I haven't posted in a while, mostly because life has been in total chaos and I've had no time. Almost 2.5+ years ago my wife filed for divorce and we had a gnarly battle over parenting time, and the finances. After blowing damn near everything I had on lawyers, I finally ended up with 40% parenting time during the school year and 50% during the summer. I now know why every guy I know will tell you divorce is 100% biased against men in this state. The courts pretend it's equitable, but it's fully stacked against you. It's mind boggling that it doesn't default to 50% especially when you dont have a single negative check mark against you, let alone a parking ticket. But at least now I can take my kid biking and skiing at least every-other weekend. My Ex had argued that was reckless engagement. WTF? She ended up with all of our retirement and I get the pleasure of buying her out from the house, even thou she never paid a cent towards it, but you know what, at least I'm now free from that mess other than sorting out the house buy out.
The winter after our divorce started, we had an avalanche accident at the end of our work trip in Japan, caused by another group, that killed one of my athletes and good friend, in addition to killing a skier from the group and burying my best friend 5' deep for 25 minutes. Dealing with that situation, the 8 hour long Japanese police interrogation the next day (The Japanese police sent their organized crime unit to investigate it as a murder) and all of the work to get my friends body back home to his newlywed wife took a toll on me and a I took a few months off to get my head right. At the end of the season, I along with my boss, where pushed out of our long term contracts / employment with Ikon pass (mostly due to taking personal time after the accident while on the work trip for them) just in time to see the entire outdoor industry implode from the post covid bubble. I saw that bubble pop coming and had managed to save a ton of cash, not only from the few boom years of Covid, but from my entire career. Unfortunately my Ex-got nearly all of it. So I went from 3 of my best years ever making stupid good money, to for the first time in 25 years not having a single contract or source of income. So with zero signs of perspective work, and so far no success finding a job in a different industry / field, last summer I decided to start a side job business of rebuilding mountain bike suspension and mounting ski bindings this fall. That has proven to be crazy busy, and luckily all of the tools that I had acquired over the years proved to be a nice reserve for bringing in additional income. So far it hasn't been enough to fully support me, but at least its enough to help slow the flow of funds flowing out of my meager savings I got left with after the divorce.
So long story short, I went from making stupid good money with lots of free time, to making very little with almost no free time... and I now get to start all over in regard to retirement at age 45. In other words, I'm now doing it all in reverse, as I had the lifestyle of being retired for the last 25 years, and now I get to work my *** off harder than ever to try to rebuild, but hey at least I really enjoy it. If the photo business ever comes back around, combined with the shop side business, it should allow me to rebuild rather quickly... or at least that what's the eternal optimist in me wants to believe.
Along the way 8 months into the divorce, I just happen to meet an amazing lady friend when I wasn't looking, (former World Cup mountain bike racer, former Single Speed World Champ), thats now a family med doc, and has a daughter the same age as my son (the kids have become best friends). She's helped me out in so many ways as a friend during what's been the most stressful string of life events I could have ever imagined. She's in the process of building a second home down in Sedona, so working with her on designing the floor plans, etc has been a nice distraction for me. It's also a welcome change to finally be with someone that gets pissed if I don't ride my bike daily, VS. someone that was in spite of me doing it.
The last year or so, I've watched my 81 year old dad's health decline rapidly. His body will no longer produce saliva, so it's nearly impossible for him to eat causing his body to basically starve him to death. He's been to every specialist and they have done everything they can to figure out what is causing it / treatment and they have zero answers. It looks like cancer, but they have fully ruled that out. 2 weeks ago they installed a feeding tube, and then 2 days later at home he was complaining of chest pain all day and his wife just thought it was from the feeding tube incision, after 8 hours she finally called 911 and he was in the hospital for 2 days before she let any of the family know. I only found out when my dad didnt call 2 days in a row (We have always talked daily and I'm damn grateful for that relationship with him). When drove back to Yakima to see him the next day I spoke to the doc and evidently, that chest pain was most likely a heart attack (He had all of the enzyme markers for it, but he is so weak they cant do any intervention let go in and verify what happened, and my dad has asked to be full DNR now. The lack of nutrition has caused his short term memory to almost disappear and his wife isn't doing the best mentally either with all of the stress (she's in denial that there is something wrong with my dad) So I've had my hands full getting him from the hospital into a nursing home while trying to get in home care setup. Dying is a crazy emotional process, and while I'm thankful I keep having opportunities to say goodby, it's damn hard when each time I do say goodby in the back of my mind, I wonder if thats the last time. I remember my mom telling me when she was dying of cancer 20 years ago, that no matter how much family or friends you have or how often they visit, dying is a lonely process as you have to do it by yourself. My dad told me when I visited this week, that he's still learning how to grow old as he's never done it before and its happening fast (he still has some humor left!). It's also crazy how a guy that once designed nuclear reactors for submarines and was the head of engineering out at Hanford for the B-plant (Plutonium / Nuke waist processing) and its clean up now has a hard time holding a 10 minute conversation. Thankfully his long term memory is still sharp, but he keeps saying the hardest part of the short term memory going, is the inability to reason in the thought process, ie, mentally compare two scenarios, etc.
As if that wasnt enough my long time free ski partner, died in a freak ski accident 10 days ago too.
This isn't meant to be a pity me post, rather just all of the **** thats gone on lately. I've had so many things go perfect in my life, where I've gotten to literally live a Billionaire's lifestyle on a dirt bag budget heliskiing all of the world, have had a successful career that I aboslutlue loved and the best son I could ever ask for. So sooner or later, things were bound to go sideways. Hopefully this is just all of those major life events all once, and once they are out of the way, it's back to the good life. Things are looking up too. A major book publisher reached out to me via a literary agent, to recruit me to write a book on skiing. Never thought I'd get into writing a book, despite licensing my images in countless books over the years. Signing a contract with a representative and learning about the book publishing world and its contracts and advance payments, royalties, etc has been very educating to say the least.... I'm kinda looking forward to working on the project despite the fact it's going to be a big investment in time.
Ok, back to why you are probably reading this thread in the first place, workshop stuff.
Part of the success with the suspension business, is that I turn the rebuilds around in 24 hours, while most places send them out and are a month + out on turnaround times. I am also willing to do stuff most places wont, such as rebuilding Ohlins... turns out they are actually easier to service than most Fox / Rockshocks stuff. The main piston / bladder is just held in place by snap rings. The the whole seal head gets replaced as a unit.
The suspension business slowed down this fall, just as ski binding mounts picked up. Once again, thats been super successful as I turn the mounts around in an hour while every shop in town is 2 weeks out. The key to that speed, is A, experience, but having all of the proper tooling.
I just so happen to have the largest collection of binding jigs in the PNW. You cant by these on the open market, as you have to be a dealer for each brands binding to get their jigs. Since I've worked with all of the brands over the years doing their catalog shoots, I have acquired every jig. Only other way to get them is if you find a shop selling them used which is rare and they are stupid expensive. I.E $350 and up!
I even have the ATK factory jig. ATK is an Italian ski touring binding maker, they make the Ferrari of ski bindings all beautifully CNC'd. Their jig is no exception as its machined and laser etched out of billet, while every other jig is stamped sheet metal.
Locally at Baker we have a lot of college age kids that like to really push it on skis. For them, the CAST touring conversion for the old school Look Pivot bindings is the most burley setup you can get. Problem is it requires two more holes to be drilled in addition to what the standard look jig has.
So I laid the locations out using the DRO on the mill, and machined a prototype jig up. I just so happened to have a contact at
ROXBO who makes the factory jigs for most brands and got them to custom make me a factory jig, but with the extra holes for the Cast system.
So I'm now the only guy with a factory jig for those bindings, and it saves me a ton of time. It wasn't cheap to make, but it paid for itself the first week I had it, in the amount I uncharge for the Cast system.
The biggest time saver tho, is eliminating process time. The single biggest repeatable time ****, was changing bits during the mounting process, so I added a Festool CSXS 12 to the fleet. I know have their impact driver for zipping out old binding screws for remounts, the drill dedicated to drilling new holes, a CXS just for counting sinking, and then the new CXS for installing the binding screws and finally ya WERA torque limiting driver to set the torque to the factory spec of 4NM.
For the last 25 years, for myself and the athletes, we never bothered testing our bindings, but we were almost always mounting up new bindings every time. I wont do that for the general public for liability reasons, so I purchased a
Vermont Release Calibrator. These are essentially stupid expensive torque wrenches with special adapters to fit in ski boots. The complete system is only $6200!
And it's essentially just a beam style torque wrench with two ranges in NM depending on if you are using the longer arm attachment to test the forward release. At some point, I think I'm going to invest in a good digital Torque wrench to replace this, fi I can figure out how to replicate the dual value mode.
