tungsten

I was driving a cab in 1984 when I started lacing and building wheels part time for an operation which was suppling the wheels for the mtn. bike frames being imported from Taiwan for a little start up named Rocky Mtn. Bicycles. We worked in a sweltering hot, stuffy, windowless little mezzanine behind the small Rocky warehouse above a shop named Bikes on Broadway.
The standing joke was that I wasn't working for a paycheck, I was just there for the bike parts.
After a few months they moved the wheel building to a shop in a small industrial park way out by the south arm of the Fraser River and being pretty sick of driving hack I jumped into the bike biz full time.
In the shop alongside us Paul Brodie and Derek Bailey were fillet brazing mtn. bike frames (Derek was also gaz welding lugged road frames). Some guy named Ross who billed himself as the only Irish Jew busker in BC was painting the frames. That ended when he asked WCB to come check the quaility of the air he was breathing and the new part owner of the company told him that "we aren't running a charity here" to which he replied "they're my lungs *****".
Upshot was that Ross quit and the following weekend, reposing up at Whistler, in an ancient log cabin that used to be a brothel, after riding in the precusor to the Cheakamus Challenge, a race then named See Colours and Puke (because you were supposed to eat magic mushrooms beforehand), Paul recruited me to become the painter. And after a cursory introduction to bike painting I was left on my own figure it out.

To be continued.......