Mike Montgomery flips like a Boss!

 

This is the behind the scenes mini doco around Mikes infamous Roadbike flip as seen i the Spy Optics commercial.

http://www.vitalmtb.com/videos/member/SPY-ToC-Busche-Montgomery-Bike-Flip-Behind-the-Scenes,13664/Smutok,2463

Now that is how you roll up on the scene!

It all starts with a dream kids!

Mike Montgomery couldn’t wait for Xzibit to arrive so he went and pimped out his truck with his sponsors logos like a good pro athlete!

Drool over these.

The Death Star is nearing completion!

Once the final phase of the bike park is finished and the course is protected with special sealants the hype machine kicks in for Freeride BC! 

Then we can handle the masses and combat the wear and tear!

It is in our backyard, few blocks from our Facility and a Training are for all styles of riding, 2 huge professionally built pumptracks and intermediate to advanced Jump lines.

So this is a old shot of the construction days from a few years back, it will be looking like this in the spring when it gets refaced and redesigned. 

Who has a professional Fitness bike park in their back yard? Send me links! Who wants to challenge their community to get together and build another park like Freeride?

Reality Redesigned Contest!

So as many of you know we filmed a TV show around our production facility called Edge Factor Gnarly Metal!

The Edge Factor: Gnarly Metal - Full Episode on pinkbike.com

We filmed it around our new local event called Jumpship, it was a huge undertaking and great success.

OFFICIAL JUMPSHIP CONTEST VIDEO!! on pinkbike.com

Then mid filming of our episode the Producer Jeremy Bout who's brain never shuts off and rivals mine... decided that it wasn’t enough, lets launch a global design challenge and piggy back the shows release! I was already screwed for time and mid season so why not add more to the to do list…

Reality tv style design competition Reality Redesigned!

Turns out if you want it bad enough you get it and here is Jeremy's first instalment of Reality Redesigned.

Reality Redesigned - Defined. on pinkbike.com

 

Details on the competition will be on Pinkbikes front page shortly, but enjoy the sneak peek we have partnered with Intense and Cane Creek to be your personal manufacturers.

Straitlines 1.2 second Cameo

Aaron LaRocque called me up, actually facebooked me up and asked for me to be a zombie in his new project Strahan of the dead.

It was so fun and done on the cheap, check it out!

http://www.pinkbike.com/news/Strahan-of-the-Dead-Behind-the-Scenes-2011.html

My first appearance was an emotional explosion of raw talent as the zombie in the tree line with the shaky hand.

If you have eagle eyes you may notice the Arbutus racks in the film, Strahan’s new company captured in a great viral video.

so check the full release here.

http://www.pinkbike.com/news/Strahan-of-the-Dead-Behind-the-Scenes-2011.html

Okuma and Fanuc… a love story.

I have been biting at the bit to do our Ghetto shop tour #3 but the Robot has been delayed a bit. We have a new DH pedal coming that will be smaller in the body so perfect for the all mnt crowd as well.

This happy couple will work tirelessly through the nights producing hundreds of finished parts while we do other things.

 

This is just a small step into the right direction for us. We have always utilized automation but  this is our first fake employee and now we can only dream of ways to cut assembly and packaging times down.

 

Some cool stuff already is in reach for smaller firms, I hope we get to this stage soon-

 

Mike Montgomery and the boy who couldn’t smell!

Mike was in town last night after flying up to Whistler to design the new Krankworxs slope style course with the Claw, Seminuk and Vanderham for RedBull. If you are not aware of it, Monster got the boot and Redbull is taking over and from what Mike explained to me, it will be redonculousy awesome.

We went out for some beers last night after a product design meeting and I do not feel too good as I type this. But I’ll power through like a champion and post a vid Mike showed me from Osiris Shoes http://www.osirisshoes.com/

Short and sweet…

 

Mike is also the new Head Coach at Camp Of Champions this summer so he is amped to have control over the compound and he will be redesigning the lay out there as well.

Its going to be a rad summer, Mike is pumped.

 

Casey Groves knows the secret to life!

Our pedals can open a beer bottle but their may be dirt or poop in the webbing. Here Casey Demonstrates how to solve the no beer bottle opener scenario and avoid poop inside that cold bevy!

3 simple steps.

Flip bike

Spin Tire

Drink beer

Beer Bottle Trick from Casey Groves on Vimeo.

 

 

Straitline Kona National team!

Our kick ass distributor, Ty  at Groupe Sportif in Melbourne as seen below with my Office Paint sun glasses added on for extra cool has put together his National race team and of course Straitline is a sponsor, full kit.

 

Check it out here for full info http://cog.konaworld.com/archives/6022?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d0be53fe2eb0c67%2C0

 

Kona Project S2 Ep 1 from Sean Anderson on Vimeo.

Oldy but a goody!

Straitline‘s thunder down under Alan Hepburn posted this ages ago but I figured it needed a repost!

Yah, what Banshee just said!

Because this is so poetically written I simply stole it instead of trying to compete!

Excerpts from the Banshee blog

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“Jacob Gibbins has been the man behind the camera for most of our world cup team videos this year, as well as all track walk vids... check out this show real he put together, which features a lot of Adam Brayton, I might have to tell him to slow down so that he is in shot for longer....

 

Jacob made Adam sit down in a interview and be serious for once in his life. Adam talks out of his ass so this video is tame and we thank him for watching his P’s & Q’s!

 

 

This video was on Banshees blog and I just liked it, nothing to do with us but enjoy!

 

Ryan and Cody from Sam Tolhurst on Vimeo.

Vancouver Olympics!

This is shot from Overlooking downtown Vancouver, the infamous old North Shore is out of sight hidden by the Sky Scrapers but the city is always busing with commuters, rad place to bike any style you choose.

 

Now lets check it our after the winning goal scored by Team Canada against the USA. Over here in Victoria BC the entire city lit up with horns for an hour, the entire nation did the same pretty cool experience, check it out.

And this is just so Canadian… Air Canada delayed outgoing flights because all the passengers were glued to the tv’s in the terminals ignoring all boarding calls!

“VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Canada's largest airline has learned it sometimes has to take a back seat to the country's biggest sporting passion, ice hockey, the head of Air Canada said on Tuesday.

The airline was forced to delay a flight from Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games because passengers watching the end of gold medal final on airport televisions ignored repeated calls to board.

"We incurred a flight delay for a reason Air Canada had not yet encountered in over 72 years of existence," chief executive Calin Rovinescu told a business gathering.

The Canadian fans were rewarded for their delay, as the nail-biting end to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics saw Canada beat arch-rival United States 3-2 in overtime.”

READ ABOUT IT HERE

Micro parts! And a MTBcut happy ending!

Geek alert!!

Grab your Archie Comic and run away if you don’t like viewing anything tech related!

We just bought a fancy microscope to aid us in machining some complex parts for a client. It is like being a kid all over again putting everything within sight under the lens, a spec of dirt on the floor now becomes a mystical journey!

I used a paper clip for size reference, and paired the shots from above then closer up.

 

If I wasn’t known for talking out of my ass so much I would try to pass this next one off as my last vacation snorkeling but it is just a piece of material I found on the floor. It looks like it’s a glob of nickel.

In a few weeks we should have it hooked up to a TV so we can show items a bit better and more clear, the camera lens doesn’t like peering down the scope.

And again I am the worst guy ever to talk tech, so this video is very light and i bet 80 percent all wrong in everyway anyways!

 

Now lets un-dorkify and watch Stu over at MTBcut.tv hang out by himself with a camera!

Evil Pump Track of Death with Explosions and stuff!

Pump Tracks just sound so wimpy so the title ensures that you understand this will be a epic new addition to the Freeride BC course. http://www.freeridebc.com/
Chris Lamb is the man behind many of the best trails we love to shred in Whistler and last Summer he visited the park and got stoked on what we had planned. We were stoked just to have a guy like him build our slalom track!
So He has signed on to help future track development next Spring in http://www.freeridebc.com/ our local project of love!

The amazing people of Rotary have also agreed to help fundraise and in return we will have Chris make the Rotary Fitness section the place to be!

Check out some of Chris’s work in these links:
http://www.pinkbike.com/video/30834/
http://www.pinkbike.com/video/30843/
http://www.pinkbike.com/video/31016/

Chris's work…

Want to see our Warehouse?

This is titled Ghetto shop tour #2 for a reason, that is what it is and the first one was even worse so enjoy the show!

This is where the magic happens and we are pretty proud of what we have achieved over the many years of working our buts off to get to this point. The icing on the cake was taking front cover of American Machinist not anything that will sky rocket Straitline’s sales through the roof but the CNC dorks can sure have a good read!

Check it out here AMERICAN MACHINIST!  

 

Oh and this young gun needs some love! 

 

Kyle Marshall is up for athlete of the year over at Cycling BC

http://www.cyclingbc.net/itoolkit.asp?pg=DOWNHILL_CYCLIST_OF

 

Local ripper Dean Tennant is also up for the award…

It is a hard choice as I know them both but let me fill you in on Deans dark secrets…

DEAN TENNANT:

 

       

Now for the sake of FAIR voting we should look into Kyle's life too…

KYLE MARSHALL:

  

 

I hope this makes it a fair fight!

 

Go Vote now and do what’s right for all of humanities sake!

Straitline Front Cover of American Machinist!

This is us just being us and having fun down in America for Interbike Vegas!

This is us trying to be a bit more professional for a magazine spread in American Machinist!

 

Yes we love to have fun, yes we own a state of the art facility, and yes we need to drive it home how high tech we have been getting over the past 5 years… but there is a fine line of being a geek and boring the hell out of people so we just have fun and show tid bits of it all in the blog.

 

Few months back we took a call from Mori Seiki mentioning how American Machinist caught wind of our facility and wanted to learn more about our choice to evolve into a modern automated machine shop. I also think it is really important to drive home the costs and the overheads that a “TRUE” manufacturer carries with him and the staggering amount of processes needed to make a single product come to life.  This is a age of the “BRAND” where you outsource your goods to a manufacturing firm and carry little to no overhead what so ever.  Most of our clients are modern day Brands, nothing really wrong with that by any means but few really get to visit a facility to see how your shiny new product was made.

 

The flip side of the brand movement is that the product still needs to be made and someone somewhere just got hired to make it for you, stuff does not just fall out of trees and into Wall marts department stores. There is a lot of behind the scene work that goes on and I hope this article shows a bit about who we are and why we chose to automate our facility and prove that manufacturing in North America is not dying off rather it is coming back and thriving with the use of these modern machines! 

I think we are running at 19 hours a day of un manned CNC machining so I must warn you this article is basically like porn for machinists, it can get a bit techy but at least check out the pretty pictures on page 12!

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AMERICAN MACHINIST/ STRAITLINE ARTICLE 

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Oh, and you may notice a theme on the front cover!  That is Lama Cycles/ Morewood team rider all dressed up in the finest components.

.

 

His frame is actually made in house by our good friends in South Africa Patrick Morewood and his co pilot Richard Carter.

 

The wheels and hubs are by none other then Industry 9!

Canadian newbie's Elka Suspension –hard to see in the shots but trust me they are on the rig. I have a stage 5 installed on my Banshee Wildcard and these guys have a strong background in suspension, stoked for them!

And lastly all dressed up in Straitline Components gear!

 

Lama Cycles has also been appointed as a distributor for Straitline so expect to see them on the Race Courses next season with their pimped out Morewood rigs.