Saturday, February 28, 2009

New-to-me LFB


Mark Knokey's Elephant. I think there are only two of these CX bikes in existence.

I'm making up a new acronym. Remember, you saw it here first: LFB. That's your friendly, Local Frame Builder. My normal LFB, Hairy Gary, is busy or something. He's not returning calls right now. He may be hunting or visiting his family in the mid-west.

I've heard of the local guy that built the Elephant bikes at one time and I've admired Jake McBurns' Elephant CX bike many a time. Anyway, I talked to John at REI about figuring out who could do the RB-1 work for me. He told me to try Dave at 2 Wheel. I talked to Dave, who said that his torch/shop room got turned into a baby room, so he hooked me up with Glen, of Elephant fame.


Liza's Fuji fork


Glen is close -- like 2 miles away. I took the RB-1 over there today and the forks off of Liza's bike. She's going to run v-brakes up front on the new Fuji configuration. I also asked him to braze on some barrels according to the Alex-standard front rack mounting points. He was done with Liza's forks in about 2 hours. The RB-1 will take a bit more time. That will be about a week, since I blew him out of canti posts.

He's made bikes for Serotta and Bontrager back when Bontrager had his own shop, so he knows what he's doing. He mentioned TIG'ing the cracked bottom bracket from the inside, to fill the crack, then brazing on the outside. I wish I would've asked more questions on that to understand it better. I'll get the full story when I pick it up.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful bike, that Elephant. Elephants should run in herds.

Hey John, since you're in contact with so many local bike surgeons, is it crazy to have someone cut and paste horizontal dropouts on my Atlantis? Would that be like Angelina Jolie getting plastic surgery?

Nate

John Speare said...

As far as I understand it, that would be a pretty trivial fix for a LFB. As I'm sure you know -- go with the Campy 1010s.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, actually I wouldn't know, but those campies look like the dropouts on my Surly and I really like them.

In case you see this--I think I'm missing the ride today so don't wait if I'm not there. Moving rather slowly this grey morning.

N

RJ said...

HEY! Have I seen that Elephant at Inland Series CX races?

I think I remember admiring it!