been it's obvious in what you're doing and i can't tell you how happy i am how thrilled i am to be a very my new part of the commotion uh story by being able to ride one of your bicycles it's a it's well don't i can't thank you enough and i can't underestimate the importance of that because uh you know without uh without people like you without every customer we've ever had we would not exist so um you know we also try to recognize that that uh um every customer is important every every bike that we put out is you know maybe it's the you know the 200th or 500th bike that we've done this year but um but it's it's your only bike and so we have to treat each one with respect and you know understand that it's it's uh a thing of lasting value for for you i agree thank you thank you so much for spending the time with me today i can't thank you enough i've had a ball chatting with you i was kind of nervous at first because i it's my first time doing a lengthy interview with a person of your caliber and uh you made it seem really like a friendly scenario so i really appreciate that well thanks i felt at ease talking to you and i really appreciate you asked me some really good questions i i felt on the ropes a couple of times there so thanks very much diego if you get close to it, you might be able to see what it's carving out in there all that to just make a hole, a very important a spider for our pinion tandems. this will be bored out to fit the spline on the pinion gearbox these lobes here will accept the gates carbon drive ring. for the tandems. so you connect the two belts. yep. nice! the thing that's mounted in there is a tool to hold parts in a specific way so that they can be carved out the same way each time, following the program steps. the machine has to know where the parts are going to be held and their relationship to each other. this would be the left side so you've got your left
chain stay your left seat stay your disc brake mounts here you'd have your adjusting screw here there are two fixing bolts that will keep it from sliding keep this from sliding and the corresponding right side same concept but there's no you know it doesn't have to hold it this straight you know only one side is threaded to accept the uh the through axle this one also has a this countersunk here is your separation so that you have access for your belt so the the seat stay detaches here with a stainless steel countersunk bolt single hole after chatting it up with duan he shows me around the shop and eventually i run into mark lipchick one of the real builders he was prepping a tandem for shipping to a commotion cycles dealer and was kind enough to show me his way he first pressed the headset into the head tube and after installed both bottom brackets so our brazer bob makes a lot of our tools for us we made the handles for this i can tell because they're braced on i want to get a nice coat on the surfaces and enough of a build up so that when i press the races what we call squeeze out along the edges so that way i know it's seated to bleed which one goes in first you see i get that nice little squeeze out there with the grease this one i don't like just a nice light coconut is when we uh put this when you see this it puts the crud out of it from the morning originally sandblasted the raw frame makes the assembly easier and it keeps it from corroding what a beautiful part yeah these are machined in-house it fits the packaging box better that way when we click here to assemble again this is a part that is not going to unlock the actual bottom bracket so just now i just got my hand here to control i watch mark finish packing the tandem for shipping and soon after say my goodbyes to duane and the rest of the awesome crew of commotion cycles i'm sad to have this day and but the anticipation of building my new commotion pinion divide in the coming days has me with great anticipation i grab my box frame and make my way to eugene airport and start the first of three flights to get back home in no time i'm back home and after a restful night's sleep i open the box and take a look at my new touring bicycle frame for the first time thinking of the thousands of miles and hundreds of adventures ahead of us i can't help but to feel immense appreciation for the amazing work and passion behind what it took to build this bike when things are are you know simple and to the point and you know not over developed i i have always appreciated that and that's what we strive to achieve here as well
2022-08-10 06:10
