Brendan Love Online

Snowy house. I always try to document these snow falls ASAP, because they never last through mid-day.

My cat frequently goes berzerk.

iPod for scale.

A Pediatric BK Prosthetic

A partial-foot CROW walker:

An extremely lightweight and strong carbon fiber B-K socket with a silicone Proflex liner:

A leather brace. The order requested that we add fancy stitching so that the practitioner could have an easier time convincing the patient to wear the brace to church. (Blurry photos… sometimes there is barely a moment to snap one as it goes into the box!)

A white CROW walker with a custom leather binding:

A pink leather AFO:

A leather AFO with full footplate and custom toe filler:

The Bootlegs recently rocked the Local 506 in Chapel Hill. Many thanks to Fluff Chick for hooking up the show. You can hear a bootleg recording of the funky mayhem right here: Bootleg – Live at the Local 506!

Also…

Pass The Peas – Live at the Local 506!
Sexy Coffee Pot – Live at the Local 506!

I fished this Peugeot road bike out of a dumpster this winter and let it simmer at the shop for a little while. It was a terrible jumble of parts, but turned out to be in reasonable shape. After a little elbow grease and some parts swapped out, it is running comfortably as a city cruiser. I will continue to mess around with it, but the prevailing opinion seems to be that old Peugeots are notorious for having parts that are difficult to replace. I’m sure that whoever dug it out of the basement saw the same Google results that I did and so I will not be too surprised if the bottom bracket turns out to be finicky or whatever. The back wheel came off another junked bike and has a three-speed hub with a coaster brake that I modified by replacing the shifter with an acorn nut so it is stuck in one gear until I decide otherwise.

Last weekend, I spotted another mess sticking out of a pile in front of a derelict property. It is the wreckage of an old Schwinn road bike. I don’t know how much of it will be usable, but the frame and fork are light and it doesn’t seem like it is in any worse condition than the blue Peugeot was.

Next up: my girlfriend’s glorious red three-speed Schwinn Breeze and the Chubei 10-speed that my old roommate left behind!

I worked on my first Symes prosthetics this week. It was a bilateral set. Symes amputations involve the removal of the foot while leaving a weight-bearing heel that the patient can walk on. This set is a 10-layer carbon fiber laminate with strapped doors to allow the distal end of the limb to reach the bottom of the socket with increased comfort. Inside are soft foam liners reinforced with leather.

The feet are Flex-Symes feet manufactured by Össur.

Durham, as usual, has not let me down in terms of live music this past weekend. I was able to catch a blistering set by Caltrop at the Pinhook, followed by Hammer No More The Fingers, Rat Jackson, The Moaners, Gentleman Jesse, and a whole bunch more bands who’s names have already been forgotten by me. The D-Town Brass kicked off Saturday night’s festivities at Duke Coffee House and the crowd seemed pleased to see us.

Here is a brace I finished recently. It combines aspects of everything we do in the shop… metal work shaped by hand to closely fit the contours of plastic bracing with a heavily stitched leather cuff and dacron strapping. The heel cup was specially designed to accommodate the patient, who sawed his previous brace apart to fit inside his cowboy boots.