Ey, did you know you can ruin a pair of socks with insect repellent? You can. Last night we had the Wednesday Shop Ride , ten minutes in I was spinning up a hill (riding a geared demo bike ), this demo bike is an '07 and it it gets passed around between shop employees like a...like a, god, I don't know, I just woke up, the crazy metaphor machine is still off line I guess. Insert one of your own if you like. Anyway, the thing is pretty jacked up, it was all clicking and creaking and I'm thinking about how I'm actually going to do some maintenance on the damn thing when I get back to the shop. Too late — Kabush! The chain snapped as I was going up a small climb, my knee went into the bar wicked, wicked hard. It hurt. The knee to the bar is not a type of hurt that single speeders get often, and definitely not like that. I remember that pain, but the closest I've gotten to it in years is slipping on a wet root and tagging my knee lightly on the bar. The bar, not a SHIFTER, a fucking Sram, pointy ass shifter. Stupid pointy ass shifter. Hate you, hate you hate you! My brain was so clouded by the throbbing and the pain, I just wanted to be left alone to fix the chain but one of the guys on the ride wanted "watch and learn" so everyone hung over me while I first popped a pin all the way out, then, in an act of utter frustration, dropped the wheel out of the frame to give myself more chain slack to work with. Apparently I did a crap job pushing the pin back in because, next up hill — Kabush! Once again. Fucking ow. Oh yes, while I was fixing the chain for the second time, my sister who was on the ride, doused me with some high-test bug dope. A short while after that I experienced "total sock failure". My socks became loose and ill-fitting, what a horrible feeling, loose socks. I also noticed that parts of my bib shorts which had made contact with the stuff were becoming sticky and kind of clear. I knew insect repellent can attack plastics but this was extreme. It took me hours to figure out that the stuff had attacked the elastic bands in my socks, rendering them limp and useless, like a... like...Lincoln Navigator driver's penis! There, I'm back, but it's too late, I have to go, ten minutes was all the time I had to write today. Anyways, I biffed my stem really had last fall when traversing a slightly down-hill stonewall. A little to forward, front wheel jammed on a small rock, got launched, right foot came out, knee smacked the stem. I couldn't put any pressure on my right leg for a few days, and it was swollen for a solid week, though I could ride. I remember walking around a corner at work and having shooting pains in my knee just from the slight twisting motion. I had a noticeable lump just above the patella for a few months, and I still have scar tissue.

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Right now it is nothing more than a dead level and square measuring tool, but the long term plan is to build it out completely, using a perfectly straight frame, and try my hand at building a Champion-ish frame of my own. I bought this bike with a CR250 engine in it, and a nicely bent frame that I missed when looking at it. Now it's destined for a KTM 200EXC motor, but the frame had to be fixed first. This is my first attempt at major frame repair, and I freely admit, I was intimidated as hell starting this. The vertical post on the front of the jig is hard to see, but it's dead plumb and square with the swingarm pivot) This thing must have had a real fetish for right turns, the way it was bent. The steering head was out of plumb about 3/4", as measured with a 3' rod through a set of cones in the headstock. Once I had the swingarm pivot square with the jig, and tightened the allthread into the headstock, it became obvious that she was a little tweaked. 20 years of working on bikes, 7 of those for a living, and this isn't somewhere I have ever gone before.

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