Rainy Mondays...

Rain rain go away! Bank holiday Monday, lot's of frustrated riders not being able to ride in the bad weather... oh well, might as well come and visit Pijin!

Slosh dropped by to cheer up the house. At least James was excited to see him! After checking out Carlos last week, he's managed to get his hands on Mr Slosh! Hmm... not too sure Slosh's girl fans will appreciate the picture.


Always good to see 'Wykeham Will' and his mates. He hasn't forgotten us now that he's famous and even took the time to sign his article [page 158] in the shop copy of Ride! (The signed copy of Ride is up for sale to the highest bidder.) He's also the first guy to get his finger stuck in a stem! Had to undo the allen bolts to let his swollen finger out. Better stick a warning on the stems in future - 'Caution - don't put your finger in the hole, it might get stuck!'.



Finally managed to get some pics of James bike. It's the shiniest bike in England! Lot's of time spent polishing...

New paint jobs & girls jeans

A little update on what the Pijin kids are riding...

Carlos now has a new bright green Mankind Kingdom frame. He absolutely loves it right now, but no doubt he will get bored in 2 months and ride something else. Just like his girlfriends...


Meanwhile, Pretty Joe has stripped the paint off his Sputnic, and Jake and Dan A have both had the bikes sprayed at a BMW garage. Jake's bike is now TVR purple, and Dan's is Lamborghini yellow!

Talking of Dan A, he's a bit of a strange boy. Went round sweeping the floor and cleaning the glass on the counter after we shut the shop. Nothing wrong with that except he's not a Pijin employee and nobody asked him to do it! Normally, I have to bully Carlos or Dave into doing the cleaning...


And finally, we have a picture of Dave wearing a pair of jeans belonging to Flo's younger sister! [I think I need to have a few words with Dave about the Pijin dress code...]

Questions & Answers

Hello all. It's been a long time since the last blog! Been a combination of laziness and absence from the shop...

First off, let's clear a few questions which I've been asked over and over and over and over and over again in the last few weeks. Hopefully I won't have to answer them again!

Question : Have you left Pijin?
Answer : No, I have not. Why would I ever do that?! For now, I just don't work during week days anymore, only on weekends. Week days are spent working on a new website for THQ (who make video games). Once that is done, I will be back!

Question : Who's that girl who's always in the shop?
Answer : Her name is Flo. She helped out for a few hours one day when we were short staffed (and became Pijin's first female member of staff!). Since then, she's become a bit of a squatter and now we can't get rid of her – she scares me!

Question : When are you going to post another blog entry?
Answer : I'm writing it now...

Question : Can I have a job?
Answer : Yes, but only if you're prettier than Joe, can drink more beer than J.P, wear tighter T-shirts than Carlos, are more meticulous at tidying than James, not ask for loans like Dave and be a bigger MySpace addict than Flo. [Translation – pretty unlikely!]

Question : Can I be on the team?
Answer : Yes, but only if you're more annoying than Jake, have a bigger afro than Carlos and have more girly fans than Slosh. And being able to ride a bike helps too... [Translation – it’s possible!]

[Definition - Squatter - Person illegally occupying someone else's property; for example, some of the urban homeless in contemporary Britain making use of vacant houses. Squatters commit a criminal offence if they take over property where there is a 'residential occupier'; for example, by moving in while the owner is on holiday.]

Pijin Team Pose

Saturday morning and the shop is crowded with all the Totton locals... Everyone seems to want to leave their bikes in the shop while they go for a wander around town. I should rent out the shop next door and charge people to leave their bikes. If I charged 20p per bike per hour, I'd be a millionaire after 6 months! :)

Slosh came by to show off his handy work on his Phoenix frame with an angle grinder. He's managed to chop the end of his dropouts off. Trendy boy!

Managed to get a rare photo of the Pijin team all in the shop at the same time. Good riders but not very photogenic. Will have to get them to work on their poses!

 

The counter got raided by the now dreadless Will, who was all too eager to show off his private parts. Here's a sneak preview... the rest of the 86 picture photoset will be available when I get the new Pijin XXX pay site running. (And that's Flo next to him getting her daily Myspace fix on the shop computer!)

6T Cassette Hub

I've been hearing rumours over the last month that a certain company will be bringing out a new cassette hub this september that will just blow away all other hubs. I'm always sceptical about such rumours, and they normally just pass through one ear and straight out the other...

But yesterday, I received confirmation that it's all true, and have some juicy details. Not entirely sure if I'm allowed to share this, so I won't give away the name of the company just yet... Anyways, this new cassette hub is gonna be ultra light. Prototypes weigh in at a mere 216g - that's lighter than a lot of the light weight front hubs out there! How do they do this? It's going to have a titanium axle and a 6T titanium driver. Yep, that's not a typo, it really does say 6T! This is made possible because they've replaced the bearings in the driver with a ceramic bush(?), and so allowing for a smaller driver diameter. One of the advantages of this is that there are no longer any driver bearings to blow up! To complement the hub, they're also bringing out some special cranks which have the spider bolt hole moved futher inwards to allow running of a smaller sprocket.

Is this madness? Or is this the next break through in hub technology? I guess we'll have to wait until September to find out. Happy waiting weight freaks!

Pretty Hair

Easter holidays and it's been a pretty hectic week at Pijin. Too many damn kids away from school wrecking havoc in the shop and causing Carlos to pull his hair out!

Slosh managed to get a picture of 2 rare visitors to the shop today... Didn't have any bird seed so couldn't entice them to come in! Coo cooo.

We all know Slosh is a bit of a trendy boy. He's been somewhat lazy this week, as his hair is looking very curly (not enough time with the straighteners!). However, this is cleverly offset by the big glasses which manages to draw the attension away from the hair. Speaking of hair... both Carlos and James have had hair cuts this week. Looks like big afro haircuts are out, and the new skin head look is in! This pic was taken before Carlos had the haircut. Had to be sensored so as not to upset the younger audience...

Whilst on the subject of hair... on Saturday, we had a girl come into the shop pretending to want to borrow a pen, but in fact she only just wanted to tell Pretty Joe how 'pretty' his hair was! Silly emo girls...


Dave has splashed out on more parts for his bike this month. He now has massive uncut chrome slam bars, and has been doing bunny hop turn downs around the shop floor all week. Wannabe tweaker!

New kid on the blog...

well guys, girls and J.P.!!
Jakeypoos is now a registered blogger so expect stupid blogs all round...... haha well just thought i would get that out of the way. Did every one have a nice easter, im nursing a rum hangover and chocolate poisioning.
yesterday joe, young dan and myself went for a little street ride. It was quite good as dan learned wall ride to fakie of some stuipid little flat bank and joe was doin some hard smith stalls and disasters. I also built my first wheel at pijin and it went pretty well. Mr pijin himself decided i was not talented enough to true it yet but he has his reputation to uphold....
---peace out---
xxxxxxxxxxx

Free food

Jake now has a new ankle brace. He's convinced that it's magical properties will let him do 3-whips without his ankle buckling under bad landings... I hope he's right! He's also had the superlight KHE tires for over a week now without a single puncture, which is pretty amazing. Either Jake has learnt to ride much more smoothly or the tyres are holding up to the abuse. My personal opinion (and one that is probably not shared with Jake) is that the latter is more likely...

J.P, Pretty Joe (looking tanned after his holiday) and I managed to get some free chinese food at a newly opened restaurant in town. They laid on a buffet, and we tried our best to clean them out but there was just too much food! Feeling a bit bloated right now...

Lazy Sundays & 360 flip no hander!

Mr Sam Barclay pointed us to an awesome video of Dave Mirra. The last bit at the end is just totally and utterly jaw dropping!!! Check it out at http://www.bangpictures.com/mirraco.html

The guys at M2 next door were moving out, and we managed to grab their couch for a little while. As you can see from the pic, JP put it to good use! A little fight broke out when they tried to take it back. Unfortunately, we were out numbered and the couch had to be surrendered...

New stickers and ultra light tyres

New Pijin stickers are in! After being pestered for stickers for over 3 months, I finally got round to printing some more. We've got rid of the barcode and replaced it with a star. It's a totally original idea! (err...) We're gonna be chucking them away with all our mail order stuff so if you want one then you're gonna have to start ordering! Only problem is that they're printed on one long roll of paper so it's probably gonna take Carlos, James and Dave a whole week to cut up with the scissors...

Team rider Jake managed to blag a new set of the ultra light KHE tyres. These tyres are so light they're just amazing! They also fold up nice and neat too so you can stick it in your back pack as a spare. Had to convince him to get rid of his old thornproof tubes though, no point running heavy tubes and light tyres. Probably not a very good idea as Jake is prone to the odd hang up... We'll just have to see how well they hold up. If they can survive the Jake treatment for a fortnight then they must be pretty amazing!

Pretty busy day at Pijin, and I managed to get on with a bit of help from Carlos on his day off. Pretty Joe has ditched his bike for some skiing action somewhere in France for the next 2 weeks. Lucky boy. No doubt he will show off his skills to all the young French ladies over there!