Ten years – part 5.
2006.
2006 was a good year.
One of the things that happened was that many one-time Kirk owners got in line for a 2nd or 3rd or even 4th bike. Nothing makes you feeling like you are doing a good job more than repeat business. I even had a few people get in line for the first bike and enjoy the process so much that while the first bike was still off at Joe Bell’s getting painted they got in line for a second. It’s cool that so many enjoy the process so much that they want to go through it again. To be frank framebuilding isn’t exactly curing cancer or feeding the hungry but making someone happy with one’s work feels very damn good. I still do a good number of bikes every year for existing customers and it’s always a pleasure to work with an owner a second time.
I put my first S&S couplers in a Kirk this year. I’d worked with them before but this was the first time in a bike with my name on the downtube. I very much like the S&S couplers and think the design is second to none. Solid, sturdy and free of noise and flex makes them just disappear in the bike.
S&S couplers.
Huge travel bike with couplers.
BB and coupler.
Looking back I see that over time the brand and product had developed its own look. The bikes started to look like ‘Kirks’. I can see how the choice of color and proportion influenced what the next customer wanted and so on and so forth. I don’t know that I would have been able write out the details that made a bike look like a Kirk but I knew them when I saw them. Bright primary colors and bold accents……….lots of solids and pin stripes and little in the way of fluff or extra adornment. I see now that my personal taste of simple colors and mature and refined shapes was coming through.
Candy blue and light blue on fillets.
Personal bike 2006.
Candy red over gray.
One place a framebuilder can express themselves through shape is with sidetack seat stays caps. I make my own hollow caps from scratch and never use solid prefabbed stay plugs that are cast into a fixed shape. This makes them as light and strong as possible but also means that the shape of the cap itself needs to be carved by hand. It is very tough to come up with your own trademark shape and not just copy someone else………..realistically there are only so many functional shapes one can use and still have it look unique. At some point I was shaping some caps and could see what seemed to be a new shape speaking out to me through the metal — corny I know, but true. It took a few times to get the shape just how I wanted but now I think it’s recognizable as a Kirk shape. One of the reasons it is shaped the way it is is so that there is enough cap top wrap around on top of the seat lug and cross over the top a bit. When the two caps line up this way and point across the top of the seat lugs toward one another it looks just right to my eye. It also performs an important function — the extended cap is designed to wrap over the top of the lug to give that much more surface area for the stay to attach and makes for a super strong and stiff joint that will last a life time. I’d seen too many failures of classic side tack stays where they meet the seat lug in my retail days and knew I wanted to prevent that. To this day I’ve not had a single failure. And………….I really like the way they look.
Side tack caps.
Cross bike with sidetack caps.
Great Green.
Late in 2006 I decided I would be going to my first NAHBS (North American Handmade Bike Show) the next spring in San Jose. Lead times being what they are the bikes for that first show needed to be build in the fall of 2006. Carl and Loretta Strong and I would be driving out together and we needed to be able to fit EVERYTHING for both brands into Carl’s truck so some serious planning was in order. It was very exciting to be building bikes, picking paint schemes and designing the fixtures with Carl that we would use in our booths. Carl was great to work with as always and the stuff worked great in the end…………but I’m getting ahead of myself as that it really a story for 2007.
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I’ve loved the look of wrap over stays since buying my first Gazelle shortly after getting back into cycling. Your beautiful execution of the look really makes me want to get into line for a second one just so I can have a terraplane and a wrapover stay Kirk. I suspect it’ll only be a matter of time, but for now I’ll just keep enjoying the terraplane and admiring photos of the wrapovers. 🙂
For me, the side tack seat stays are one of the signature design elements of a Kirk. I take a quick glance at the seat cluster almost every time I ride my bike. I always point out the cluster to someone looking over my Kirk. The side tack stays are truly a work of art. Oh yeah, the bike as a whole is great too!