Rockfishin'

Charlottesville Community Bikes moved to a new location on Preston Ave in late 2009. Since then, it's been quite the task to clean out the old space. There were crappy bikes up to our ears in there. Back in August we had help from a group of UVA Project SERVE volunteers to bring one last load of metal recycling to Cycle Systems (formerly Coiner's). As we were tossing crappy Huffy bikes into a giant pile of steel, a diamond in the rough caught my eye:




This Rockfish frame happens to be a special local bike creation from two Charlottesville,VA locals, Nick & Boris. I got the scoop on them from Scott Paisley over at Blue Wheel Bicycles:

The Rockfish bikes were a project that my original frame building partner, Nick, and Boris created. There was a push to create a new racing format to encourage BMX riders to transition into bicycles as adults. The idea was parking lot criteriums with adults on super quick handling small wheel bikes. I built one prototype on 24" wheels that Boris has been riding around town for years. I may have built one of the 20" wheels as well, but I don't remember, and don't think I did any more than advise on the steering geometry. Those frames were built by Cycle Craft in Tennessee. Nick still has a bunch of the frames unpainted somewhere.

In other words, these were BMX bikes built for Formula-1 racing. I scoured the internet a bit to find Nick's site. There are some good pictures and info on there, despite the Rockfish project being defunct.

I snagged this frame right as it was about to be tossed into a heap of scrap steel to be lost forever. I brought it home and have plans to rebuild it. Unfortunately, after closer inspection, I realized that there's a 1" crack on the back of the seat tube just above the bottom bracket:


So I need to get this tig-welded. I gave Charles a call to see if he would braze the crack for me. He convinced me that tig is the way to go for this crack. He claimed that he is getting a tig setup within the next couple of months, and I hope to pay him to do the work . He told me that if I prepped it by stripping the paint and drilling out the ends that it should be a fast repair. I ended up breaking 4 skinny drill bits trying to drill the ends of the crack out to prevent it from spreading. I also started stripping the frame with a wire brush attachment. In the past I've used chemical strippers, but they are such a noxious pain. As for the color... I've looked for metallic pink automotive paint, but to no avail.


Over the past few years, several of my local friends have also gotten their hands on these frames... but I have yet to see one of theirs working. The frames we find are usually significantly damaged or missing the fork. Mine is both. I have some leads on 20" wheel forks with long steerers and cantilever studs on ebay.

At first I was thinking about restoring this bike to it's original specs. However, I think this frame with 20" wheels would make an amazing polo bike. Charlottesville Bike Polo has really gotten organized in the past few years, thanks to Barry. They meet up at McIntire Skate Park on Tuesdays & Thursday evenings. I showed up thrice recently (after not having been since things got rolling) and damn, pretty good turn out and everyone is gettin tough.

I've also started recreating some decals for the bike. Back in the day (~2006) I found a Rockfish sticker at the old commbikes shop, and I recently got my coworker Andrew Stronge to walk me through scanning, retracing, and vectorizing it in Adobe Illustrator. If you need the vector file, drop me a line

Now just to find someone to reproduce the decals. Velographic looks promising.