Here's a bit of drivel...back on Dec. 17, I said:

Two other things to do today: run to downtown MPLS to the Star-Tribune to drop off my daughter's entry for the "Color this Christmas tree" contest...yeah, mail would have been a better way to get it there, but this one I can blame on her...and get my wife a Christmas present.

Well the Christmas present has probably been forgotten by now, but I'm pleased to report that a letter from the Star-Tribune arrived yesterday - Emily was a runner up in the "Color this Christmas Tree" contest. Her prize was two four-packs of tickets to the MN Science Museum and the MN History Museum. She was stoked. But this reminded her that she had submitted an entry to Pepperidge Farm's "Create a new Friend for Finn" contest at about the same time...not a winner there. That would have been nice...the winner gets a trip to Florida. Mmmmmmm, Florida would be mighty nice right now (see previous post.)

Minus Sixteen

-16 degrees below zero degrees Farenheidt. That's what my car thermometer told me the temp was this morning, when I drove my kids to school (I remember what it was like to ride a school bus when it got cold like that...not doing that to my kids.)

The bank clock said -20.

Couldn't have been much better last night, when I went snowboarding. I don't know what I was thinking. It was miserable. I don't get too many chances to ride my board these days so when my church's youth group asked me to chaperone, I thought I should go. I should have put my foot down and said "Let's reschedule". Oh well. I guess I survived it.

The machine shop sez the new batch of stems are in process. That's better than them saying "Stems? What stems?"

Seats now available on ebay!

I threw in the towel...I can't make my online store work. I decided that I might as well fill up my ebay store...so I did.

Check it out at this link... http://stores.ebay.com/retroBMX

I hope you check out my seats - maybe get the custom color one that you have always dreamed about!! Thanks for your support!

Seats update

So the seats you see in the picture below are all going to be for sale. I'm going to focus on getting them into an online store for you to buy easily.

There are 6 more odd-ball color-combo seats that are being assembled this week with my assembly guy.

After that, my embroidery supplier is embroidering the next batch, which will be a big. In this batch we will have all the standard colors, plus a few odd balls.

I'll let you know here as soon as the webstore is operational.

Thanks Bros.

Retro Pro Necks

Lots of people have been inquiring about the status of the Pro Neck stems.

I've wanted to implement an improvement to the stem for a little while now (adding to the thickness of the stem to make it even more torsionally stiffer), but needed to get back on a CAD system to make the necessary design changes.

This was complicated by the fact that I lost my "real job" at the end of September - downsizing, you've heard it before. My design work was done in the past by using the CAD stations at work after-hours.

I recently got a chance to get on a CAD system at an old friend's place, and now the new blueprint is at my Machine Shop and he's moving ahead with production. We'll have new and improved stems available in January, though I don't know exactly the date. I'll keep you posted!

Condo Classic

Just back from the Condo Classic. For those of you who have no idea what that means, it is the reprise of the old Rondo Classic BMX race which was held indoors in St Paul MN in January of 1981 and 1982 and maybe 80 or 83, I can't quite remember.

Anyway, Mark Conley of AllTheRacing.com (see link to the right) put this together and it was a blast! All kinds of "Vintage" Minnesota Racers came out of the woodwork for this race held at Rehbein's BMX. It was just awesome to see some of my childhood heros like Shawn Sheely, Dave Christiansen, John Sandberg and Gene Oberprillar going at it on the track like it was 1980 again. I was moto-filler, just like back in the day. I took home a 7th place plaque, but that suits me fine. It was a great time and I wish to thank Mark Conley for his vision in pulling this together. I hope that next year's event is even bigger and better.

I debuted my new batch seats at the race and donated one to the door prize raffle. Gene-O won it and had just the bike in mind for it. I look forward to seeing it on his ride. I hooked up Jayson Lindsey with a long-awaited camo seat for his cruiser and he gave it a big thumbs up for both the looks and the comfort. Jayson is ABA National Age Group #2 on his Cruiser and NAG #4 on his 20", so I am glad to get a seal of approval from him.

The rest of you who are looking for seats, well, hang in there!! The time is coming!!

Seats, Baby, Seats!

OK, check this out. Here's the first batch of the long-awaited seats. I am going to be donating some of these to the Condo Classic on Friday night. I'll write a follow up post to let you know how they are received. Later, Gator.

Holiday Hangover

Wow. I sure got slack on this blogging stuff pretty quickly. Been a few weeks. I'm gonna use the excuse that it was too much stuff going on with the Holidays. Yeah, that's it.




In addition to making sure that my kids had a great Christmas, I did manage to get out on the snowboard once. Also, I did get to the skatepark last Friday. Didn't take much for pictures though...but here's one of Minneapolis Legend, Mark Lukens. That's a pocket wallride for you. Awesome rider at age 40-something.

Hey, my first pic. I could try to put up a pic of the seats, but jeez that's a lot for one day.

2 days 'til Condo.