put out an "amber alert"

Cool Thing Of The Day: Watching one of our mechanics take his first ride on a bike he built. I'm not talking 'built' like buy a frame and buy a bunch of parts and put it all together. I'm talking 'built' like make a bunch of drawings, do some geometry wizardry, take a bunch of steel tubes, painstakingly arrange and weld them together, spend a few months fillet-brazing the thing to perfection then putting some parts on it and it's a bike. This was the first frame he ever built, he took his time with it and it looks great. It was a fanfareless but very cool little event in our small corner of the world. When you spend a good portion of your life working on bikes slapped together by machines in far-eastern mega-factories, the day you ride something built by your own hands is a pretty cool deal.

Un-Cool Thing Of The Day: Some worthless idiot stole our shop demo Trek 69er off of the roof rack of an employees car. Which was parked in our parking lot. While we were open. Who does that? Here's the good bit: That bike's pretty new. So new, that we have not sold a single one. We are the only dealer within 200 miles that sells that bike. With a 26in wheel in the back, a 29in wheel in the front, a gigantic triple crown fork and a crazy bronze anodized frame, it is very distinctive. Seriously. You can't miss it. And some idiot has the only one. Here's what it looks like by the way.

By noon today every pawn shop and used bike shop in town will have a picture and serial number, so when the idiot tries to sell it, he'll get arrested and we'll get the bike back. If the bike shows up on Craigslist of Ebay, game over. Same result. If the idiot takes it to Forest Park, he'll get jumped by one of the 10 shop guys who commute through the park, get beaten with a frame pump and then get arrested. So if you see this bike, it's ours. And we want it back.

DT