what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

What’s left of Mad Fiber is up for auction   Alistair sent me links to the auctioneers from Florida who have come in to sweep up the dust bunnies in the old Essential Bakery space that once held a revolutionary carbon fiber wheel manufacturing company that sprouted in the fertile Puget Sound region allowing for a unique cross pollination from the aerospace industry, the software world and a bit of cycling too…and so on and so forth. The massive overbuilt one-0f-kind tools do not come with instruction manuals because nobody ever made wheels like that before. Many of those tools are third, fourth, or fifth iterations that evolved from thousands of hours of trial and error and experimentation and they needed a lot of tweaking and gentle nudges here and there.  Maybe they’d make great lawn ornaments or the most expensive hunks of scrap metal ever. But beware of the bad juju. 

The pictures of the empty shop with stuff scattered around willy-nilly make me queasy because I spent a lot of hours hunching over those work benches sorting spokes, huffing acetone and grinding off excess aerospace industry adhesives with a dremel tool.

Alistair also helped to remind me that the bright spot -- before, during and long after this Mad Fiber thing fades away--  has been and will continue to be Ric

4 Comments

thank you Alistair

Good call on that particular video Mark. Ric's delight in, and admiration for, a cleverly conceived and built machine/mechanism is really evident there. It's a great thing to see.

yeah man that is tough to look at. many good memories with a few crappy ones too. here's a toast to 0.001" just give it a little tap then push it through.

push it through. push it through. what I hear you saying is, push it through. Are you fucking kidding me? Push it through.

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