Well, it seems we have dropped off the face of the earth for a few months. We had some momentous things happen to us that have set us back a couple months. Rest assured, we are still supporting dealers and still backing our bikes, but personal events and some unforeseen circumstances have stopped production during the summer. I have been dealing with family matters over the summer. We also had a partner leave and our manufacturing suppliers had distractions and shut downs due to the economy. This has forced us into a new direction that has actually made us into a stronger, more viable company with more flexibility. We have a new manufacturing partner that is enabling us to cut our costs, decrease cycle time to market, and is going to give us the ability to do real marketing for our dealers, including some possible TV/Media spots.   One big benefit: The ability to bring several new models into the market. We know that the overall recumbent season is dropping off, but the market is still there, so we have resumed building since we are back on our feet with new enthusiasm and resources. We have Koosah and Jett Creek long wheel bases in process as well as a couple Djangos and Hepcats.   And there are a couple of surprises coming this winter that we are so excited about,…… well…..you’ll have to see. Keep watching the new website and dealers: you will be getting new marketing materials soon.

The www.edgebike.com site is being revised with actual content.  That ‘under construction’ moniker is annoying.  The got-bent site has been totally redone and the webmaster is adding more content.

We also are negotiating a deal with a major sporting goods chain which will give us a good monthly sales volume. This will enable us to have sufficient cash flow to put more money into marketing for our dealers and to expand our dealer network.

Well, we are still here and welcome inquiries.

Regards,

Bill

As I drove across the east I had plenty of time to ponder the events of my life and the influence of my parents on me.  I was driving my mom in her van to a new home in New Jersey.  My dad was in the passenger seat of the truck in front of me, while my younger brother John drove the truck.  Dad had a stroke 3 years ago and my mother had been managing his care with disastrous results. She was on medication herself and confusion in managing Dad’s medication and diet had resulted in a weak, disoriented, emaciated old man.  Mom moved in a daily fog hovering between lucidity and dementia. They were alone on a farm in the middle of northern Missouri with the nearest child living in St. Louis, 150 miles away.  We could call but trips to their farm were 650 miles of driving.  It was finally time for them to live in a more managed situation with my brother and his wife.

He had a bad episode in the winter and after that he had daily care and management for two months.  When we visited in March, he was lively, lucid, and humorous.  His voice was often strong as before.  It was evidence that daily therapy and management of his medication did a lot of good.

It wasn’t always this way.  Going through their things before the move, I had found a pic of dad and uncle Vern taken just before his stroke.  They were both laughing, standing in a construction site, a gleam in Dad’s eyes and a full 210# on his frame.  Dad could have probably taken on a handful of younger men and beat them soundly when this picture was taken.  He was out welding a trailer when the stroke hit him.  Not being one to go to the doctor and living with no one who monitored him, it was 7 months before he was diagnosed.

Heartbreaking.

We all age, and as long as my parents were running along that continuum of retirement without incident it really didn’t bother me.

We talked on one trip a few years ago:

“Dad, what do you mean?”

“Hell, I’ll be dead soon”

“Heck Dad, you’ve got a good 20 years on you! You’re healthier than I am!”

“ Think so?”

About a year later: the stroke.  And then a diagnosis of Parkinson’s.

Now, as a drove my parents across Pennsylvania, images  of two young people in photos ran through my mind:  a young man leaning back laughing with his three little boys at his side,  a picture of a young, shapely woman with long dark hair, a muscular lively twenty-something guy standing beside his van with a camera in his hand.

That young woman was sitting beside me in the car asleep, with her grey hair neatly combed.  The young man was in the truck ahead, staring out at the countryside with a faint Parkinson’s mask on his face, his lively blue eyes retaining little spark.

My mom didn’t see the tears streaming slowly from the corner of the sunglasses I wore.  At the rest stops I would sob against the car uncontrollably while they were walking their dogs a couple hundred feet away.

John, my brother, almost seems stoic about the whole affair, but he is dealing with it in his own necessary, detached way because he has to in order to execute the care they need.  My brother commands hundreds, if not thousands of men in his position as Crew Chief of McGuire AFB.  No doubt his military training serves him well in times like these, but you could see the pain  in his face and the occasional frustration as he executed the almost military plan to get the folks off the farm.

I did a lot of thinking about life and what’s important on the trip and it seems that parents and family are pretty much the sum of it.  Not your money, your toys, your house, your career, or your car.  Only the time you spend with them, the brief few seconds that you have before you or they blink back out of existence into eternity….  Lots of regrets about spending the last quarter century building a great engineering career, but it doesn’t seem like it’s worth much when you weigh it against the lost time one could spend with the two exceptional people who are my parents.

Dad and mom both had eighth grade educations but managed to raise 4 kids who have had varied levels of what the world would call success.  The thing that I am thankful most for are the simple memories of camping and fishing and traveling that we have, as well as a work ethic and moral code that have served us well.  We all move to our own compass and we have dad to thank for the individualism that keeps us going forward.

More on my Dad and Mom in my next post.

We’ve got our bikes in dealers now and we have received some nice feedback.
First of all, whenever you design something, even if it is tested locally, you may not get honest feedback. Dealers can be brutal and so it was refreshing to hear that we have done well with our design. There are issues that we fell short on (manuals not shipping with bikes…we have that rectified now) and we have some design suggestions from the dealers. However, we have received overwhelmingly positive feedback on the quality, design, and price point. The seat seems to be a winner with the comfort rating right up there with the big boys in the industry. We had a limited first run so only have the bikes at a few select dealers. We are making more and some of these will go for re-orders already at these dealers. If you want to be a dealer, you may want to get an order in now, because we already have about a third of the next lot spoken for.

Burley Strut Installation

…of bikes and seats that is.

A couple of news notes:

1)  You can now use your Burley struts with an Edge Seat.  Just reduce the length on the top part by 4 holes, off the bottom part by 10 holes and attach to the seat lateral brace just on the inside of the strut tabs.  Works great.  No adaptor needed

2)  EDGE recumbents are now available at the following dealers:

• BicycleMan in Alfred Station, NY
• K&G Bikes in Dayton, OH
• Mt. Airy Bicycles in  Mt. Airy, MD (see our bike at the Demo Day on March 22)
• Greenlee’s Bicycles in Knoxville, TN
• Easy Chair Recumbents in Signal Mountain, TN

3)  We only have a few bikes left so if you are a dealer and want one, get it now.  I anticipate they will all be gone within 2 weeks.  It will be at around 4 weeks before we ship again

4) Aftermarket seats went fast.  I’ve only got 3 left.  New seats will be in by early April if we get any more interest.  We have those in various states of completion.

5)  Don’t forget….if you want to use a Volae seat, Volae struts, or even a Volae hardshell seat, they all fit on our bikes.  If you order from a dealer and want these options, we can supply that.  There is a change in price for the Volae seat system.

6)  We re-weighed our bikes and they are 1# lighter than the Burley Koosah.  That makes the overall weight come in at 37# not 34-1/2#.  We are updating the website

7)  Our new website will be going live in the next couple weeks with dealer section, shopping cart, etc.

8)  We will take credit card orders within a few weeks.  We are setting up the merchant account now.

Our CFO doesn’t want us to make any press releases, but as of this week we are shipping. Our first bike goes out this week to a large recumbent dealer in the Northeast with other bikes going out through the week. By next week we should have no other bikes left except for three bikes that had some blems in the powdercoat. Those are being sold locally and we hope those will be gone by end of next week.

So, where do we go from here? We are already getting ready to make our next 25 bikes and have some of the parts already pre-fabricated. I’m cleaning up drawings and getting new quotes. This manufacturing cycle should go pretty fast since we now have all the bugs worked out down to how we pack and ship. Official press release will have to wait until after we get feedback from dealers on our bikes. We are not going to steal Bryan’s thunder so no details now, other than that: We have our first batch of bikes done and in boxes and shipping out.  However, we have placed a pic of one of our bikes  here for your perusal. No harm in that.

The New Edge Koosah

Once again, a reactionary neo-liberal can’t address the issue at hand and resorts to immature name calling. Below is correspondence from a liberal from New York. Before you go any further, note that I never called Patrick names and tried to keep my arguments impersonal. Patrick just couldn’t help himself. Our original discussion was about my rights as a business owner to ‘own’ my jobs. Then it degraded as liberals responded saying their individual rights extended to owning my job, etc. While I don’t advocate Jim Crow laws and employment discrimination, I threw out some arguments from my libertarian perch and got an impassioned response from this guy who obviously thought I was being racist since HE injected race into it. I do have to say for the record that I do agree with him on many points below, but there are conflicting ‘rights’ when we are talking about the property rights of business owners as opposed to the rights of prospective workers.

It’s also obvious he is another Obama Kool-Aid drinker since he doesn’t know that Obama has openly been a member of a Socialist party in Illinois. Another uninformed voter.

Once again, my comments are in bold.

Ah! I failed to realize I was debating with right-wing libertarian lunatics. Liberal playbook rule #1. Call your opponent names. It makes up for logic. As an aside I’m wondering why he didn’t call me a NAZI. That’s typically done. Even though Democrats use the term they don’t realize their party name roughly translated into German means NAZI. I wonder if they ever make the connection. My bad! Anyone stupid enough to buy Richard Epstein’s the “free market would solve racial discrimination in the private sphere” argument displays a shocking lack of understanding of history and human nature. Funny how free market capitalism never got around to ending hundreds of years of slavery and nearly a century of racial segregation. It took affirmative government legislation to end these practices.

Nope. Never read him. I’m not a lunatic, but as the typical neo-liberal template goes, you’ve resorted to immature name calling. I threw that out there. You really didn’t keep in mind that we were originally talking about the line where I was talking about business owner’s rights to jobs, etc. Anyway…

I wish all libertarians such as yourselves could be made to go back to live in the good ol’ 1800’s and early 1900’s when government operated more or less under your libertarian principles. And then if you were forced to live as blacks then all the better. Maybe then you’d have an appropriate appreciation for government regulation of the private sector that makes our society function as well as it does.” Oh I do. I think we need some, but we have way too much now. Let’s badk off on the govt influence. By the way, read Amendment 10 lately?

And Bill, I understand where you are coming from as a Libertarian, but you are an certified idiot if you think Obama is a socialist or communist. If I belong to the socialist party, I am by definition a socialist. Obama belonged to the New Party in Illinois which is an affiliate of the Democrat Socialists of America. Their bylaws plainly state: “We are Socialists”. The party was formed by their own admission out of joining socialists and communists. What part of this don’t you understand? You would have to be brain dead not to acknowledge this simple logical conclusion. Do I have to explain this to you? And you called me an idiot…… You destroy the meanings of these two terms both when you use them interchangeably and when you apply them to liberal Democrats such as Obama. I mean if you can’t see the difference between Karl Marx and liberal thinkers such as Richard Hofstadter you are a moron. I have always understood the definitions between the different political/economic systems. I also understand that many of Obama’s philosophies are in line with Mr. Marx. Once again, more typical liberal name calling. My IQ is high enough but I have simply deferred joining Mensa. What, pray tell, is your IQ?

Let me break it down to you simply. When it comes to economics, liberals believe in limited government interference in a free market where private individuals retain control of all means of production and commerce. (Note how he redefines liberals. This is amazing. He just described many conservatives and libertarians and now he uses this definition in connection with neo-liberals. See. By his definition I am a liberal) Dude, I’m a libertarian, not an anarchist! Socialists believe that the government should control all the large means of production and allow limited free market commerce. We will be there soon enough. Communists believe that the free market should be abolished and government should control all means of production and divide all outputs equally. There are many elements of communism in Obama’s words he spoke during the campaign then. Get it yet? Please stop dumbing down political debate.”

I do not agree that the government has a duty to prevent employment discrimination.” — Only an ignorant ass white man could make such statement. Well. That was a racist comment if I ever I heard one.    I hate employment discrimination but does the govt have that duty to regulate against it and where does it draw the line?  I do not believe the Feds have any say  in it, but it would be nice if the State govts did something.   You are a fool to think that a black person such as myself would ever have an even shot at making something of himself/herself in this country without the Supreme Court rulings and government legislation that banned racially restrictive housing covenants, racial job discrimination, and all the Jim Crow laws. The free market would never have corrected these injustices because the free market is limited by the prejudices of individuals. I actually agree with you. I was just throwing it out there. And I will concede that we had to have these things to create the diverse and very ‘equal’ society we have today.  Keep in mind that I am an SDA who has been on the receiving end of discrimination because of my religion. But the crux of my argument is still: Is it MY job as the employer or YOUR job? Who owns that job. And if I own it, does the govt have the right to tell me what I can do with it.  If they do, then it isn’t mine is it?  You haven’t answered that.

Since the abolition of slavery, racial prejudice always trumped economic self-interest. Poor whites even when it was in their ultimate economic interest to cooperate with poor blacks never did so because it was more important for them to maintain a sense of superiority over blacks than to better their economic condition.”

A restaurant owner who might attempt to draw in both black and white customers and increase his profits would lose all his white customers because they refused to eat with blacks. A research laboratory that comes across a brilliant black scientist doesn’t hire him because his white colleagues will not work with him. A black family seeking to better their living condition are barred from a good neighborhood and are forced to raise their children in a ghetto. The list goes on and on. Without government action to force whites to deal with blacks on an equal footing in housing and employment blacks would never have an equal chance. And because whites were forced to deal with blacks on an equal basis by government action that resulted in changing their racial prejudices towards blacks, the election of a black man as President became possible.Obama is more white than I am. He is mixed race and not black. Only by the old racist definitions of black is he black (‘one drop of black blood’). By some estimations looking at his family tree he may be up to 94-95% Caucasion. I know that really fries you, but accept it. He ‘identifies’ with blacks. But because he has that little bit of dark in his skin doesn’t make him black. Hell, my wife is more black (13%) by genetic makeup than Obama but because she is ‘high yellow’ most people think she is Hispanic or white. In point of fact Obama may be more white than I am since I am 13% Native American. It is truly a shame that this has to be explained to you Bill and that even with this explanation you still probably don’t get it

I get it.  Really Patrick I do.

Hey, how’s that for a catchy title.  Actually I’ve been slightly involved in a little running text battle with a guy named ‘Spanky’ on the BROL board.  Usually I don’t attack anyone personally and strive to keep comments ‘impersonal’ but Spanky felt the need to attack myself and another BROL member about our AGW opinions and then used our religious beliefs and political beliefs as an excuse for other people involved in the discussion to ignore us.  A transparent attempt to discredit us.

I’ve replied to Spanky and he didn’t like it very well.  I received another post and the below text is my reply to him.  It’s much too long for BROL, so that’s why it is here.  Spanky’s comments are in italics.  Mine are in bold.  I’ve removed many of my comments that were personally directed.  I’ve got a poison pen and sometimes it gets out of control.  No need for that with civilized people……

They have already decided what they believe, and only pick out points that support their outright denial. There are for them no degrees of probability, no weighing and considering of any evidence unless it supports their position. I think this need to believe and the logical contortions required to hold it is a phenomenon almost as interesting as global warming itself. I have weighed the evidence and it is wanting. There’s a credibility gap that I will explore below.

But, as I said, for climate change deniers there is no weighing and considering, no degrees of probability, only an entrenched position to be defended as if their very lives depended on it. Such is the nature of the human ego.

This same comment can be applied to AGW proponents

________________

Answer me this for instance: if there is, say, only a 10% chance of catastrophic man made climate change, what do you have to gain from this position of absolute denial? There is not a 10% chance of catastrophic man made climate change except in computer simulations that keep having to be revised and revised as the predictions spewed forth don’t come to pass. As to your question: 1) I have not absolutely denied it. I am just not convinced. 2) The economic damage that can be inflicted on the world economy from draconian measures to solve a possibly non-existent problem could be more harmful to both industrialized and developing nations than the actual ‘problem’. Michael Crichton went into this in detail in ‘State of Fear’.

Can you really say with absolute certainty that the majority of the scientific community, minds vastly more qualified to judge than yours and mine, are totally mistaken about this? There are many, many members of the scientific community who do not believe in AGW. Are you saying that if 50.5% of the scientific community votes that AGW is correct that we should discount the other 49.5% and just accept this. No. I cannot say with absolute certainty that they are totally mistaken about this. Of course, if we were talking about eugenics in the early part of the 20^th century then you would be on the side of the eugenics community and you would be talking about the eugenics consensus. We all know what the result of this scientific consensus was, don’t we? (See ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Final Solution’, etc. in your online encyclopedia).

Pertinent quotes:…

…“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” –  Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

….

Can anyone really believe that the scientific community is only acting in its own interests in promulgating a fictional climate change scenario? Considering what this entails: that thousands of scientists are in on a conspiracy; that none of these scientists have any respect for scientific truth; that these thousand of scientists are primarily financially motivated; that there is nothing else they could equally as effectively apply for funding to research . . . do you honestly think anyone is justified in believing this? These are ‘strawman’ arguments. These scientists are not all in a ‘conspiracy’. I live in an R&D community (Knoxville/Oak Ridge area…you have heard of ORNL I am sure) and am familiar with the motivations of some of these researchers. Many people are motivated by the need for a paycheck. It is much EASIER if not more effective to get funding for AGW research right now. It has become its own industry. I have worked for British companies for 12 years now and must admit that our friends in the UK have a huge amount more of integrity, so perhaps we have a cultural difference in our perceptions of researchers. Unfortunately I have also talked to American researchers and they ‘follow the grant money’ pretty well.

Would you admit the possibility that you may only be believing what you need to believe to fend off fear? Uh….no. I believe what I believe because AGW proponents have made prediction after prediction based on faulty computer models that keep getting revised. Computer modeling of weather is not science. It is high tech guessing. Guessing that so far has been dismally wrong. Hardly any of the AGW crowds’ predictions have come to pass. When we have a cooling trend for the last few years they regroup and say that the cooling is caused by AGW. Then they make up a new name and call it ‘climate change’ because they look like fools as a ‘temporary’ cooling trend kicks in. It is silliness. In the private sector these fools would be fired. How many times do they have to get it wrong to lose all credibility?

__________________

In the public life of the US, outright denial of AGW comes largely from the Republican party. A supposition. But if true may prove that the only people who can think for themselves may be people of that persuasion.

One need only look at the Bush administration’s attitude to the issue, or the way it is discussed on Fox news. Is Fox News rightist? I thought they were fairly balanced in reporting the news on AGW, LOL. They are a heck of a lot more balanced than that crazy female doc on the Weather Channel. In my country, the only bloc of the parliament that is demanding a select committee to review the science on climate change is the ACT party who are . . . libertarians. They have only a few seats in the parliament. Most of the country think they are a bit bonkers. Libertarians are fairly rational here. A little history: If you really read the US constitution and the Federalist papers and examine who the founders of our country were, you will come to the conclusion that they were very much Libertarian in their politics and economics.

Maybe you are an authoritarian personality type! Engineers have their own unique personality type. I think arrogance could go along with it….though maybe not authoritarian.

My only point was that I fail to see the rationality behind the outright denial that seems to come from the right of the political spectrum. Maybe you would like to address the primary question I posted:

Given even a relatively small probability of the reality of Anthropogenic Climate Change, what does anyone have to gain from a position of outright denial?

I’ll finally address your argument even though it is sort of a strawman.  The converse question is valid.  Yours is not:

1) I don’t think that anyone ‘outright’ denies ACC. They just are not convinced. Why should they accept it when they see the media pumping conflicting and often untrue anecdotal evidence out on the tube, hear of eminent scientists getting blackballed for disagreeing with AGW. There is a credibility gap here. People here distrust (with good reason) the media and government since those two institutions have pretty much shown they cannot be trusted due to many, many scandals in the last 15 years.

2) There is nothing irrational about questioning a hypothesis that has as its frontmen a failed VP candidate who has a riveting, mostly false powerpoint presentation on the subject and a NASA chief who in the 70s was a proponent of the opposite belief. BTW, that nobel prize winner also owns a major stake in a carbon offset trading corporation. He should have been disqualified for that huge conflict of interest.

3) The default belief is that climate change is a natural process. That is not denial. Many are just questioning the supposition that man has caused any climate change.

4) AGW is one of the few, if not the only scientific theory that is so politicized that it is being used to justify radically changing the entire political, industrial, and economic structure of the planet. That will affect me. Before I turn over my life to the politicos because of this, I am surely going to see if this is really happening. AGW is being used as a tool for a massive power grab. Billions of dollars are at stake and it is big, big business. I used to work for a company that was one of the leaders in promoting solutions to the ozone layer ‘problem’. Of course, they were the major manufacturer and patent holder of the Freon replacement that would be needed……I’m sure their motives were entirely altruistic though.

5) The potential socio-economic damage that can be done by relying on this ‘scientific consensus’ is staggering while the damage that can be done by doing nothing about it is admittedly, even by AGW proponents, debatable or minimal. The temperature rise specs have been repeatedly revised down, down, and down to the point that it would be considered statistical ‘noise’ in many ‘hard’ sciences. When you look at how the temperature monitoring stations have been compromised and the data continually changed (which no rational scientist or engineer would do) to fit the AGW template, any observed temperature rise is far within the measurement error. I stated it before and I will state the analogy again: A group of junior engineers, even all the engineers that work for me submit a report saying that we should spend 5 times our annual revenue on a new A/C system based on their studies that showed a statistically insignificant rise in temperature in the building that was within the measurement error of their instruments. They then tell me that they are not adhering to all the protocols for setup of the measuring devices and then they openly admit and publish that they have modified the data upward repeatedly each iteration and even added data points when they felt that interpolation was needed and deleted huge portions of the graphs which would have countered and falsified their claims. I would fire them all, every one of them. Now, that is EXACTLY what has been documented to be going on in AGW research. Why should I believe these people?

6) I have a bridge for sale here in Knoxville. It’s a fine bridge and I believe you would not have anything to gain by outright denial that I own it. However, you may have a large amount to lose if you believe I own it and then give me money in order to purchase it.

__________________

After all this time, Bike 0001 is done.  We reviewed this thoroughly so we could be sure of what we do to finish the remaining bikes.

Since some of you have wondered if we fell off the world, I thought I would update you all.

Naturally I am disappointed it took this long.  We basically ran out of money earlier in the year and were stalled for almost 6 weeks while we looked for new funding.  And then we found out that many of the fixtures we needed to finish the bikes had been disposed of or had to be redesigned and rebuilt.  Along with picking somewhat undependable vendors at first, it just added up to week after week of delay.

So….The bike looks great, rides great.  The seat frame is great, and we are going to do some slight redesign on the webbing this week and turn loose our new seamstress.  She is a master seamstress and has already designed about 40% of the extraneous sewing out of it.

This week, we are building a head tube alignment tool and then aligning and brazing the remaining frames.  We are now ready to take orders.  I’m going to send some press release pics to the usual outlets this week if our CFO approves and may post some pics here on the blog.

Our brazing guy had to leave for Galveston because he is a catastrophe adjuster.  Because of that, we are just going to do the brazing ourselves this week.  No worries, I’ve done enough of it myself.

So, there you go.  We should hit powder coating soon.

Ever hear the above sentiment? The basic premise is that ‘rich’ people should pay their part in supporting government services. ‘Rich’ means anybody making more money than you, by the way……

I agree. I think that everyone should pay their fair share. If you use a road, it doesn’t matter how much you make. The costs for using that road should be the same for each person regardless of how much money they make. I mean, just imagine if we used the current tax system philosophy for shopping at Wal-Mart:

“That will be $50”

“wait a minute, You charged that guy in front of me only $5 for that gallon of milk”

“ I know sir, but he makes much less than you and our groceries are priced on a sliding scale. We think it is ‘fairer’ that way.”

Well, you can see how silly that whole thing is. Of course, there are those of you with limited intelligence who actually think the above scenario is workable.

‘Fairness’ is just a euphemism for thievery. It presupposes there is some cosmic equalization moving us all towards a steady state economic heat death. Just isn’t so. What I think people really want is a ‘fair’ chance. An equal opportunity. But to say that the rich are not paying their fair share is ludicrous.

I’ll tell you what is ‘fair’. Let’s charge everyone an equal dollar amount for every government service they use. By this reasoning the ‘rich’ people will pay very little since they really don’t lean on government services the same way that people of lesser economic means do. You see, a poor person depends on the rich already and the rich pay a disproportionate amount of their wealth already. So there isn’t anything fair about it. It is just thievery from the rich to give to the poor. Robin Hood if you will. Except, often, the money is just taken from the rich and spent on ….whatever.

Obama’s tax policies are predicated on the principle of fairness, not real world revenue needs. When it was pointed out that the capital gains tax increases actually decrease revenue, Obama didn’t care. He just wanted to raise the taxes because it was ‘fairer’ that way. What kind of Crack was Obama smoking back in school? “I’m going to ignore the facts and raise taxes anyway because of my crazy emotional feelings that it would be fair to do that”. Fair to who? If revenues drop, then they have to be made up somewhere. If the investors that lost their money in capital gains tax cut back, you can bet it will hurt the little guy. So in fact, Obama’s policies would hurt the people he is trying to be fair to. This is what putting an inexperienced empty suit in power will get us. More stupid economic and tax policies.

So let’s implement the ultimate ‘fair’ system. If you use a road, then you pay the same fee regardless of your income. If you use any government service you pay the same fee regardless. If you don’t use a govt service then you don’t pay for it. Soon, lower income people will be screaming that it isn’t fair.

Once again, ‘Fair’ = ‘Thievery’

Sorry about the hiatus. We have been very busy. We had our seats at one vendor for weeks and nothing was done so we had to pull the work. Nothing wrong with the guy, just too busy right now. We have placed our seat fabrication with a local machine shop that is also going to be doing our seat notching. A-Mazing. In just a day we had a new welding fixture that maintains all the critical dimensions. Their engineer is familiar with welded tubing fabrication and was able to devise a method to notch and install each set of lateral supports in about 8 minutes per seat. By Friday we will have 20 seats ready for powder coat. I also picked up our first frames. They do not even need cold-setting. I can’t believe it. The welder we have for our bikes is a welding genius. We knew his reputation for welding race cars without needing any post weld alignment but we had to see it for ourselves.

We have spent a lot of time developing fixtures to ensure accurate placement of braze ons and idler mounts. I have stopped putting out dates for completion as it seems there is always something coming up. I can safely say that our metalworking for the first batch of bikes is drawing to a completion. I’m turning most of my attention to soft goods stuff like getting the seat meshes done. In addition the alignment table is done. We can ensure that our bikes are straight to the same high standards that the previous owner of the designs was able to attain.

I’m very happy with the quality level of what we are producing. That has been in some part responsible for the delays. We have really held our vendors to a high quality standard and it will pay off.

I’ll try to post some relevant pictures next week since we anticipate having bike 0001 powder coated and assembled next week sometime.