Cheeky Transport

cyclocross.. in NSW!!

So, as you may be aware, Cross is finally seeming to take off in Australia. Check out this sweet series in Melbourne http://dirtydeedscx.blogspot.com/

but don’t panic, CycloCross returns to the Illawarra. This event will be held on the 22nd August 2010 at Unanderra Velodrome Complex.

Start -Time 2:00pm
Sign on -from 12:30pm
Entry fee $15.00

Division 1-40 Mins + 3 Laps

Division 2-30 Mins + 3Laps

http://www.illawarracycleclub.org.au/

hunter valley ride guide

Just got a bunch of really cool little ride guides for the Hunter Valley $15

The Bike Life..

Since my little girl was born, I’ve not had as much opportunity to get on my bikes in a way that used to be pretty ordinary for me, but I had a chance on Friday night. The family were settled in and I had a date with some top notch ramen and the flicks.

The inclement weather almost kept me at home, but I was admonished to “Man-up, ladybird, and put your poncho on”, which I duly did and cruised into town.

I’ve got to look into finding more stock of quality rain capes, cos teamed with my guards, Schmidt, Skully’s and PDW taillight, I was warm, dry and well illuminated all the way. (I didn’t learn my lesson though, and got caught cape-less on guard-less bike in a bucketing on Sunday evening – luckily I was able to seek shelter in The Concordia Club and get lubricated enough that I didn’t mind the rain on the way home).

Regardless of the weather, the incident that prompted this post was still to come. After a stellar bowl of noodles, I was caught short looking for a place to secure my bike outside the Hoyts on George St, and chose a dubious looking set of bannisters to lock up to. Just as I walked away, a security guard came barrelling up with the standard “Hey mate, you can’t lock your bike there!”, to which I replied, with just a touch of implied snarkiness, “Well where’s a good spot around here for me to leave it?”.

I was ready for a casual dismissal of my problem, so when the reply was “Well, if you’re here to see a movie, I guess I could chuck it in the loading dock for you”, I was totally floored. I followed the guard down some flights of stairs and through a fire exit, and locked my bike to a exposed water pipe, with the reassurance that “It’ll be fine here, no-one ever comes down, give me a call when your movie finishes and I’ll make sure you can get out okay”.

Suffice it to say that Gumshara Ramen is the best in Sydney, you gotta go see Inception, and I had a great midnight ride home to Marrickville through rain-slick back streets and alleyways.

I wanted to write this for the blog, cos the debate about bike lanes and cycling in the city is never gonna make everyone happy. But when instead of telling you to “Fuck off buddy, I don’t care where you put your bike”, you get an almost valet-like service from a Hoyts security guard, it certainly makes me feel that Sydney is ever so slowly becoming a city that makes it easier to live the bike life.

Rouleur magazine

Rouleur Issue 18, the Grand Tour Issue, in store now. Bloody beautiful. Even if you’re not a roadie.

jo speration

image by patrick jones from bikewise

The Ride Journal, Issue 4 in store

Our stock of The Ride #4 just arrived – looks stunning as always.

These will sell out everywhere, so get in quick.

P.S. Before you call or email – No, sorry we don’t have any copies of Issues 1, 2 or 3 left.

Drink It Up #2 – Kleen Kanteen

The other new cool stainless steel drinkin’ related product we’ve now got available are Kleen Kanteen water bottles, as used and recommended byLaura and Russ at PathLessPedalled.

We’ve got lots of colours, sizes and accessories, including the Wine Karafe – very important for touring cyclists.

Kleen Kanteen make their own bottle cages to fit their bottles. They’re a snug secure fit, and their slotted mounting hole design makes ‘em easy to set up on small frames.

Small bottles (532ml) are $30 and Large (800ml) are $35.

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Drink It Up #1 – King Cage

We’re now stocking the classic stainless steel King Cage water bottle cages. They’re made in Colorado, light, strong and won’t mark your bottles.

We’ve also got the Top Cap Cage Mounts available – a neat solution for problematic bottle cage setups (small frames, step-throughs etc).

Tony’s Rohloff Karate Monkey

Check out this sweet bike we built.

Tony had an unused Rohloff hub knocking around in the garage (!), and a hankering to get out on the dirt. We started out with the idea of a Surly Puglsey, looked a 1×1 with suspension forks, then settled on a rigid Karate Monkey. The bars are new and interesting for us – a Titec version of the famous titanium Jones H-bar.

Corkage

Been thinking about how annoyed we get when someone comes in with a boxes of chainreaction/ebay/wiggle and wants us to build their dream bike for them. Particularly when it’s stuff that we specialise in (take the time and money to research and stock product). There have been times when the customer wouldn’t have even know about the internet purchased products, but for our time in analysing their particular situation and offering a solution (generally by Nick, who is a solutions man). Yeah it’s cheaper blah blah but fuck, that’s just rude!

So our labour rates are worked out based on what could be done by Adam or Dave at $80 an hour which also includes workshop equipment, tools blah blah.. Which is way less than what I was charging as an essentially unskilled trainee accountant 20 years ago. How much do you earn? We are both very smart and handsome guys and given our shop specialisation you get great value because we know what we are doing. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean that we earn $80 for every hour the shop is open because we have to order stuff, talk to lovely people who share our bike lifestyle,  and do other things, like talk to people about which things they should buy on ebay/wiggle/chainreaction.

So we have to balance how to price our time and how to price our products that we stock. That mix has been the same for pretty much ten years. Our markup on parts has gone up a bit. Our standard service price has gone up from $50 or $60 in 1999 to $90 in 2010. ( I gotta stop feeling guilty when I hear people whinging about their mortgages. House prices have more than doubled in that period, and I don’t own a house yet.) The model works if we sell a bit of stuff and fix stuff. Right now, it works pretty well. We have a truly wonderful lot of customers (hate that word) who have been with us for a long time, and we feel a 2 way relationship. People pay a fair price for our advice and services, and everyone pays the same. We don’t discriminate against huffy riders or roadies. So, the thing is, the business model currently depends on service charges, profit on parts and accessories and profit on bikes. Becasue we spend so much time with new bike owners and building the bikes up properly, we don’t make money on new bikes, and I really don’t know why we stock bikes. Except for how cool it is seeing someone pick up their new bike. 2 year olds or 62 year olds, the look is generally the same.

Anyway, when someone gets their bike fixed, or a new set of wheels built, or a custom bike built, our labour rate factors in the profit from the parts/accessories that we sell with the service. So when someone brings in their ebay/chainreaction/wiggle , and we don’t get any of the profit from those parts, but we still spend the same amount of time on their project, smiling , we are ripping ourself off.

So what do we do? If we put our service prices up across the board, and all those lovely customers who haven’t been buying internet parts and bringing them in for us to fit will have to pay more. That doesn’t seem right. Or we could just say no internet buyers, like other shops say no to Huffys. I’m tempted, because then I wouldn’t need to be annoyed every time I am working on their internet products. We don’t really need any more customers. But people will keep buying more stuff off the internet unless there is a true carbon price put on all those airfreights, ha. Or maybe we should charge a corkage, 50% extra labour to work on internet provided bits. Or should we just bite it and keep  saying “oh awesome! We are so excited that you have bought all this stuff on the internet, even though we sell it too!”

Spose it doesn’t happen that much. Lucky we don’t depend on high end stuff .

Can’t wait for the day when we only do BoBo bikes and repairs.

End of rant