Sweetpea Bicycles

I got up, let the dog out, and jumped into the shower. No sooner had I pulled on my favorite pair of shop pants and an old t shirt, than a voicemail appeared blinking on my telephone. I hadn’t had my coffee, and already I was missing calls. It was Bicycling Magazine. They wanted to ask me a few questions to go along with the photos they took a couple of weeks back. Where is that coffee? Are we really out of sugar?

I returned the call, left a voicemail, and drank some coffee while checking my emails. A customer had a few questions about her bike design which presented some interesting possibilities and a couple of conversations later, we were looking at an intriguing and innovative solution. The computer, which was going to be packed into the backpack to head down to the shop, was now plugged into the wall while I plugged my ideas into BikeCAD Pro to try them out.

This design would be pretty new, so I got on the phone to review some of finer points and a few calls later I found myself talking to Grant Petersen. He asked me a couple of questions to gauge what he was dealing with, and then he asked point blank if I was mostly using carbon (he said “plastic”) forks on my bikes. I said I’ve used them on two bikes. “Well, then you are only going to hell twice.” I hoped he wasn’t the final authority on that, so we moved on to bottom bracket drops for 650B bikes and he offered his brake reach-centric fork designing method.

Back in the kitchen, the dog needed a treat. I administered a frozen treat-stuffed kong, and got back to BikeCAD. Since I was already at the computer, I started digging into some methods of making some of the technical decisions easier on my customers. A little while later, I was neck deep into Basecamp and had enlisted a couple of customers to be guinea pigs.

Uploading pictures of cable routing choices for mixte frames, I got the call I had been waiting for. Bicycling Magazine had questions for Sweetpea. Sweetpea was on her second cup of coffee and was ready for a lively interview. Talking about bikes and why women deserve the best gets me pretty stoked. It gets me thinking about all the really fantastic women who are in line for a Sweetpea, and reminds me just how lucky I am to be doing this.

After the interview I called Michael Sylvester, my bicycle fitting mentor to check in about some of our upcoming Sweetpea fittings. We went over some outstanding decisions and decided to gather some information and meet back for a bike design jam session. Next thing I knew his 4 o’clock appointment was calling. Really? Was it that late? I hadn’t even looked into the lathe purchase I am thinking of making for my new shop, let alone touched metal all day. I spent the next chunk of my afternoon coordinating a shop visit to look at some machinery and getting an education in the benefits of large spindle bore diameters on metal lathes. (To sum it up once and for all, bigger is better.)

By the time Austin came home and the puppy was roused from her slumber beneath the kitchen table, I had packed in a full day and barely left the kitchen. When you come home brushing metal shavings off your sleeves and wiping oil smudges off your forehead, you know that you’ve been making something. On days like this, work is a bit less tangible. Important work? Yes. But it doesn’t quite feel real unless something is getting bent, chopped, brazed or filed. Its days like this where I have to remind myself that if its a small failure not to touch metal, then there are times when you just have to fail harder.