It may seem, form these reports, that the builds just fly together. And for the most part, they really do. But sometimes, you discover that your whatsit doesn’t fit the dimension of the thisnthat, or that something is stripped, or breaks, or frankly, you just didn’t account for something.

Sometimes though, it’s all about pilot error.

Example A: Mechanical Fail

I have a pipe cutter, and have used it on a number of steerers. It wasn’t particularly dull, not enough that I would think the blade needed replacement. But it DID fail: the binder bolt grip stripped, and the roller pins that hold the opposing side of the pipe started to shift. That’s all mechanical, and dodgy, but happens. The pilot error comes from doing the steerer cutting at 2am after the baby had you up, and doing this in a dim bike shoppe in an exhausted state. That’s how you, in a few short seconds, scribe a huge swath of the steerer like a drunkard attempting to manually tap a screw, so to speak. I actually was just conferring with my boss about the terminology for threading, male vs female, tapping vs, threading, and he said ‘threads on a male member’ to which I cried out ‘I’ll show you threads on a male member like you’ve never SEEN!’ to which I got silence.

So, in comes the brand new pipe cutter a few days later. Bigger, beefier, ready to correct that mistake. I spent about ten minutes with some sandpaper to smooth out the damage that I did, and i *think* i took care of it, though we won’t know for a few thousand miles, right. Anyway, the best part: the new cutter lobbed the steerer off in about 5 seconds. The old one was always a lengthly, time consuming job, leading me to believe it was either defective or weak saucery.

Example B: Sequencing Fail

So from day one I was all excited to use my Walnut Portage Strap on the coupler bike. It’s even visible in my color mock-ups. So one night I went down, again late, exhausted, etc, and slapped it on the bike, just to see how it was going to look.

YEAH. The portage strap is longer than the coupler insertion point. So, it would be holding the coupled parts together. NICE WORK.

Fortunately, I noticed this before I began sewing the seat tube segment, and fortunately again, it worked out just as well on the new Wrongbike, so yay.

Anyway, I’m nothing if not honest about dumb mistakes…

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