It has been a while since I have made a post to the blog. My recovery time from this years NAHBS has been very long for me. The time leading up to it, the travel and jet lag, the stress and after show politics etc… Getting back into the swing of things has been difficult too. The show was great and as busy as a show can be and we met a lot of good people and had many customers come by to say hello. Portland was a wonderful host city and I was able to visit with some old friends too. Even the warm rain was nice…compared to the cold rain and or snow here in New England. When I got back to snow and then 35 degree rain I was not to motivated to ride to work. My shop is having some flooding problems and the powder coat room had water standing in it. It made a mess of things. I am looking forward to Spring, but not the Spring melt down [and flooding] I had a lot of maintenance to so in the shop after all the many consecutive days at the shop over the last months. We had another snow storm on Friday and I spent the night in the shop, stayed up late making tools and blasting Chemical Brothers all night. Someday I will find some shop space where I can listen to my music loud [during the day] rather than having to work late at night. My upstairs neighbors can not deal with it. I have been motivated to fix a few tools and make a few new ones that I have been doing with out or need repairing. My main tool to work on was my fork alignment table. The clamp handle had stripped out a few times and I have been doing patches to keep it going and the blocks were no longer holding the steerers well. I completely rebuilt it with many improvements. Next was a new fork tacking fixture. My old one did work [and I gave it to Marty], but I am too nice of a shop to not have a quality tacking fixture. I used to have an Anvil fixture which was nice, but sold it to make room for powder coating equipment and I felt I should make my own. I also made some wheel check tools. These are used for alignment and mimics a wheel. I am working on a threadless stem fixture now [almost done]. It is an add on to my old quill stem fixture. After that I will get back to work on Mark H’s road frame, which is welded up. I rode into work today, but it took me a long time to get out the door. It was 12 degrees at 7am. I waited a long time and checked email at home before heading out around 10am it was 32 degrees or so. I had a nice sunny ride, but the traffic was not real friendly and way to fast…all well to bad for them.
