Future Plans and Dreams

I was told that I might hear back this week regarding a job with a firm downtown. Nope. Hopefully I will get an answer, an affirmative answer early next week. If so we are having a party, a big one. Actually, come to think of it, the size of the party will depend upon the amount of pay ;)

Tomorrow I am going to get a bunch of riding in. At least that is the plan. I am going early with DTP to Forest Park to do some climbing. Then I am riding to work. and then Riding home. All together that should be somewhere between 3.5 and 4 hours of riding. That will do nicely. I gotta work off the Thai food that I overstuffed myself with tonight.

In other news I have a new frame on the horizon. Yes, another one, somewhere around number 34 or 35 in the past 15 years (seriously). But this one will be especially special. You may ask how can this one be much more special than some of the fabulous bikes that I have owned. Is it going to be made out of some unobtanium material? Nope. Is it going to be the lightest thing I have owned? Nope. Not the heaviest either. Yes, it should be very easy on the eyes though if things work out. But the specialness is going to come from the fact that I am going to have a small hand in building it.

Neil is a retired Boeing engineer and he also likes to slum it with us in the shop for fun. He went to UBI some years ago and has lots of experience building and fabricating things much more difficult than bike frames. Yet, building bike frames is what he is going to start doing. His plan is to build about one a month. The first few are for members of his family. I am number 6 on the list. That puts me around the beginning of 2009. I believe that pretty much everything so far that he is going to build will be made steel and lugged. That is where I come in. He is going to do a drawing for me and then we will know the angles that the lugs need to be. At which point I am going to order some stainless lugs. I will be doing some customization of the lugs to personalize them a bit. That is the risky part. If they don't turn out I can order more, no big deal. But dang, I am really looking forward to this. I believe that within a couple of weeks I should be able to start playing with the lugs. We have a Dremel tool at the shop and I hope to be able to freehand some alterations to the lugs. I have done some stuff like this before long ago with a Dremel tool and hopefully it will turn out well. If not, there are back up lugs that I can get easily. Excited, yes I am very excited. I spend much of my spare time looking for lugs and figuring out what tubes I cam going to use. These are great problems to have. This is going to be fun.