Hello form Indy....

Hey Two Spoke, it's nice to find you.

I've been riding bicycle of one sort or another since I was four years old and began building my own since there before there was bmx. At nine years old I lived in the canyons in San Diego and was lucky enough to have a neighbor that was willing to help me to modify a Schwinn stingray to work better on the trails and fireroads in the area. Later I lived in lived in Mission Viejo and I built 24" Junior Varsity to use primarily off-road in the surrounding canyons and to deliver newspapers to homes in the foothills. The newspaper routes allowed me to buy a motorcycle, that allowed me to add several more routes until the police objected to a 13 year old operating a motor vehicle on public roads.....

Year later my freinds were buying some of the early cheap (read heavy) mountain bikes while I was spreading the rear triangles of old Peugots and Motobecanes using hand cut pieces of lumber and the garage floor as an alignment table. I got an early Stumpjumper fork that I modified (since the forks were always the first part I would bend), I built my own wheels, and then I had a local bike shop braze on mounts for a cheap set of Diacompe cantilever brakes. After a couple of years I ended up getting a job as a framebuilder working for Santana Tandems and over the next eight years I built a dozen or so custom bikes at night while building production tandems by day.

For the past fifteen years I have worked as a network technician and toyed with the idea of putting together a small custom frame shop at some point, but computer pay better. I still build my own bikes but I leave the framebuilding to others, and I still ride daily (I haven't owned a car since 2002). I ride road bikes, mountain bikes, fixed gear and single-speeds, and I generally commute on a heavily-modified Fisher Opie or a Salsa Campion.

Cycling is not a pasttime for me, it is a lifestyle and a passion. My riding partner is often my Haliquinn macaw "Apache" who rides on my shoulder (we have been mountain biking all over the country) and we currently reside in a rural area outside of Indianapolis. Although I work with computers daily, I haven't really been too interested in Intenet forums or blogs until lately. I'm glad to have found this one.