Dave Thompson Update

Rail connoisseur, Dave Thompson, is on the road again and he’s currently posted up in the Southern California area for the next few days. He and a few of his buddies will be embarking on a journey up the scenic Highway 1, through Big Sur and San Francisco. Then they’ll probably drive through a tree (literally) in the Redwood forest and eventually make their way to Portland, Oregon. Oh and of course, there’ll most definitely be some BMX action going on.

Sneak Peek: The Birdcage

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Someone told me a few years ago that there was nothing new left to do with BMX rims, yet since then we have gone on to do quite a lot of new stuff, and here’s an example of the latest. At first glance the Birdcage looks like a fairly conventional “aero” style rim, but there is more to it than that. The first clue comes from the name; birds have hollow bones to save weight whilst retaining as much strength as possible, and the Birdcage rim has a hollow bead for the same reason. The rim’s hollow bead is still big and chunky to help reduce the chances of pinch puncturing or flat spotting the rim, but by creating a tiny hollow cavity inside it we can also keep the weight right down.

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PHOTOS: 2010 S&M Rail Jam

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The 2010 S&M Rail Jam just went down and both Dakota Roche and Dave Thompson put in some solid effort and fired out some wildness. Click around the gallery above to see some of the stuff that went down!

New Beartable shirt by Tom Perry

Tom Perry is a man of many talents. He’s a shredder on the BMX mobile and a professional doodler, as evidenced by his Awkward Words blog.

Tom Perry recently cooked up the graphic you see above (bear doing a tabletop) for the current line of G-Sport softgoods, which are available now (full preview coming soon). Tom wrote up a quick blurb on how the shirt came to be, so read on….

An homage to one of the original G-SPORT designs (mean polar bear doing a mean turndown), Jim (Bauer) asked me to draw up the artwork for this shirt based on some of my artwork I post on my doodle-blog. Specifically it was a kangaroo with boxing gloves I had doodled for him, check the site archive…

I started by sort of replicating the original bear turndown in order to understand how a bear might look on a bmx bike, but we both agreed that it needed to be more of my take on a big awkward bear doing awkward twisty stunts and less of a retro remake. What better stunt than a tabes, right? So I doodled around with some different bears getting wicked and shortly came up with what you now see on the Beartable shirt. It was originally to be a polar bear but Jim went ahead and colored things up a bit which actually turned out pretty cool…

Anyways, I am always psyched to see my doodles end up on shirts, though I’ve never been much into the whole printing process, so there has yet to be an actual Awkward Words shirt… But companies like Lotek, Avenue Garments, Albe’s and now G-SPORT have all represented some of my artwork on t-shirts and I’m definitely stoked on the idea. Looking forward to more doodles, more requests, maybe more shirts? (Here’s looking at you Defgrip!) Check the blog and hit me up!

-Tom Perry

Photo by Hoang Tran.