Don't get confused, this blog is still dead.
Strangely, it actually has more followers than when I used to post stuff. And of course it now gets far more Japanese porn comment spam than ever before... so that's a positive.
But you see, I just lost a hundred of my hard-earned on Brazil v Netherlands, so I needed some cheer... And then I saw the latest Fly vid... and it was perfect... and it's in Melbourne.
In fact, it was so perfect that it got me reminiscing about that classic Lotek mini vid. So here's a couple for old times sake:
Taste the Virtual Blood
You gotta say that Jimmy from Eject / Simple is stepping up his rendering game. That PC stem looked so real you could almost taste the blood and feel the holes where your teeth were as it snapped and you face-butted the concrete.
And this one... the little bit of machining on the body... the touch of rust on the bolts. You just want to save it and upload it straight to your steerer tube.
Anyway... damn fine looking stem is what I mean. You can read the interview with I did with Jimmy here and here, or you can head over to Simple for a couple more flix of the Eject v4 stem.
god natt.
Plastic Death Stem
Introducing...
New Simple Eject v4 PC stem
"After doing massive material research we came across this High Strength Plastic, with an incredibly high molecular mass. This allows us to make a very light, yet very strong stem without compromising on the durability. We have taken this stem through a lot of testing and abuse to see how it would hold up, and so far it's proved to last very well."Dropping In
Are cats still cool?
Anyway, here's mine dropping in on the backyard ramp:
Bhusta gets rad
stoked
Anyway, here's mine dropping in on the backyard ramp:
Bhusta gets rad
stoked
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That last post felt good. Cleansing. And it got me thinking.
Back when this blog actually existed as a blog - like, with updates and stuff - there was one thing that always shitted me. And that was visiting the Colony site. Being in Australia, I suppose I always felt some vague loyalty to Colony and though I didn't particularly rate them, I bit my tongue and hid behind my 75% positive content policy.
But I was there again today, and enough is enough:
1) Their logo is so fucking rubbish that I almost can't bear it. There is just so many bad things about it. There is the obvious things, like that it rips off the Gucci logo, does a shit job of it, and looks like it's been created by an 11 year old learning to use Illustrator. But there is also a subtle indescribable shitness to it, something that just makes you feel bad:
2) Every post on the site says "Yo yo!!" at the end of it. That also makes you feel bad.
3) The comments section of each page, makes me angry:
No Comments: OK, fair enough.
No comments yet: Of course there is not comments yet, cause there's no fucking comments.
RSS feed for the comments on this post. TrackBack URL: Would you like a feed of the comments that aren't allowed on this page? Maybe you'd like to leave a trackback that won't get left in the comments that don't exist?
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time: No fucking shit.
If I could just make one comment, I would suggest that someone spends the 60 seconds that it would probable take to remove all this bullshit.
Sorry kids, that was just so negative, but felt so right. Some stuff just can't stay bottled up.
Back when this blog actually existed as a blog - like, with updates and stuff - there was one thing that always shitted me. And that was visiting the Colony site. Being in Australia, I suppose I always felt some vague loyalty to Colony and though I didn't particularly rate them, I bit my tongue and hid behind my 75% positive content policy.
But I was there again today, and enough is enough:
1) Their logo is so fucking rubbish that I almost can't bear it. There is just so many bad things about it. There is the obvious things, like that it rips off the Gucci logo, does a shit job of it, and looks like it's been created by an 11 year old learning to use Illustrator. But there is also a subtle indescribable shitness to it, something that just makes you feel bad:
Out of the darkness a mysterious, bad looking logo appeared
2) Every post on the site says "Yo yo!!" at the end of it. That also makes you feel bad.
3) The comments section of each page, makes me angry:
No Comments: OK, fair enough.
No comments yet: Of course there is not comments yet, cause there's no fucking comments.
RSS feed for the comments on this post. TrackBack URL: Would you like a feed of the comments that aren't allowed on this page? Maybe you'd like to leave a trackback that won't get left in the comments that don't exist?
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time: No fucking shit.
If I could just make one comment, I would suggest that someone spends the 60 seconds that it would probable take to remove all this bullshit.
Sorry kids, that was just so negative, but felt so right. Some stuff just can't stay bottled up.
Guilt and Neglect... Honey
Last night I had a dream...
Actually, it was probably leaning more towards being a low level nightmare. I was being talked at by one of those guys who hang around in skateparks, on bikes, but with the sole purpose of honing their relentless and uninterruptable, talking-at-you skills. You probably know the dude.
Anyway, the light was fading and I was cornered and this uncontrollably verbal bmx bandit, he was really going for it. He was spitting all over me as he ranted with this mentally imbalanced, manically enthusiastic expression on his face. Wasting the valuable final minutes of my session as he repeated his crazed idea that the Fly not-pivotal seat post was the best bmx part ever created.
When I woke, I was confused. His views where controversial at best. What was all this about? Why had my sub-conscious conjured this impossibly annoying yet almost realistic character? Upon reflection, I decided that it was my inner self's effort to have me face up to the feelings of suppressed guilt and neglect that I've been carrying around with me.
Guilt: that I pretty much shut this blog down a few months ago in more of a fade away, than a burn up kind of way - I'd always thought that was a shitty way to go out. Guilty.
Neglect: of the unposted jpegs of new the Fly Bikes bits that are still hanging around in my inbox. Why had they not been either posted, or deleted? Neglect.
So it seems that the only way to exorcise this imaginary nightmare man talking blindly at me about bmx parts, is for me to. . . . . .
Talk blindly at you about bmx parts. At least this one last time. Sorry.
I couldn't actually tell you for certain, but I'm pretty sure that the last few months would have seen the standard shitload of new parts let loose via internet, stoking the fires of capitalism and exciting teenage males all over the western world to part with their parent's hard earned in the quest to define themselves by the parts they ride.
But I'm not going to sweet talk you with all that, I want to make you feel really special. I'm going to take you to my private place and show you the "things in my inbox".
Pretend like it's the 11th of November and you've never seen this lovely piece of framesmanship before:
Ooohhh... yeah... it's the Luna. And it's purple (or white).
Please don't complain that this is old news - I don't care - this isn't about you. I'm exorcising, and you just happen to be on the other end of the cable. If you're going to get all needy and naggy, you may as well put your pants back on and leave.
You don't need the specs. I don't have time and they're fucking everywhere, including here.
If you do like that kinda thing though, here's an illustration showing the features of Fly's 2010 frames. It is here because I like technical illustrations and it's a particularly fine example. Hats off to whoever at Fly draws that stuff:
Next: 24th of November and and you may recognize this sprocket:
Circulo by name, circulo by nature. All in all a very sprockety sprocket. They do always have good photos though, don't they darling? 2.2 oz.
5th of December now. The Pantera was the second bmx frame I ever owned. This is the Pantera V4, it's covered with investment castings, it's red, and if you click the pic, it's almost like it's real:
Yeah...
So...
That's it. Thanks. And all the best.
Actually, it was probably leaning more towards being a low level nightmare. I was being talked at by one of those guys who hang around in skateparks, on bikes, but with the sole purpose of honing their relentless and uninterruptable, talking-at-you skills. You probably know the dude.
Anyway, the light was fading and I was cornered and this uncontrollably verbal bmx bandit, he was really going for it. He was spitting all over me as he ranted with this mentally imbalanced, manically enthusiastic expression on his face. Wasting the valuable final minutes of my session as he repeated his crazed idea that the Fly not-pivotal seat post was the best bmx part ever created.
When I woke, I was confused. His views where controversial at best. What was all this about? Why had my sub-conscious conjured this impossibly annoying yet almost realistic character? Upon reflection, I decided that it was my inner self's effort to have me face up to the feelings of suppressed guilt and neglect that I've been carrying around with me.
Guilt: that I pretty much shut this blog down a few months ago in more of a fade away, than a burn up kind of way - I'd always thought that was a shitty way to go out. Guilty.
Neglect: of the unposted jpegs of new the Fly Bikes bits that are still hanging around in my inbox. Why had they not been either posted, or deleted? Neglect.
So it seems that the only way to exorcise this imaginary nightmare man talking blindly at me about bmx parts, is for me to. . . . . .
Talk blindly at you about bmx parts. At least this one last time. Sorry.
I couldn't actually tell you for certain, but I'm pretty sure that the last few months would have seen the standard shitload of new parts let loose via internet, stoking the fires of capitalism and exciting teenage males all over the western world to part with their parent's hard earned in the quest to define themselves by the parts they ride.
But I'm not going to sweet talk you with all that, I want to make you feel really special. I'm going to take you to my private place and show you the "things in my inbox".
Ooohhh... yeah... it's the Luna. And it's purple (or white).
Please don't complain that this is old news - I don't care - this isn't about you. I'm exorcising, and you just happen to be on the other end of the cable. If you're going to get all needy and naggy, you may as well put your pants back on and leave.
You don't need the specs. I don't have time and they're fucking everywhere, including here.
If you do like that kinda thing though, here's an illustration showing the features of Fly's 2010 frames. It is here because I like technical illustrations and it's a particularly fine example. Hats off to whoever at Fly draws that stuff:
Next: 24th of November and and you may recognize this sprocket:
Circulo by name, circulo by nature. All in all a very sprockety sprocket. They do always have good photos though, don't they darling? 2.2 oz.
5th of December now. The Pantera was the second bmx frame I ever owned. This is the Pantera V4, it's covered with investment castings, it's red, and if you click the pic, it's almost like it's real:
Yeah...
So...
That's it. Thanks. And all the best.
Can't See the Hammer for the Trees
OK, enough hammer, back on the horse:
Tree Bike Co are the legendary little guys of bmx. They only make new shit when it's better than the old shit, they don't advertise much so just rely on the quality of their stuff to sell itself, they don't do gimmicks, and they should be the heros of anyone that rides bmx and has ever laid hands on any lathe or some kind of rudimentary milling set up.
Their most recent bit of machinemanship is to be a stem they've done with the help of Super Rat Machine Works. At the risk of waving a red flag to the nothing-is-new-that-was-done-in-84 crowd, I'm saying that this stem features a new clamping system.
I can't tell you exactly how it works, but I can try to tell you exactly how I think it works. Will that do? I'd say the collar that goes around your fork steerer is slightly larger than the cavity that it sits in, so as the top and bottom pieces of the stem are tightened, the collar finds space by contracting in on itself and clamps your steerer in the process. Of course your bars are also clamped by the two bits of the stem body.
That was a shit description, but it's all I've got. Hopefully you get what I'm talking about, and hopefully what I'm talking about is what actually happens. Do you ever feel like you're wasting your time reading this? You could always go back and watch that MC Hammer clip in my last post.
Anyway, here's some pictures of the Stem With No Name and some captions from Sam Tree himself:
One stem. Three pieces. Four bolts. High Five!
He had some other captions for here, but the first one was better
I once had a hand in designing a stem.
It was shit.
Well... I didn't actually design one, I just made an almost entirely unresolved sketch. And although it may well have turned out to be shit if it was ever made, the shittiness that I'm refering to is that it attempts to solve a problem that I don't really even think really is a problem. You see, I had a friend who had an idea to design a stem that slotted onto your steerer so that your bars were all nice and straight. Of course people have been putting handlebars onto bikes for years and you don't often hear someone complaining that they just can't get their bars straight, but working on the principal that my hunches are very often wrong and just being generally keen to draw some bike stuff, I had a go and came up with this:
It's based around Superstar's Neutral fork which has an internally fluted steerer tube, but is probably too complicate to bother even trying to manufacture, especially when you consider that even 0.1mm slop in any of the fits would probably be amplified to a really noticeable amount of movement in the bars. My friend didn't like it and so together we came up with this:
That one might have been a little more realistic, and could have been done by machining a really slight groove down the sides of the steerer rather than the fluting that I sketched. But really you're probably just complicating things without really adding much other than the possibility that due to some slight error in jig set up or whatever, you'd end up making bars that locked on crooked to the steerer. That said one of the advantages of this idea is that the stem could come with two sets of wedges - with or without tabs - so it would also work without the slotted fork.
Anyway, whay am I posting all this? Well, apart from trying to make things a little more interesting, I'd been thinking that the Shola stem which was around at InterBike might be trying for something similar with what looks like little grub screws on the clamping collar:
And while we're talking stems, I may as well try to make up for some recent slackness by posting up the current incarnation of T1's Cyclops stem that was also around at InterBike. But that's it, I'm all outta stem news:
Tree Bike Co are the legendary little guys of bmx. They only make new shit when it's better than the old shit, they don't advertise much so just rely on the quality of their stuff to sell itself, they don't do gimmicks, and they should be the heros of anyone that rides bmx and has ever laid hands on any lathe or some kind of rudimentary milling set up.
Their most recent bit of machinemanship is to be a stem they've done with the help of Super Rat Machine Works. At the risk of waving a red flag to the nothing-is-new-that-was-done-in-84 crowd, I'm saying that this stem features a new clamping system.
I can't tell you exactly how it works, but I can try to tell you exactly how I think it works. Will that do? I'd say the collar that goes around your fork steerer is slightly larger than the cavity that it sits in, so as the top and bottom pieces of the stem are tightened, the collar finds space by contracting in on itself and clamps your steerer in the process. Of course your bars are also clamped by the two bits of the stem body.
That was a shit description, but it's all I've got. Hopefully you get what I'm talking about, and hopefully what I'm talking about is what actually happens. Do you ever feel like you're wasting your time reading this? You could always go back and watch that MC Hammer clip in my last post.
Anyway, here's some pictures of the Stem With No Name and some captions from Sam Tree himself:
One stem. Three pieces. Four bolts. High Five!
He had some other captions for here, but the first one was better
I once had a hand in designing a stem.
It was shit.
Well... I didn't actually design one, I just made an almost entirely unresolved sketch. And although it may well have turned out to be shit if it was ever made, the shittiness that I'm refering to is that it attempts to solve a problem that I don't really even think really is a problem. You see, I had a friend who had an idea to design a stem that slotted onto your steerer so that your bars were all nice and straight. Of course people have been putting handlebars onto bikes for years and you don't often hear someone complaining that they just can't get their bars straight, but working on the principal that my hunches are very often wrong and just being generally keen to draw some bike stuff, I had a go and came up with this:
It's based around Superstar's Neutral fork which has an internally fluted steerer tube, but is probably too complicate to bother even trying to manufacture, especially when you consider that even 0.1mm slop in any of the fits would probably be amplified to a really noticeable amount of movement in the bars. My friend didn't like it and so together we came up with this:
That one might have been a little more realistic, and could have been done by machining a really slight groove down the sides of the steerer rather than the fluting that I sketched. But really you're probably just complicating things without really adding much other than the possibility that due to some slight error in jig set up or whatever, you'd end up making bars that locked on crooked to the steerer. That said one of the advantages of this idea is that the stem could come with two sets of wedges - with or without tabs - so it would also work without the slotted fork.
Anyway, whay am I posting all this? Well, apart from trying to make things a little more interesting, I'd been thinking that the Shola stem which was around at InterBike might be trying for something similar with what looks like little grub screws on the clamping collar:
And while we're talking stems, I may as well try to make up for some recent slackness by posting up the current incarnation of T1's Cyclops stem that was also around at InterBike. But that's it, I'm all outta stem news:
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