September, 2010

How nice is this?

click on the photo for more images

Mate of mine Mark Thurston (and custom tool maker for the shoppe) has built this beautiful cruiser for his missis to pootle around the VW shows they frequent. Parts have been sourced from a variety of places like Ridelow in Manchester, the internet and crucially some retired old 20″ wheeled shoppers from the 70′s – doing his bit for the environment there!

The wheels are a 72 hole radial spoke pattern, they were a 36 hole rim and hub but Mark being Mark he made himself a jig and drilled a few extra holes. Also on the back wheel you can see a retro fit cable disc brake with the cable housing running through the frame – this means no lugs anywhere on the frame – a nice touch.

Check out the pin striping on the mudguards with the chrome centre. All the cream pinstripes were done by hand!

The good news is that he’s got another one called the ‘Shopper Chopper’ and hopefully I’ll have some photo’s of that soon.

Hello.

It’s been a long time hasn’t it?

You well?

It was way back on the 31st May 2009 when the last post from me appeared and what a year it’s been since then. No excuses for not keeping up the blog I’m just busy and lazy – not a great combo for a blog as it turns out.

So what’s been going on?

First some sad news. A great friend of mine and the shop, Terry Stokes, sadly died last September at the Holme Valley Mountain Bike Challenge. The exact details are unclear but it appears that Terry came off his bike and hit the gable end of a house fracturing his skull causing internal bleeding. He died a week later at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary with his family by his side. He was 55. Terry loved his bikes and his biking. He had been riding since he was a young man from road racing to touring to the early days of MTB. He will be best remembered by me as the guy who could fix anything; whenever we had a stuck seatpost or a tricky job that needed some patience he would step in, take control and sort it out. Here’s a photo I found of him after he slid down a slippery track near Bolton Abbey – covered in mud but still smiling.

RIP Terry.

On to better news now and the birth of our son Alexander Michael Hanney Firth, born in the early hours on the 26th January 2010. Here’s a recent pic of him with his dad on his first holiday in Scotland. Not ready for his first bike yet but believe me when I say it’s in the pipeline – watch this space!

The shop is going well, getting busier every year and still getting some interesting bikes in for servicing. We have new signage, new windows upstairs and a new raised window display on the inside giving the shop a new look.

Hopefully another post soon, certainly not in 16 months time.