Here is a little tool to hold bladed spokes from rotating while wheel building and truing. This one was custom made for Corsa Concepts and tightly fits the spokes that they use.

This is a 5C collet indexer on loan from my friend Brett, at Efficient Velo Tools. Collets are great for holding round stock when using a milling machine and this particular indexer can rotate the workpiece in 1 degree increments. Pretty helpful if you want to make a bolt head with six sides.

Who says that you can’t put a double Ursus kickstand on a Karate Monkey? All you need is some 1/4″ steel plate and a milling machine. The kickstand and the bottom mounting plate were both machined to interface with each other. The kickstand is rated for 100lbs. and I think the chainstays will buckle before this bracket fails!

My friend Jeff has a business restoring old bikes, often modernizing them as well. To install modern brakes on a old steel frame you usually need a concave washer shown in the picture to attach a rear brake to the seatstay bridge. That assumes you can use a recessed nut. otherwise your brake options are limited.

To get around this restriction I machined a small flanged sleeve that will get brazed into the frame instead. This will let the brake sit flush and allows for the proper use of a recessed brake nut. This simple fix will look great on the bike and allow modern components to be used on a vintage steel frame without compromise.

My downhill bike has an older Manitou Swinger coil shock which has both a top-out and a bottom-out ‘clunk’ due to a failed SPV. The SPV was Manitou’s attempt at a compression gate and I don’t think it ever worked very well. I hardly ride this bike anymore so I thought I play with customizing the damper. Any modification I made would be an improvement!

After removing the SPV, turning the shaft on the lathe, and making some new spacers,  I was able to replace the SPV with a shim stack, salvaged from a non-spv shock.

This got rid of the ‘clunks’ and now I can tune the compression circuit by altering the shims. There is a reason most motorcycle suspension uses simple shim stacks. They work great, are highly tune-able, and rarely fail. If Manitou had paid attention to this they would probably still be a player in the mountain bike market. Ironically, the SPV was licensed by Manitou from Progressive, which made mountain bike suspension briefly before going back to their core motorcycle products.

The moral of the story is that the best suspension is often the simplest.

Putting a Bionx battery on a Rans Recumbent is no easy task. The frame has limited mounting options so a custom adapter was in order. The adapter is angled so that the battery just clears the top tube as it is ejected from the mounting bracket. The Bionx bracket normally mounts to the water bottle bosses. In this case the adapter has recessed thru-holes to mount to the frame’s water bottle bosses. The Bionx bracket is then mounted offset from these holes directly to the adapter. For a customer with mobility issues this adapter was the difference between them being able to stay on two wheels or give up riding altogether.

A local fitter contacted me about making a custom cleat shim. This shim is contoured to the shape of the shoe, raised to address a leg length discrepancy, and also milled at a 1.6 degree angle to provide a varus/valgus correction. This one is made out of aluminum to keep the weight down, but it could have been made out of stainless steel to make it more durable. Even this alloy version will last longer than the plastic alternatives from Specialized, and only one shim is required instead of stacking a bunch of a the plastic type.

Over the holidays I picked up a Sheldon 10″ metal lathe. This lathe is from the late 1940′s and cuts both imperial and metric threads making it a great choice for bicycle parts. This particular model has an extra long bed and a large spindle bore which will help out for jobs like tube mitering and fork threading.

Here is another example of a 2mm lever blade reach adjuster tool. This one fits both Shimano and Avid hydraulics.

While this part doesn’t look like much it will save a client almost $400. Sometimes all that’s needed is a little part to fix a big problem.