Ten Years – part 4.

2005

2005 was a bit like 2004 in that it was a year of maintaining and building momentum. Business was going well and things had become more efficient with repetition, practice and the refining of my shop methods. Most of the changes I made were pretty small but in the end added up to saving big time in the shop and at the desk. Saving time without cutting any corners can be a real challenge but it was worth it to keep customers happy and the queue as short as possible……….I really didn’t want my job to slip from building bikes to managing a queue. So to this end making things as efficient as possible was important to me.

I’m pretty sure that 2005 was the first year that we offered a yearly calendar made up of favorite photos from the previous year. What should have been a small amount of work was, for some reason, a huge amount of work and time and after a few years we stopped doing it. I toy with doing it again and maybe we’ll be able to carve out some time and make it happen. One thing that strikes me looking back at some of the photos was the quality of them……….not that good really. I suppose I will think the same thing about the photos I’m taking now when I look back on them eight years hence. Or at least I hope I get better over time. We’ll see.

We hosted our first open house event in 2005. I’m a big user and supporter of the then ‘Serotta Forum’ (now ‘Paceline’ – http://forums.thepaceline.net/) and the online group had had a few real life gatherings over time and Karin and I decided to host one here. We had no idea what to expect in terms of attendance but we got about 35 people overall and a fine time was had by all. We had 3 days of riding and good food and we enjoyed sharing Bozeman with the folks who came from so far away. In retrospect I wish the rides were a bit more challenging……….I erred on the side of caution with concern about how travel and altitude would affect riders and I think I took it a step too far. Live and learn I guess. The rides at this year’s open house will be more challenging and fun.

What floored me about the get together was how far folks came to be with others they knew only online before hand. We had riders come from as far away as Miami (a very long way!) and nearly every corner of the country. It was very cool that the Internet, which so many thought might keep us apart, brought us all together……..I like that it works this way.

One trend that really took hold was that so many of the bikes went out the door with the then still new Terraplane seat stays. I think a good 40 % of the bikes going out the door were built with the curved Terraplane stays. This was both good and bad to be honest. The good part is that the riders loved them and the way they rode…………the bad was that I needed to design a less time consuming way to bend the stays to the specific shape that would best suit the rider. Each set was bent as a pair that was unique to the rider (they still are) and that was a good thing but it took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to bend a set. The technique I’d come up with worked fine for prototypes but not for production even at a very low level. Late in the year something had to give and I went back to the drawing board and came up with a much quicker way to get the same exact results and much time and swearing was saved. I still use this same method today and get very good results with it and I still send out nearly 50% of my work with the Terraplane stays. I’m very happy about that.

Thanks as always for reading.

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One response to “Ten Years – part 4.”

1. Steve P says:

   May 14, 2013 at 2:05 am

   Liking this series.

   Liking my Terraplane Kirk too.