At the end of August, you saw me talking about the Rocky Mountain High Wheel rim that Brian Cawley at Caslebar Cycle Store, with Jim Spillane's guidance, was helping me to modify for the Irish roads over here. Well, we tried everything with no success. In fact, we'd reached a point where Jim was even going to create a batch of slightly longer spokes for the new slightly bigger rim when we hadn't heard back from the Polish blacksmith who you have seen help me before (March 2011 job). I had dropped my bad rim off with Pawel Guba, at his Global Metal Art factory, hoping he could buttress it with an added sleeve of metal around the full inside of the rim.
He said he could do the job but wasn't sure if he'd be able to get to it before some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu matches he had coming up. I knew he was the Irish champion in his weight class, here is some video of him winning a match in Dublin:
But I didn't know he was ramping up to fight for the European title. If that's not enough, my wife saw in the local newspaper that he had won first place in a prestigious Ireland art competition. He won it with an amazing metal jewelry box that I had seen him dabbling with.
If you want to see how blacksmiths go about making sculptures out of metal, here is Pawel making an award winning tabletop chess set:
Well, about a week ago, he called me to say he'd be back in town this week to finish my rim. When I asked him where he was, he told me he was in London. When I wanted to know what art competition he was involved in there, he said that he just took third in the European Jiu Jitsu championship! I was astounded at his modesty - especially since I had had to ask him why he was even in England to begin with. He promised to send me some professional quality video footage from one of his bouts.
We met today to discuss the project. Here he is with my rim:
As Pawel was grinding the paint off, he found even more
cracks waiting for disaster. Hopefully you can see
the tear above, where his thumb is.
Pawel even has one of his buddies involved. The hard plastic disk that will shape the three mil metal strip into a a semi circular gusset on the machine he has is being supplied by one of his friends. And Pawel tells me he should be getting that soon, If all goes according to plan, I will have a bullet proof rim soon. From there the build should be pretty straight forward this time around. Keeping m,y fingers crossed...
Talk about a real bullets powerhouse. Not only does this amazing man make magic with metal as well as mow down his Jiu Jitsu competition, but he also runs a huge workout facility that he lets his friends use so they can join him when he trains here locally..
Keep an eye on this space as Ireland offers its best talent to help me to get the Eagle back on the road.....
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