Normally, moving is a complete drag both physically and emotionally. The days and weeks before are a slow grind of abstract organization, planning and sitting on the phone with various permitting offices, mostly being on hold the entire time. One can only take so much smooth elevator jazz. You plan and wait, but can’t execute anything until you actually have some sort of moving vessel, in our case a 28ft truck…thankfully Shawn grew up on a farm. Then there’s the actual moving day (read: forever, it seems) which bring a unique cluster of unique insanity for which you thought you were prepared. Of course, you are completely wrong but you won’t know that until later when you can’t find the drill… you just had it.
Shop disassembly is usually the first task, you know, taking down any random bins you have and making a glorified leaning tower only to be moved again once the truck shows up. Once *everything* is on the ground you realize, “holy shit, when did I get so many pallet racks”. They need to come down. Boxes need procuring and creation, bins need stacking, other piles are created and moved several times before they even make it onto any kind of truck. One-ton lathes need relocation. Paint booths require teardown and selling. Wet Sanding booths, those also need to come down and move. Pallet jacks and forklifts are on overdrive.
So, why’d we do it? Well, other than our building being set for demolition the time was right. The old shop filled the necessity of three workers, however, with our recent growth and workforce expansion we were needing more room and build out ability. As a company, our entire history has been dealing with continual adaption on both subtle and massive scales and this move is a logical conclusion to that ongoing process. Version 4.0 is already bigger and better than ever.
Our new building, located at 3380 SE 20th Ave, has a much bigger front office which also serves as our showroom and carbon fiber bicycle manufacturing museum. We’re further able to separate the individual repair and paint process stages into their own areas, therefore extremely optimizing our workflow. There’s now a negative pressure paint room and a clean room for carbon lay-up, as well as a packing and rebuild area. The plan being to hire a shipping/rebuild specialist for the busy summer times. As Beyoncé said, “lemme lemme upgrade ya”. Of course, it’s only been a week but the new shop vibe 4.0 is unparalleled in anything we’ve ever experienced. Each and every one of us is stoked beyond belief.
What does this mean for you, our dear customer? More of the same, really, but better. Our main goal is to continue our industry-leading repair service, providing the highest quality repair and repaint services. We’ve heavily invested in NDT (non-destructive testing), such as ultrasound, infrared and fluorescing penetrant dye as means of gathering an entire picture of how bikes are damaged and can be damaged.
We’re continuing development on our 3D printing capabilities for more small parts fabrication, and we are extremely vetting out the addition of a 3d Titanium Laser Printer. We’re sponsoring races (we’d like to partner even more, so get at us!) and getting out into the community. The long and short of everything is, we’re gonna keep doing the same that we’ve always done. But bigger, better and faster than ever before. We’re coming up and we want the world to know, we’ve got to let it show.
Lastly, we finally feel like we got our shit together now, like, completely. We figured out the last missing piece of the puzzle: we’ve never made a T-shirt available to you. So, here it is.