I went dirt jumping at the beginning of the Golden Week.

The weather was nice and it was warm, one of the first t-shirt days for me this year.

But I tried something unnecessarily tech and ended up with a sore leg. I started to manual before the jump and take off with just the back wheel, then a forward pitch moment in the air landed me overly nosedived. It happens, I know, so I jumped over the handlebar onto the ground as usual. But the spot I landed was already the launch of the next jump, so I just landed flat, no way to roll around and let go of the impact. My already sore right ankle and knee called it the day, and the pain was just as bad as when I snapped the PCL, sending me straight to the couch to stay in for a few days.

It was bad enough to force me to miss the two-year anniversary of Boogaloo, my bike friend’s bar. But after a few days of doing nothing much but icing and also going to Hoheikyo Spa, it finally felt better to my relief. I had just got the fork replaced, so injuries at this point are especially not welcome.

I had got this fork, used but nice;

Overhauled it, took off unneeded guts;

Cut and ground it;

I also got super low head bolts at the tips. This way, rail grinds cannot break the bolts. The fork is good and alive till the ends wear out.

The damping adjustment on the right leg will require taking off this bolt, but hey, you won’t touch it often once you set it up. No problem. There is way less sealing capability than the original bolts, but it’s not that bad, I filed down the end surface flat enough to prevent major leakage.

Let’s take a look at the connection between the frame and the fork. The current setup is the only loose ball integrated system in the world that I created by brazing on the lower cup, to which I’d like to add a final touch. The frame is put upside down in the pic, so the big cup on top is the lower cup, and the other is the upper, a Chris King cup with sketchy DIY paint on it.

This is a rather traditional tuning method sometimes called “unsealed bearing packing.” You take off the balls from the retainer pictured in the bottom right corner, and put in more balls than there originally were. It is said to offer more durability due to the load distributed onto more balls. In this case, I had to solve the rubbing of the retainer and the fork steerer tube. The cause could be the misalignment of cup and head tube, too much flex of the steerer, or bad design of the retainer. But I guess all of those are happening, so no further investigation, just solution. By the way, this loose ball integrated system really doesn’t offer any special merits, so it won’t be available on production frames.

Now two weeks later.

Eh?

Seriously?

Umm, I’m open to fork sponsorship offers. I’m confident about fracture testing skills.

Hello this is Masaki, grumpy due to the lack of bike riding. Someone told me I had been touchy recently. “I’m not,” I shouted back. I’m sorry.

Related to what I recently wrote about a YouTube video not available “in the country you live in,” I’ve got to dis someone one more time.

Adele, the new phenomenon from England. She’s a good singer, and the song is great too. Well, I don’t have to prove it because the whole world already has.

Problem is, the translated lyrics. What the hell?

Not about translation style issue like direct or more poetic manner to employ, there just are a whole bunch of wrong or awkward translations. Job well done at such a level as when it was contracted out to a friend on a voluntary basis, or for a pint of beer to translate this. What’s even more awestriking is the fact that this is the official video from Adele’s Japanese distributor.

I believe it is vital in the music import business to provide well translated lyrics. Principally because it helps a great deal in the understanding of the world that the artist creates. Besides, everything else is available online anyway, like the CD, or other form of sound file, or the biography of the artist.

So this distributor doesn’t commit to it to serve the Japanese customers by helping them understand the song, while, on the other hand, talking to YouTube like a boss wielding the distribution rights so they can block other Adele videos from Japanese viewers? And there of course is the typical massive rip-off on each Japanese version CD they sell, huh?

They say the business climate is getting tougher for movie and music industries based on physical media. Well, if this is the level of their best effort, then they are simply not needed.

Speaking of which, this movie distributor is on my shitlist too. It’s a shame cause it is a good movie, wrong characters in the introduction. If you seriously can’t spell with no error in Japanese, it’s time for you to retire the physical media business.

I thought the internet has lowered the walls separating the world and shallowed the ocean dividing the world. Until recently.

“This clip is not available in the country you live in.”

This is the first time in a while I get discriminated based on the region. How exciting. The last time was…yes, about three years ago, when I was a Facebook fan of a Canadian rock band. I got a link in a message like “Check out our recent live show,” then clicked and saw the same screen. Of course, the rudeness made me sad and angry enough to quit being their Facebook fan.

If there is an inherent copyright problem in the material, then the clip shouldn’t have been uploaded on YouTube, or Niconico Douga, or whatever site. But this incident seems to have different reasons.

We at North Shore Products make films as well, so we have our share of philosophy about copyrights. However, we have little sympathy for corporate bodies only remotely related to actual artists who are skimming the cream off someone else’s creation. I don’t know who it is in this case, but would guess it’s either JASRAC or some Japanese record company. If you have ever talked to them about music licensing fees for a DVD, for instance, you know that they both are greedy copyright mafias.

“Music has no border,” said somebody whose name I forgot. In reality, it can’t be farther from the truth. In the time when industrial structures, labor force, culture and even national spots in Olympic games have become borderless, what on earth are they doing? The same goes with so many things, including bike distributorship as well. In the world where anything can be parallel imported, local distributorship is no longer a major right you can be so proud of. It just means nothing unless you think about the way to provide the best experience to customers utilizing it.

I haven’t been able to master the trick I set as my goal for March. Not a good situation, even though it has been snowing furiously from late March to like two days ago. There are some other reasons, breakage and wreckage being the leading ones.

Let’s start with, um, the big stuff. The bike frame.

Gorgeous cracks growing there, meaning the tubes will snap within a few hours of riding. What should I do? Let’s fix it.

Though not a professional level at all, I’ve been messing with welding recently. This is a perfect opportunity, as I’m too scared to do this on somebody else’s bike.

Spark.

Oh…

Mmm let’s hope reinforcement works as magical cosmetic…

Now the frame material is hybrid, including the stainless steel washer used as reinforcement. I ran out of welding sticks, so tried a broken drill bit as well. One more hole in the frame, one less drill shaft on this planet. Now it’s an official knowledge that welding sticks are made in that specific way for reasons. Besides, you really shouldn’t build a bike frame by stick welding.

My awesome rig. Little cost on used car batteries my friend Occhi gave me, jumper cables I’ve had, and a good investment on the automatic mask, which turns dark reacting to the first spark. DIY is fun and you get to know something interesting even if the results are not best, but you need to be careful about safety. Well at least for me, cause I can be quite sketchy.

So I ride the Halloween-like bike. Not bad. No problem after a few days.

However, the appearance just called for a re-repair in the end.

Looking good! Got gussets, and even some painting job done to hide the filthy welding job. The welding stick was downsized from 2.0mm to 1.4mm, resulting in less holes. Later I heard that you can weld thin stuff better with the plus-ground, minus-stick setup, which I may try next time.

The reason that the original frame does not come with this kind of gusset is that it creates stress riser points on the seat stay tubes where they meet the gussets, resulting in quicker snapping. Then the reason that this is okay as a repair method is that it’s only meant to lengthen the product life a little extra bit. Roughly, the frame gained the life of a new frame with this kind of gusset design, which can be a few months for me.

And within that few months, I’m going to get a new prototype frame. The new one has more support for sideways forces by the chain stays, reducing a lot of stress applied on seat stays which causes problems like this.

So I was glad for a while, before my palm got wrecked. Bike riders are friends with calluses. Due to the contraction of skin as it grows into calluses, there sometimes appear cracks. When that happens at the foot of a finger, I sometimes have to cut open both ends of the crack to make it one united canyon all the way across. It means carving your live skin, it means some pain, but it’s better than having the problem longer.

Don’t click the thumbnail if you can’t take this kind of stuff.

For a few days there was pain, and more pain when I grab the handlebars. In the similar veins my jeans had holes and it was cold.

I still went out and practiced, then…

You too, Brutus?

It’s been a great fork. Originally a 160mm travel all-mountain one, converted by me to 100mm and used or abused in the street, including grinds down rails on fork ends. Bye bye sweetheart.

Luckily though, my great friend who hooked me up with Rock Shox is going to help me out once again about the fork. So these days, I’ve been jumping up, down and over fences with no bike, while also waiting for the snow to melt.