Saturday, April 4, 2009

Time for an update

Well, I've finally got a chance to breath and poke around the blogs again.  I've been terribly out of touch with my old bike friends, apologies.  But I did finally find a nice little engineering job.  After my long hopeful search for a cool location, I ended up with an interesting job, but not a great location.  I'm now here in Kearney, NE.  I suppose a bit closer to CO than Lincoln or Iowa, but not close enough:(  Alright, enough complaining, it's a solid job.  While I don't really like that they do make products for defense contracters, they also do commercial aerospace work:


The best part, is they are really good at making composites.  So over the past 3 weeks with the company I've had an exponential learning curve on composite manufacturing.  I thought I knew some, but really know now.  I've had hands on experience making a few parts already.  We do a lot of different composite parts, but my main project is all carbon fiber reinforced composite.  So being the bike enginerd, this is really good experience for that.  I also do lots of CAD, and being a small company, I have to really do the hardcore engineering stuff.  

As far as biking, there isn't a lot, but I haven't gotten out a lot yet.  There are a few state parks within ~40 miles, so I'm thinking I'll do a lot of weekend tour/camp biking.  Of course there's plenty of gravel grinding and road riding.  Got a Garmin handheld GPS the other day, so I'll have to get that going to explore some more.  Did find a little decent coffee shop, nothing like Lincoln, but decent.  That's about it for now.  

3 comments:

Paul said...

Congrats on the new job Alex!

I have moved to Facebook so I don't blog much anymore. Everything is going well though.

I hope all is well.

mr. f. g. superman said...

Nice. Sad that the freedom to roam came to a close, but I'm sure you don't feel that way. Finally get to do what you love again. Maybe RPM could start a bike component wing, the moniker seems fitting. Could be the love affair you've been looking for after all. Looks like I'll have to include Kearny on my trek this Summer/Fall.

Finally got shop space and am building. Working with a retired machinist/fabricator - lotsa experience. Also, building a custom bike for the paralympic rider you helped me with before, so if any ideas come to the surface out of your knowledge base, feel free to share. Lots of stress on one side of the bike, so I'm working on a custom bar/stem as well. Could work a trade for a carbon version, perhaps Alex needs a custom steel frame- just planting the seed...ha! Hope all is going well. Take care.

bontrag said...

I see you have a new blog name, assuming that's you Cory? Glad you chimed in, I'll slowly get back into blogging here. I'll try to keep more up-to-date. Your shop stuff sounds good, enjoy working with older machinists. You'll learn a ton, I've worked a handful myself, it's great experience.

I'm trying to put money away to buy a couple more frames, switching back to all steel and I want to add a single speed cross and 29er frame.