Oh.... July..... Summer time & Projects ......

The last month has been a wide open cluster of projects filling the shop on a daily basis...

I have had to take a few brakes from everything here and there to enjoy the great West Coast summer and work on some personal projects.

The little giant hammer is coming along with a fresh coat of paint and some retro-fit pieces to make it run a little bit better. Theres a strong following to these Little Giant PowerHammers around and luckly they love the share the love and show how to do some of the rebuilds on them and make them run a little better.

So heres a update of the rebuild....

Thats the old connecting rod from 1927 on the right.

So using 2 giant bolts, I cut the heads off of them and used the cut off to make new safe and adjustable connecting rods. The old ones were really beat up and not adjustable like the new ones are.

This is a very important upgrade to the LG hammers that is a "must have" if your are rebuilding it.

The finished product.

Custom Tig welded and bolted " for extra safety " connecting rods

The old hammer adjusters limit the movement but making these connectors will double the amount of adjustment, making it possible to work some very large billets of steel safely.

This is the slide assembly with the 2 adjusters and all the retrofit bearing set up on it.

I am getting excited....

This assembly is about 200 lb of steel as you see it on the table. Solid !

The 1927 Little Giant 100LB power hammer is looking better everyday..

My arms and hands are trembling thinking about this thing running....

I am sure I will have to move as soon as the people on the block hear this thing...

Exile Cycles.... Another day at work.

Somedays I get a kick out of classing the place up by parking my sweet truck in the shop to stoke out Russell, he loves when my $500 dollar truck sits in the middle of the shop leaking oil and smelling like gas...

MLS is always growing

These are production punch presses that can hit 135 hits per minute with 25 tons per hit.

Almost 3,000 lb that punch weighs

Gabe has been learning to Tig weld and do sheet metal at the shop and is having a blast doing it.

This was a project for science museums to use Ipads for exhibits.

Really cool way to have a touch screen on the exhibit and a camera as well.

With a fresh white powercoat the Ipad displays are ready for action!

With all the orders for robots, displays and madness filled...

Jen and I jumped in to the New Belgium Beer van and headed north to Portland...

Time to relax and see the friends.

This is Robert the mad chef behind Chris King's in house kitchen for the employees.

We spent the weekend cruzin Portland with Nick, and Matt from King.

Then on Monday we made them and also Kyle at King give us a full tour of every square inch of Chris King, even got to stop in the frame shop and give Buck and the welders a hard time as they were welding the Celio frames. I had to QC the frames for errors.... But I couldn't find any.....

Jen and I both know Chris but he happened to not be in that day which was a bummer but we will be back soon to talk machines, biking, trains or what ever madness we have to offer.

This is Chris Kings in house " tooling dept " on this end of the building.

Theres about 90 employees making some really rad parts and doing a great job to show USA can still keep them machines spinning.

I don't know how I managed to snap this photo during our coaster brake race thur Portland...

Trust me, there was heavy tire smoke from all the heavy power skids around the corners.

Mr. Poe is still holding the shop down..

Sometimes I find poop behind the machines and I have to be a mean to him...

He wasn't stoked to get told to quit shitting behind the press brake....

Jen and I had some crazy box seats to the Oakland A's game...

( what ever value they hold )

But it came with a chef..... With style..... Plus for some unknown reason...

The A's happened to win... thats a rare statement.

Back to the grind of designing and building...

Theres some really cool stuff showing up at the shop to build so stay tuned

Poe

My little dog Poe at the Oakland Port - Photo by Kane Lynch

Holy $#!+ where have I been.....

July at MLS is always a mad month for many reasons and so this is my complete July post in a nut shell...

1.Interbike is coming up
2. New product releases for 2012 for various companies
3. Prototype medical stuff
4. Bike Expo in San Francisco is coming up
5. Doing a Kickstarter.com grant for the 120 mph Speed bicycle project for filming
6. Working with 2 electric motorcycle companies
7. Designing home decor and gardening products for a few new companies
8. Working with a green company that produces generators that run 100% off of wood chip and biomass
9. Doing R&D machines for Clorox and its brands
10. Making various research projects for donut making
11. Still making more designs for the video game console project
12. Threw MLS prom at the machine shop
13. Getting ready for an art show coming up in a week, here in Oakland.
14. Also pulled a high speed chase with the cops for fun.... first time I have gotten caught.... sucks..... $$$$ :(
15. Working in LA and helping my brother on the turbocharged Honda race concept project
16. Its summer and you know how it goes... This is my first full Oakland summer and its been amazing with all the stuff to do and people to meet. It reminds me of back in Minneapolis with September weather, but all year round.
17. Almost forgot - Had personal lunch with famous designer Pierre Terblanche who designed all the Ducati motorcycles for the last like 15+ years, kinda stoked me out to say the least.

so where do I even start....

How about the fun stuff.... wait its all fun.....

This blurry pictures seems to stoke me out so much - its my summer and its been a blur of good times.
Matt leading the cruz on his custom Traffic cross bike to the hidden lake in the Oakland hills. Swimming at midnight is EPIC after a long ride!!

The new MLS Laboratory Home decor line will be coming out soon...
Made from recycled Lab materials and goodies these should stoke out your mom and have her asking for more. I bend them up on the big 90 ton press shown in the MLS video and the flowers are not included.

This is Jay (Chemical Engineer/designer/good looking smart girl) and myself hanging out after our meeting at All Power Labs in Berkeley. This company designs, builds and test a system called Gasifiers, which in a nut shell - take wood chips, chars them, extracts the gases from the charring process then uses that to run a natural gas engine. Running completely 100% on wood chips - sooooo cool to see it all happen.

This is one of the prototype systems that gets tested around the clock with various different things, if you ask them what they have run in the machine other then wood chips, this list will go for days, they have even run cigs for a full tobacco running gas engine you could drive a car with. That is Abrim the Fabricator/Shipping bitch standing in the blue hat.

I spend about 60+ hours a week working in my shop and other shops, but every once and a while I just have to shut it down and relax. we made a Santa Cruz run to swim in the river with the friends, Mr. Poe the dog is always down to relax it seems....?

Don't feed me coffee at 10 PM or else you will have a set of bars to ride down the street to the local bar for last call.

For real don't do it, now the 1938 Schwinn New World is a racing machine in under an hour.

PROM  at Monkey Likes Shiny -  "a moment in time" theme prom

The idea was to dress as a couple in a matching period correct clothing, we went as Steampunk....

My lovely dates for the night - Louise Chen and Mr. Poe

I fired up the sheet metal press and made her a fan out of aluminum using a clear plastic protractor in the middle so she could measure the degrees.

The punch was so spiked it almost evaporated.... need I say more

Thats Matt up front dancing to Kenneth's hit single " Girl check your signal" 

We had a list of celebs show up which stoked me out, also a live performance from  Kenneth Ronquillo and with over 70+ couples attending, the MLS headquarters was hopping with fun. When no one wanted to leave because of all the fun, I decided to take things in to my own hands by doing a 4th gear burnout and donuts on the dance floor with my dirt bike, in my own place destroying the hardwood floors and smoking the place out ( please don't tell the landlords) 

This is the Show coming up in Oakland if your in the area 

Also I have asked Mike Cleaver of Cleaver Bikes to join me in displaying some oddness brewed in Oakland.

To finish up this post I think the electric motorcycle will do the trick.

Jeff Sand of Sand Studios contacted me about doing some odd fab work on his top secret project.

The idea was to build a concept 100% electric motorcycle that looks good and rides even better.

Using his odd  1 to 1 scaled blue prints and no numbers given ( all by eye ) I some how made the bash guard out of 1/8 thick aluminum all cold worked on the big press and all my sheet metal tools. With little to no time left before the date to unveil I put the last minute polish on the bash guard ( its the aluminum part around the orange battery box, it protect the batteries from stuff hitting the frame, batteries or underside of the bike) I receive an email from him asking for more things to be made. This use to be my life doing this last minute BS when I was fabricating on air for Discovery Channel shows and also when I was working for Roland Sands Design, so to say the least I don't really even get upset or frustrated like most people do when this stuff comes in hours before the big event. 

The email said " hey make this stand for the bike and make it pretty" 

BAM!!!

done, the only problem is now my track bike only has one grip because I put the other one on the handle for the stand as you can see in the lower left of the picture. 

The photos is in Derek's shop in San Francisco which is sooooo sick, its called Moss Machine and they build some neat stuff there, even parts for the cable cars in San Francisco.

This photos is like taken an hour before we were to show the bike to a fully packed press release.

The BRD Redshift Electric Motorcycle with my bash guard left in the raw aluminum

It got painted black for press release. 

If you want to read more about it here is some info from the press release

 MX action  or  for some cool photos from the night( pictures )

Thanks everyone - This July has been fun !!!!!

Summer !!!!

Hey, its summer time and my machines are running non-stop around my shop.

Tons of prototypes for start up companies and some even for some Fortune 500 companies.

Game consoles,Electric motorcycles, 3 flaming 40 foot tall umbrellas, concept bicycles, and concept medical radness,

 I love it all !

Love to be any part of it...

Living the dream with Poe the dog

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