Ten Years – part 9.

2010

When I first sat to make notes about what had happened during any given year for this series I got to 2010 and had trouble remembering anything significant. Did I do nothing in 2010? No — it turns out a good number of things got done and I just couldn’t remember them. Maybe I’m getting old.

One of the more significant changes in 2010 was also one of the bigger changes in the history of the company. When I started the company I had some artwork in mind for the logos and it was an adaptation of some logos I’d done when making custom skateboards when I was a kid. I tweaked them to work on frame tubes and was all set. I got the decals printed and they went out on the bikes and the reaction was decidedly mixed. Now I know there is no way to please everyone, and it’s a fool’s errand to even try, but it felt like the artwork might have been a dud.

O course the original artwork was very different and not at all the normal “first name-last name” in a stock font deal that is pretty common and it took some time for folks to get used to it. After a while many said they really liked the artwork. At the same time many did not and I took more than a few calls from people who wanted to know if they could buy a bike with different logos, as they really disliked what I had. This of course was a backhanded complement — they liked my bikes enough want to buy one but hated the artwork so much that they wouldn’t pull the trigger. I wanted to stay true to the design and brand I was developing and not change the artwork on a whim but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me some.

At some point I got a note from a fellow framebuilder named Jim Kish and he wasn’t pleased that my logos looked so much like his. I’d never seen his artwork before and of course when he pointed them out to me and he was right……….they were similar in concept — four letters, starting with a ‘K’, the letters all in circles and a line through them. But when push came to shove I didn’t feel that anyone would confuse my work for that of Mr. Kish so I decided to keep using them…….but it nagged at me a bit. In time I wanted a change in artwork and Karin and I started working on it. It took some time but we came up with a simple and clean design that I felt had the look I was going for — modern, contemporary, sparse, and with a strong negative space component.

So we held our breath and released the new artwork. Most of the response was very positive, some less so. The funny thing to me was that some said they wanted the old logo! Funny to me because so many said they hated the old logo. Like I said……..can’t please everyone. The most important thing is that you please yourself and hope that others agree.

We launched the new artwork at the NAHBS event in Richmond, Virginia and it went very well. We did have few folks walk right by our booth while looking for us, as the banner didn’t have the logo they expected.

One of the framesets I bought to NAHBS Richmond had no logos at all…..in fact it had no paint. I brought a raw fillet brazed frame to show off fillets sans paint. Fillets are funny………..once they are painted it can be very tough to tell if the fillet work is clean or if the painter was good with bondo. I can tell you I’ve seen some epically bad fillets covered with bondo and painted up nice and they look 95% the same as good clean fillets. I suppose one could argue that it doesn’t matter then — that bad fillets with good paint to cover them is just fine. But I just can’t do it so I thought I’d bring a frameset with my best fillets in the raw. I got two fun rewards for doing this. The first was I won my second “Best Fillet” award at the show. The second was much more private. I had a very well known builder, who also builds with fillets, walk into my booth and walk with purpose straight up to the fillet bike. I was busy with someone at that moment and could only watch as a the builder walked up to my frameset, took a good look at the bottom bracket and head tube joints, developed a frustrated look, and said aloud to no one in particular — “FUCK!” It’s always nice to get compliments from your peers and I think that was one. I know paint is a big deal on bikes but I would really like to see shows like NAHBS encourage more work in the raw to really show the metal work.

Speaking of paint — JB and I tried something new for us in 2010 — matte paint. I chose a light putty gray and had JB cover it with a mate clear and I loved it. It’s like a light magnet — so cool. It does a very good job of showing off the metal work too, which surprised me a bit. One of my personal bikes is matte (fillet cross with discs) and my road bike is about to become matte. I like matte I guess.

This was also the year that I prototyped a new version of the JKS. In time I named it the JKS X with X standing for the ‘XL’ sized tubes it uses. The larger tubes give a very responsive ride and work very well for bigger guys or folks looking for a ‘spring classics’ type bike that can be hammered over whatever is in front of you. I built the one-off prototype and left it unpainted for the entire season and frankly abused it on the worst stuff I could find to ride on……….crappy pavement, steep hills, washboard gravel…..etc. I loved it and it held up to the abuse without a single issue. It held up so well in fact that I painted it and brought it to NAHBS the next year and no one would ever have suspected it was beat on the way it was. It’s still my everyday bike and has been used as a test mule for various ideas over the past few years. More about this later. I think for me……….at 6’4” and 180 pounds……………it’s the best road bike I’ve ever ridden.

Thanks for looking,

Dave

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