Jacob Larocca and Robert Masek from A Maker Tale got me to sit still for an hour to talk about bikes, art, making, managing, and foolish endeavors.
A Maker Tale: Episode 014: Skunk
We caught up with Skunk to find out how Scooping ice cream makes you a better welder, how being a SCUL pilot makes you a better person and welding space ships can be a window to the soul.
Skunk began to join metal with lightning in August of 1996, at a small bicycle factory known Merlin Metalworks, in Cambridge Massachusetts. Practicing after hours, he learned TIG welding on thin-walled titanium, eventually well enough to become a welder full-time. A year later he joined the team at Seven Cycles, welding well over a thousand bicycle frames before transitioning over to become their in-house graphic designer.
Learning to weld was an important element in founding the bicycle chopper gang known as SCUL: once more ‘Fight Club’ & ‘Max Max’, now more ‘Roller Boogie’ & ‘Blue Angels’. As SCUL grew in years, so did its membership, complexity, lingo, tech and armada; and with it a knowledge of engineering, bike mechanics, destructive testing, and so on. Most of all, SCUL continues to remind Skunk of the importance of play. The motto of SCUL is “Be a superhero version of yourself”. Many late night Bostonians have witnessed SCUL firsthand, with Fleet Admiral Skunk piloting USB Cloudbuster, also known as the ‘disco-bike’.