I haven't made it in to my workspace in nearly two weeks.

I've been focusing on trying to figure out how to use a video editing program for my cargo bike project on Kickstarter, working to get up some money for my rent, and finally creating some artwork again.

I'd meant to be back in today, but it didn't happen this morning.

The next thing I'm going to be working on is a set of frame welding jigs for the next run of prototype cargo bikes.

Drawings for this design Do exist, and will be posted as soon as I can get a scanner that actually works.

The design uses wooden blocks drilled with hole saws to the tubing diameter desired, then cut into halves, with the bottom halves laid out in the shape we want on a reinforced sheet of plywood, with the top halves screwed down to hold the tubes in place.

This is the roughest outline, but the rest just builds on and refines that basic idea.

I chose wood for welding jigs for its ease of use and ready availability.

The danger of fire is minimized with two different coatings. The first is a paint with actual aluminum flakes suspended in its matrix, brushed thickly onto the whole thing.

The second coating will be spray-on high-temperature grill or engine paint.

These measures coupled with designing the jigs so that the actual joints to be welded maintain distance from the surfaces of the jig itself.

Construction has already begun, but will resume this week.

I haven't had regular online access in a while, so it's difficult to fit everything in when I do go online.
Besides putting together a video, I've been doing a couple of small projects in the shop.
I've been helping a couple of different people with some small fabrication projects, a couple of front racks. 
The one I just finished was a rush job for someone who needed to leave town 
within a few days.
We just met a couple of times in the shop, and just Did the project. The person acted as a helper, and the whole build took a total of about ten hours.
It's a little crooked, but it went solidly together, and the person was happy with it.


The other one was a lot more carefully planned out, as this project has no real time limit.
The first thing I had this person do was send me some pictures of units similar to what he wanted, then we met up in the shop and

I had him draw a template of the rack as he envisioned it, we checked it for fit with a bike similar in size to the one he intended to put it on.


Then we selected some materials, and measured them out against our template to make sure we had enough to do the job, and marked off sections of the material to match up with the sections of the rack, and finally, cut the pieces out.


The next part of this build is fleshing out the template and turning it into a welding jig that I can set the parts into in order to hold them in a rigid alignment while I weld.



This is where we're going to pick up the next time we meet for a work session. 


I can't really say I prefer one of these approaches to fabrication over the other. I really, really like getting into a project of stages, and watching it evolve through the various steps. 
When I was a kid, I used to save the instruction sheets from my plastic model car and plane kits, and just study them, just observe the way the images went together, and look for any kind of ways the images were different in any of the other languages the instructions were printed in. There never were, it was always the same set of images, with different words or symbols depending on the country.
The Images told the story in a way that Bridged the language gap. I thought that was Profound.
I liked to critique the way the images went together themselves and study it against the parts to judge how clearly and understandably it was laid out
I wanted to be the person who made those precise technical drawings...


But I also know what it's like to have an idea burning in your head that you can't quite fully see, but it's yelling at you that these particular pieces in front of you Should be able to go together in This way... If only That part were removed... And it's Right  There in front of me and I can either stop and hunt down the tools to Document what I'm thinking with, or I can just DO it, and see if it works... and whether it does or doesn't, I kind of get pulled into a trance where I just move about in the shop looking at things, considering and rejecting everything I see almost unconsciously until I find the next part, and so on and so on,
until hours have gone by and I'm either Done or Exhausted.


And some of my best work comes our of working that way.
So I don't know. I think it needs to be a balance between the two approaches, which is not saying anything that hasn't been said before,
But sometimes I need to remind myself of these things.

My history with bicycles...

Okay this is Naron's Build Blog, and normally this blog is going to be reserved for updates on what I'm doing in the workshop, and what projects I'm working on. I'll try to update it fairly often, but I'm not making any promises. For this first one, since it's about bikes, I've decided to furnish a little history about myself and my relationship with the the Bike.

I've been involved with bicycles and bike repair since 1992, when I 

started working for a company in Maryland called the Bikemobile. The bike shop was a warehouse, and used two converted delivery vans to go to people's houses. 

I got into a vehicle accident in a company truck (not a shop van) on my first day of work.

So, I spent all my time in the warehouse support facility, mostly doing bike assembly

The very first thing I learned about modern bicycles was how to properly assemble and tune brand new and slightly used ones in a shop environment.

Eventually, though, a guy gets Bored with a job that cannot ever offer any advancement. (The insurance company decreed that I never get behind the wheel of a company vehicle again). 

One day I found a cycling industry magazine in the office, and read an article about bike messengers. The very next day I called around downtown to every messenger company in the phone book.

I had by this time had the boss essentially push a bicycle on me to eliminate my excuse for lateness, the bus. I rode the 2 or so miles to work and back every day, and felt myself becoming visibly stronger and faster over the months I did it. I'd been taking detours and long ways just for the feeling of it for a while. I was ready.

About a month later I got a call and within a week quit my job.

became a bike messenger.

That took up the next six or so years of my life, working for various companies in Baltimore and DC.

I started doing my own repairs and mechanical work to save money, and deal with the constant theft of my bicycles, and quickly began building my own bikes out of whatever cheap parts I could find.

I used to cruise the alleys of the City in my spare time and drag home old discarded bikes and parts.

After about 1995, everywhere I lived ended up having a pile of bikes and parts somewhere, which would eventually grow to take over whatever space it was confined in.

This is how most volunteer bike shops start in the first place, I was that close to starting one myself, but had never seen one and hadn't gotten the idea.

I was also working alone, and basically just trying to maintain my own mobility. 

In '97 I started getting involved with activism and travelling. I did a lot of long distance touring carrying fairly heavy Weight, and, when I was in town, operating as a volunteer courier, and resource gatherer for an organization called the Environmental Crisis Center, in Baltimore City.

They fed and advocated for the city's homeless on a shoestring budget. and I handled much of their pickup and delivery on a mountain bike outfitted to carry weight.

In 2002 I came to Missoula and met Bob Giordano and Free Cycles Missoula.

As I became more involved there, I encountered the vehicle that inspired me to build this cargo bicycle:

I built this in about 2005, and it's been in use since then. 

It's served me well, and lasted a long time under rough conditions without ever failing catastrophically.

 It's undergone a recent overhaul, too:

It's still in the process. There's more I want to do with this design so it'll appear here a Lot.

I taught myself how to weld on this project, but have since gone to school for it and learned far more about the process. For the past three years I was in Wilmington, Delaware helping Family, and while I was there i attended a 630- hour structural welding course offered by the State of Delaware at the Delaware Skills Center. I was trained and certified and Found a Job, all for absolutely Free.

While I was there I also volunteered at the local community bike shop, the Urban Bike Project. I worked to set a a bike stripping production system of the sort necessary to do projects like the cargo bike, but space constraints came to bear again, and I was forced to abandon the project at that time.

So, I've returned to Missoula, reconnected with Free Cycles, and resumed the work Here, where it Began.

I'd eventually like to form a nonprofit organization of my own, for the purpose of teaching people the skills I learned for free myself, in the area of welding and metalworking,

but for now I have a Residency Position in the Pedal technology Warehouse here at Free Cycles Missoula,  Until the end of september.

That's pretty much where I am right now.