A beer sommelier is called a cicerone. :thumb:

Oh no, I had this discussion with Andy_K . Becoming a cicerone requires spending a lot of time, money and structured study.

Andy's just a beer sommelier.

:D

Plus, if you tell Andy you want an IPA he’ll walk away and not come back.

I have a simple and consistent policy on this. If your beer is being shipped across two or more oceans and extra hops are needed to keep it drinkable then IPA is acceptable. Otherwise, the beer shouldn't be intentionally ruined in this way.

There are a lot of rubbish IPAs out there. Mediocre ones, too. So I more than understand many people's distaste for them. Lately, I have found myself more interested in less aggressive beers (dark pilsners, etc) for numerous reasons, but I still like the IPA clan (and have a handful of favorites). Imperial IPAs, I have found, can correct an overexuberant hop profile with their increased malt presence, but can still be ruined. :/ At least we have 1,000 Hazy IPA options now!...........:foo:

At this time of year you should all be drinking German festbiers! Vienna lagers, marzens, etc.

This is the real reason I've become so militant against IPAs. I agree there are a few good ones, but there are just soooooooo many. The tipping point for me came a few years ago when I stopped at a bar in Hood River that had six beers on tap...five IPAs and an APA. :notamused:

Yes!!!

"Do you have anything not IPA?"
"uhh... Bud Lite in a can"

I'm pretty excited about how the fork turned out.

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The new paint is glossier than the old, but a few rides ought to take care of that. I think the color is a good match.

I was really planning to put the frame painting off until this weekend, but I peeked at the forecast and saw 15-25 mile per hour winds Saturday and Sunday, so I snuck out midday and gave it a hasty shot. I'm afraid I may have put it on too thick in a few spots, which will be especially bad if I did it near the masking around the bottom bracket. Hopefully I can smooth it out with sandpaper.

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Pay no attention to the level of clutter in my garage. Speaking of which, you know what's a really awful feeling? When you've just painted a frame and you're turning it around to hang it up to dry and you feel the headtube bump your elbow. :eek: It doesn't look like it left a mark. I guess it had dried enough by then for me to get away with that, but it was a serious "oh crap!" moment.

I've still got some things to clean up, not least of which is the significant amount of residue left by my frog tape, and there's a spot or two where I managed to not completely cover the primer, but overall I feel confident that I'll be able to smooth over the problems.

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Look at the bottom bracket picture, in particular. That's got three tubes making abrupt transitions from the original paint to the new paint. You'll have no problem spotting the edges, but I'm pretty sure I can fix that with a bit of cleaning solvent, some fine grit sandpaper, and maybe some car wax. And even if I can't, it's in a spot that won't draw the eye. Plus, look at the same area in the wide shot of the frame!

Looking good! Most of those areas will be obscured by hardware, anyway, right? Crank, chain, cables, seat bag... Plenty of smokescreen if the clean up is not to your liking, but it's a really good match so far.

Exactly! I think I'll be able to get it to blend, but even the way it is right now (hanging on the workstand behind me as I type) if I turn quickly and look at it, absolutely nothing jumps out at me. The first thing that catches my eye as I look it over is the seat tube transition, and that happens almost exactly where the front derailleur clamp will be.

Now I just need to somehow find the patience to give the paint a week or two to dry before I start hanging parts on it. :innocent:

Soften the transition lines and no one will notice. Good work on the color match.

it's looking fantastic so far

I was hawing on that frame and knew it would probably end up going thru Atelier gugie if I ended up with it, but nice job.

Nice work!
Best, Ben

On another thread, I got some tips for converting the rattle can to a form I could use for touch up paint. Long story short....

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It was as thin as water in the jar, but started to dry very quickly as I brushed it on. The early results were good, but I ended up making some mistakes before I was done that will require fixing up.

A little feathering to hide the masking line on the seat tube and down tube.

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This is about mid-blade on the fork where the original paints was intact. There's a spot in the center of this picture where I filled a chip the went down to the chrome. I wish I had a before picture.

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Finally, remember the spot I mentioned wear I bumped it with my elbow right after painting? Well, I found that on the lower head tube lug. There was also some scraping around the lugs where I masked it off too close and didn't cover part of what had been sanded away. I'm not entirely sure what I did here. I think maybe I put down some paint, did some other things, and then tried to come back to it after it had started to thicken. Whatever it was, the brush decided to shed some bristles here and it just generally ended up looking pretty awful.

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I don't know how this will turn out, but my first attempt to fix it was hitting it with some paint thinner to take off a lot of the paint I didn't need in this area. I'm not sure if the drops you see in the picture below will dry as paint or evaporate. This will definitely be a place I have to revisit with the touch-up paint. It's also likely to require some sanding.

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I've reached the point where everything I do to the paint is making it worse. So, I think I need to accept that I don't have the patience or skill to get this perfect. It looks pretty good, and I might come back to it from time to time, but for now I'm moving on to the build and ride phase of the project.

This weekend, I built the wheels.

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Today I installed the headset. Usually I borrow a proper headset press from [MENTION=381793]gugie[/MENTION] for nice bikes like this. I was feeling impatient today, so I used my DIY headset press. The problem with the DIY tool is that 90% of the time at least one of the cups wants to go in crooked. I added a few more bits to my tool today to try to fix that. The copper reduction fitting serves pretty well as a drift, but I needed something to keep it centered on the threaded rod. Using what I had on hand, I added an extra nut as a guide for the smaller section and a couple of washers with some pipe insulation for the wider section. The washers are a close fit to keep it centered, and the pipe insulation fills space so the washer don't get crooked. All of this still leaves about a millimeter of wiggle. It's not as good as a proper tool, but it worked much better than the DIY tool without these additions. As a MacGuyver modification to a DIY tool, I'm pretty happy with it. The second picture below shows the upper cup slightly angled, but this was before I started tightening the nuts. Once I got it started it straightened itself out reasonably well.

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The headset, BTW, is a Specialized bit that I had on another bike and reclaimed for this project. It's different from the Speciailized headset listed on VeloBase in that it doesn't have O-ring seals. There are no grooves for them, so they aren't just missing. It says "Specialized" on the lock ring and inside the upper race.

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Finally, the current state of the bike.

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Next up, I need to buy a bottom bracket and start installing the drivetrain.

Just in time for the rainy season!

I know! That's going to suck. I guess I should have said I'm moving on to the build phase. The ride phase may not come until June.

Looks like NOAA has it dry here Sun.and Mon.

Get to it. ;)

That sounds an awful lot like a deadline. I'm dodging deadlines pretty aggressively these days.

Nah, just trying to be helpful. :D

And I appreciate that. I was just saying that I'm not exactly getting things done at record speed lately, as is evidenced by the three weeks it took me to go from starting to paint to installing the headset. :)

:thumb: No worries, I get it, right there with ya.

I was on track to finally get back out to the Gorge last Sunday, had fellow workers lined up and all.

Wheels fell off later Sat. when Ms. merziac got sick and put that away.

So I may try for this Sun. and or Sun. the 15th so we'll see, weather may have other plans. ;)

Feel free to join in either or, maybe. :)

Finally, at long last, the completed bike...

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I don't have anything better than a dirty garage door picture at this point. Often I'll roll the bike out for pictures in front of the empty field across from my house, but today someone was parked there. I've made a habit lately of consulting [MENTION=401497]RiddleOfSteel[/MENTION] on aesthetic choices like bar tape and cable color, but since he built a red Allez not long ago, I was able to see what he thought without bugging him. There are quite a few other red Allez pics on the internet too, so this one wasn't hard to visualize. The white cables were inspired by the pics [MENTION=431307]Dean51[/MENTION] sent me of his 3Rensho Allez. I was planning to use black sidewall tires, but I tried these from another bike for clearance info and loved the look enough to keep them.

More detail pics:

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Wow! That came out beautifully! You can always bug me about aesthetics. :lol: The Campy triple setup looks right at home, as do the very clean-yet-detail-y wheelset. I think the wheels and tires play perfectly off the clean/minimally graphic'd frameset, not only in graphics-wise, but also in the black/tan/red/spot of silver composition. It should be such a great rider. Congrats!

Is that stem out past the minimum insert line?

Gorgeous bike!

No, that line is a scratch from a previous use. There are about 80mm of stem below the locknut. It's a Soma Sutro, which is 180mm tall.

[MENTION=111144]Andy_K[/MENTION] Very Classic! Also inspirational! I may just sand down my 760 and put another coal of black on it. The 610 should be my painting skills test after the 760.

Applaud the salvation effort too! Great job [MENTION=381793]gugie[/MENTION]!