Back again. I'm giving up on the idea of blogging as such for a bit, but I'd better make a start on this backlog of bike photos from various Friends of Hubjub. Gonna work through them all in strict reverse order. First up is Chris Kerley's Bareknuckle, built up from a 56cm frame bought last week. Those cranks took my attention. According to Chris they're generic FSAs, but I could have sworn they were oldschool (ie pre-ENO) White Industries. Did FSA buy up the machinery?

No real news. I've pretty much sorted out the backlog (of admin, not orders) which was accumulating and am as a result tired out, but the system is now de-coked and running nicely as we gear up for the next US order. Bike of the day is Mike Hayes' lurvely Eddy Merckx, now sporting various Hubjub-sourced goodies, especially a Paul Hewitt wheelbuild on Phil high flanges. Yum. Soundtrack of the week is David Lynch's 'Lost Highway', sadly missing 'Song to the Siren' but otherwise all present and correct.

The last couple of days have been taken up with Hunt The Frameset, an interesting game somewhat akin to Battleships devised by DHL employees. Presumably they wanted an alternative to Ultimate Stack, the old company fave where you see who can stuff most bikes into one shipping container. (Double bonus for each pair of track ends that actually meets.) Cheer supplied by Nick Jones, who in real life is a shrink from South London. I won't list out the Hubjub goodies on this frame -- the real news is that Nick built it himself on a course run by Dave Yates. Wow!

It is with great regret that I... ah, bollocks, who'm I trying to kid? Nothing like putting the boot in where it's deserved. I know that this blog doesn't often discuss small business issues but I offer the following nugget to other mail order kids: ***do not use DHL***. I took up with this outfit over the summer and regretted it pretty quickly. Their greatest achievement to date was bending a FIXIE, inc frame that I shipped to Ireland. I used a stout box, a framekeeper, and a lot of padding: the damage they inflicted must have involved stacking the box with maybe half a ton on top of it, contrary to explicit instructions. What was sold as full insurance turned out to pay around 15% of book value. I used them to bring the replacement over: the supplier made a typo in the postcode and the DHL pixies couldn't be arsed to get the correct address from my account details, so the parcel went into limbo. I just managed to stop them shipping it back to point of origin, but the total journey time from Germany was more than two weeks. Very poo-er. Avoid.