Back again.

Well, blog, it has been a long time. More than a year. It has been a very rough year, personally and for a lot of people around the world. I lost a friend unexpectedly and had my partner of 6 years leave me in quick succession just after I had taken on a new job with greater responsibility, and it has been a slow burn. As a result, I have not been as productive in the workshop as I had hoped when last we chatted. However, I do have some good results. Karen's mixte came out awesome after some issues with the powder coating. I took on a hardtail MTB project for a friend of mine in Baltimore, and I am pretty happy with the results. Since last we spoke, I rode many miles of single and double track in Baja, and will be returning in January 2018. My next project is a bike packing 29x3.0 frameset that will adapt well to a mid-travel fork when I just want to fuck around, but can take a rigid fork and load without issue when I need to go ride bikes in the wilderness for a while. My 29er that I built way back in 2013 rode really well, but did break 3 times while I was on expedition. Twice I fixed it en route, but there comes a point when you realize that a bike you built to be fun and take off of jumps and rocks just isn't meant to strap 10 liters of water, 3 days of food, and camping supplies to and then jump off of rocks. I tried, folks. I will try to be better about keeping this up to date in the weeks to come.