My last few months have been wild! I’ve barely had time to sit down! (When I’ve not been floating down an Alpine river on an inflatable American flag while drinking a nuclear coloured cocktail of some sort, but more on that later..)
Happy Days Cycles has seen some big changes in the last year and a bit since Jonny and I took over. We’ve sold more bikes than ever before, fixed more bikes than ever before and raised more money for Happy Days Homeless Charity than ever before! We’ve run mechanical skills lessons, we’ve helped a few kids to get their Duke of Edinburgh awards, run guided rides, provided support for events and loads more I can’t remember. The shop has gone from a dark badly lit room full of dusty old second hand bikes with a workshop full of tools you wouldn’t want anywhere near your bike, to a still badly lit room full of sparkling pre-loved bikes. The workshop has also come on massively with the addition of some real workbenches rather than the decidedly Heath Robinson benches made from random bits of two-by-four.
In fact this month I managed to convince the charity Directors to finally get rid of the final wooden bench and spring for a fancy new roll cab to help with my never ending storage space problems. I can’t tell you how much this thing makes my life easier! Previously I’d have to move the bike around in the stand so I can get behind it to pull a box full of boxes out of a cupboard from which I then have to select the right box, then remove the box find the part I want, then reverse the whole setup to put the box back in the cupboard. Now, if I need a bearing or a bolt or a washer or an O-ring or any number of things like that, I can just open a drawer and have them all laid out in front of me ready to go!
I reckon this roll cab will save me hours every year and it’s gonna help me no end with my workshop tidiness and organisation obsession that’s just getting worse and worse… As a side note if anyone else has this kind of problem/obsession I’d highly recommend Adam Savage from Mythbusters YouTube channel, it’s very therapeutic watching him organise his workspace and explain his decision making process for why he does things, he also has videos about props he made from all my favourite sci-fi movies so it hits on two levels for me. There’s not a lot I like more after a day of using tools for eight plus hours than watching a dude talk about using and organising tools at length!
Also @Cobraframebuilding on Instagram for less relaxing content but another type of workshop that’s in a constant state of flux as Joe, the guy who runs it, fits out his new workspace into what seems like it will be the most efficient factory space imaginable. His problem solving skills and ingenuity are amazing. Also he sometimes goes on rants about big ol’ machines in his shop and they’re very interesting!
A post shared by Joe Roggenbuck (@cobraframebuilding)
…and back to my/real life…The shop being so much busier has taken its toll slightly on my more creative side doing repairs the last few months, more to fix means less time to make a something to fix something out of something else and more of just doing normal bike shop stuff like fitting stuff that doesn’t require a Dremel/hacksaw/drill/tap set, etc etc.
The level of bikes that I’m working on in the shop has stepped up massively as well (in part due to this column, so thanks very much for that! Y’all know who you are! Xx ) and that means that there are a lot less hacky, bodgey fixes to keep an older part going and a lot more bolting on shiny new parts. This is great business for the shop but less so for my column about weird fixes!
Lacking inspiration in work due to workload was leading to lacking inspiration for writing about work. Maybe it’s burnout, the workload over the last year has been steadily growing, reaching a fever pitch this summer. We’ve been doing extra hours to stay on top of things and without the help of our volunteers there’s no way I could have coped with the volume of work that was coming through the shop, I really can’t stress how grateful I am for them all and the herculean efforts they’ve all put in. There’s definitely no way I’d have been able to do it without them, so biggest of big ups to Noah and Jack and everyone else who’s ever helped out for all their help!
I love working at the shop and I’m stoked to go to work there every day but the last year has been exhausting and having taken over at the tail end of the pandemic it had been a long time since I’d had a proper break and some time to properly get the oil out of my hands. As busy as we were I NEEDED a holiday, luckily I had one booked! A holiday booked long before I even moved to Calderdale. A holiday to my favourite place on Earth (that I’ve been to), Slovenia! Every year (pandemic withstanding) since I met my girlfriend we’ve made the pilgrimage to the beautiful Soća Valley in Slovenia to indulge my other main passion in life beside bikes, Punk Rock Music!
(Also: apparently Slovenia is the place to go when you’re very busy with work this summer as the taxi driver who picked us up at the airport informed us that it was where Boris Johnson was currently on holiday, doing some of that incredibly important business that he just had to do before leaving office.)
Punk Rock Holiday is an absolutely terrible name for a festival but it does describe what happens there very aptly.
Basically every year 6000 punkers from all over the world descend on the tiny Slovenian town of Tolmin nestled in the Julian Alps to spend a week camping in one of the most beautiful areas of the world, spending the days floating down the crystal clear Soća river on inflatables shaped like just about anything you can imagine, and the nights sweating away watching bands made up of middle age men singing songs they wrote as teenagers!
After a full week of drunken river based antics we’d decided to stay in Tolmin for a few days after the festival to give ourselves the chance to properly relax without the constant festival noise and ever present threat of someone falling over your tent while you’re in it. We checked into a local campsite where the loudest it got was a group of scouts singing Coldplay songs with an acoustic guitar.
Every year I’ve been here I’ve wished I had a bike with me so I could explore these crazy mountains that surround the town and staying few days after the festival finally gave me my chance. There’s a whole variety of local bike rental places to choose from with any kind of bike available from basic hybrids to full suspension, as long as you want it with a motor. There were a few places still advertising non e-bikes but no one seemed to have any available for hire – in Slovenia the E-revolution has been and gone!
I settled on a full suspension Haibike from the awesomely helpful Azimut Center for the very reasonable price of €38 for a full day between 9am and 7pm. I followed my nose into the hills and soon came across a group of local riders stopped on their way back into town. They pointed me in the direction of a trail that I could see climb steeply up and around the side of a forebodingly big and jagged looking mountain. Through a combination of swoopy arm movements and repetition of the word ‘turns’ I was fairly confident they were sending me somewhere I’d enjoy.
The climb was steeper and longer than anything I’d ever usually contemplate, especially in the ridiculous midday heat of a Slovenian summer, so the assistance given by the motor was very much appreciated. Riding some sections felt more like riding moto trials than mountain biking! This is the most extensive off road ride I’ve done on an e-bike and while I was by no means a hater before, I just felt like I didn’t need one. But if I can have this much fun on a relatively underpowered normal weight e-bike I reckon one of this new breed of lightweight mid powered e-bikes might be about the most fun possible on a bike, especially in a place like this! More investigation needed..
Anyway after the climb comes the descent! Or in fact no, after the climb comes the enormous natural amphitheatre where the mountain carries on even higher all around with mind bendingly steep, seemingly unscaleable walls carved by millenia of weather and water. Maybe it was my slightly altered emotional state after a week doing what punkers do when you leave them in the woods for a week but it was more than enough to make me shed a tear. After gathering myself and working out that there was a way out of this awe inspiring arena that didn’t involve just turning round and heading back the way I came, I finally found out what all the swoopy hand movements had been about from the riders I met earlier. The return trail was a line of switchbacks running right through the woodland that having seen it on my way up I thought would have been too steep to ride – it turns out nothing’s too steep if you cut enough switchbacks and then line them with fist size rocks! If you’ve ever ridden Jacobs Ladder in the Peaks, think the bottom part of that after the gate on the right, but for 20 minutes! Oh and did I mention the euro brake setup leading to more than a few almost full death rolls off the side of the track?
After Armpumpapalooza the track opened up into a swooping doubletrack down through postcard alpine farms down to the gate where I’d met the local riders earlier. There was a minibus there with a whole bunch of tourists getting off and shuffling up a very steep road out of sight. I decided to follow and proceeded up the road only to quickly find out why the minibus waits at the bottom! The road was so steep I was battling to either keep the front end of the bike from wandering like a dog after a scent, or the back end from spitting gravel on crowds of elderly tourists.
After probably half a mile and a couple more switchbacks I approached an amazing looking little church on the mountain built in the early 20th century by Austrian Soldiers, so I stopped here and ate the remains of my packed lunch, and almost drank the last of my water. With this and the rapidly depleting battery of my steed I decided that further exploration might not be the best idea and it was about time to head back into town. The descent back was mostly on the road that the minibus takes to take people up to the church, which judging by the lack of safety barriers and the sheer drop off to the side is enough, I’m sure, to convince just about anyone they need church! Unless, that is, you’re on a bike, in which case it’s a super fun doubletrack with bermed corners and the odd jump built into the walls on one side. Just be sure to watch out for minibuses coming up the other way!
I rolled back into town with a single bar remaining on the bike’s battery level indicator feeling fully refreshed and recharged and hyped on bikes! Ready to hit the ground running and fix some shizz when I got back to real life and back to work less than 48hrs later. And fix some shizz I would, but I’ll talk about that next time. Sometimes the mechanic needs fixing, this time I’m what’s Back From The Dead! Oooh how narcissistic!
