Living the dream ?

December was not a particularly great month for me. For one, I had a demolition project next door to my shop going on that made it impossible to work for most of two weeks. The noise and dust caused by the remodel of the bathrooms next door got to be so oppressive that there was no way I could attempt to weld while the floor was shaking with the sawing and hammering.

The next thing to come down the pike was a kidney stone that got stuck and landed me on my back for nearly a week and a half-this infirmity made it so I missed the three biggest races of the cyclocross season and my team had no manager for the Nationals . If you are self employed like me , you know well that there is no unemployment, no state diasbility and no crew to carry on the work while you are incapacitated. So, what are my plans for the new year ? That's pretty easy to figure out.....work my ass off to try to catch up and pay the bills.

This brings me to the point I wanted to make : The phrase " Living the dream" has been bandied about in reference to folks like myself who are supported by building bicycle frames. The person or persons who use this phrase in regards to what I do obviously have no idea what full-time framebuilding is about. If losing money for years , having days of wrench-throwing frustration , working until 10:00 at night to catch up on a build that took way longer than anticipated , not getting any kind of vacation for years-opting instead to go to trade shows where most folks don't even look at the stuff you brought is living the dream , I think most folks would rather take the nightmare option instead.

From the outside looking in , some folks must see the daily jaunt to the workshop and subsequent idyllic time of self-employed crafting as the dream that got away-the escape from the mundane work-a-day life that most people endure to scratch out a living in this crippled economy. From the inside looking out , my view is that all the years that led up to this point were so difficult and debilitating that I find it difficult to rejoice in celebration of my so-called dream.

This is how I got to the life of full-time framebuilding. It wasn't as if I had a calling I could not refuse-it was not that I felt as if I was put on this earth to do just this , build bicycle frames with every micron of my being-and it was certainly not because I thought I would be living the dream. This is what happened. I worked really hard, stupidly hard much of the time. I didn't always believe that I would succeed-I just kept at it , almost like some sort of beat-down. One of us was going to give in-Me or the F$%^ dream. For years I stuck with this craft as if it were my only choice in life..........it wasn't , but I worked at it, fought it, made many blunders , learned and re-learned the same stuff over and over again because of my impatient and slipshod nature- What I did was beat my head against the frigging wall until I made a hole in it and climbed through. What was on the other side of that wall ? A dream ? No. An awakening and some spiritual enlightement ? Not really. What was on the other side was folks that saw what I did and placed a value on it. It was these folks that saw all my blunders, all of the dents in my floor and workbench where tools had been thrown - these amazing people who awarded me for my seemingly hopeless and psychotic devotion to a craft that initially I had little talent for........these folks welcomed me to be someone who was valid as a bike builder.

I have read where a person said that folks like me who were " Living the dream" owed my livelyhood to a builder who came before me who the great majority of my customers have never heard of. Maybe I owe my job to the folks that put on the trade shows. Maybe I owe my success to the internet. These reasons all sound great except for the fact that they ignore two things: # 1, I started this job before the handbuilt shows, before anyone building bikes even knew what a web page was and also ,with just a few exceptions a lot of builders back in the day were not willing to give out any information or support to anyone like me. My position is that I owe my success to the folks that come to my shop and see a reason to have me build something. My customers are my saviors and I always want to be worthy of their trust. That means that I have to fix my fuckups in a timely fashion , I have to on any given day be ready to bear down and focus on a bike that must be depended on to be safe, fun and not hold the rider back in any way. It isn't and easy thing to do and it is no dream......it is reality. I'm living the reality , and the torch, the welder and the materials will never let me forget that. Happy new year !

Perceived value

Last time I checked, I was not dead yet....or at least the breathing noises I make would indicate that my death has not yet arrived. Since this is the case , I'll have to consider myself one of the 'Not dead yet' framebuilders. Even though my frames are not collectable and as far as I know , not causing any kind of buzz amongst the rabid vintage bike fans I am very happy to be still alive. Being not dead yet has a lot of advantages....at least that's the way it appears to me , having never been to the 'other side' .

There is however , a distinct plus for being a dead guy who built bicycle frames-your legacy of work might get to command a much higher price than when you were alive to open your wallet and receive the proceeds. I'll cite the example of the late Mario Confente , noted Italian transplant to California who was sent here to re-create the famed Masi branded bicycles here in the U.S.A. as the demand for the bikes was sufficient to merit a satellite factory close to the new fertile market. Americans were going nuts over Masi, Cinelli, Colnago and a host of noted Italian racing bikes but it was Masi who made the move to get manufacturing nearer to the dollars . From what I understand , Mario Confente was the man to head up the operation.

This is where it all gets fuzzy to me......I don't know the details of what happened and why Mario wound up leaving and building under his own name but what I do know is that back in the late '70's , Mr. Confente was regarded was a real master of his craft by many bicycle shops-the shop where I worked was no exception. Any time a Masi made in California showed up in my shop, the serial number was checked to see if it could possibly be a "Confente built Masi". I didn't understand the significance as no matter how closely I looked at the workmanship, I could not distinguish one Masi frame from another. They seemed all to be built to a certain standard and almost boringly consistent. When an actual Confente came into the store there was quite a stir amongst the crew.....this I really didn't get as the Bruce Gordon sitting in the shop in near anonymity was light years beyond the Confente in terms of attention to detail and impeccability.

Fast forward to 2010. These are different times with the internet and much information and mis-information being bandied about by experts and complete morons alike about the value of certain 'collectable' bicycles. While one of my lugged frames from the early '80's might fetch a whopping $ 300 on craigslist on a good day, a Confente might be sold in a bidding war for well over $ 10,000 ! Is the Confente worth the price ? I guess that is not for me to say......the price is set by whoever pays it. While I love the whole nostalgia of vintage bikes and own a small fleet of relics, I don't really get why some bikes are worth over $ 10,000 and why others that display better craftsmanship and equal rarity are snubbed by the collectors. I guess it has something to do with death. If you are not dead, people can't really fabricate your legendary life......the life you lead is maybe too real and accessable . If you are still alive people can still talk to you, even order a bike from you. Conversely if you are dead , there's a finite supply of your work and probably a legend about the magical quality of your work-both of theses factors can be used to manipulate the price of your bikes. The bikes might be good or bad, the legend could be complete bullshit but for some folks it doesn't matter-you are dead , therefore your bikes are a must-have holy grail item.

I'm not supposed to be angry about anything that enhances the perceived value of bikes-that would be shooting myself and every other framebuilder in the foot. We all want our work to be valued as a lot of us devote out lives to this dubious pursuit. What makes me mad is the fact that collectors are rewarding the dead guys and pretty much ignoring the guys who are still alive , in effect rewarding speculation rather than craftsmanship and dedication. While there are a couple of actual living builders who have frames that are highly sought after by collectors , there's a whole army of neglected artisans out there putting out incredible work -a lot of it arguably superior to much of the collectable cult items. I'm not including myself in this group as I mostly build bikes for competition and don't consider myself a builder who caters to the collectors.

After more than 30 years in the business and many visits to bike shows, swaps and the like I have grown weary of the notion that some dead guy's bike is worth 20 times more than a living builders bike on the open used market. It is not a fucking Matisse !

Trying to do too much...

Building bike is what I do and for the most part , it's really all I have time to do. I get to ride a bit , I also have Saturdays to do laundry and the weekly shopping but it is a solid five-day a week grind just trying to keep the work rolling, even if the list isn't all that long. Stuff just takes more time than one suspects , even if there's many years of experience in the books. It's all about expectations of oneself , usually a bit higher than reasonable.
This brings me to current times and what I'm hooked into every fall/winter....cycolcross. Ever since the late '70's Iv'e been a big fan of the sport and watched it grow dramatically here in northern California. About 1998 I got the idea to try racing myself when I got involved in sponsoring a local team. At first, my racing was just me, no team affiliation and no expectations other than to have some fun and make a few people laugh. I'm not a talented rider by any stretch and my years of dabbling in other forms of bicycle racing have resulted in a big two wins in 20 years. In 2004 I, and my helper Simon Vickers formed a cyclocross team around my bikes and things changed in a big way. I was present at races every weekend and I wore the same kit as the real racers, although my racing was still pretty much a joke-trying not to be last in the 45-A masters division.
After an injury kept me out of most of the 2007 season, I decided correctly that I never belonged in an A division race and demoted myself to the 45 + B catagory in 2008. This is when things got weird.....I started getting on the podium. About 2/3 of the way through the season I did something I haden't done in 20 years-I won a race. This made me the leader of a series and I nearly won the whole four-race Peak Season series but for a bad cold during the last race. This success was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me.....I started getting a little serious about racing.
In 2009 I trained like a madman and went into the season expecting to start where I left off.....racing well and always being a threat for the podium , even if it was usually the lowest step. I was plagued by back problems and wound up just like I had started in 1998, giving a few folks laughs and finding myself behind most of the field every weekend. I decided to get physical therapy for my back, not so much for racing ( Although I can't lie that it wasn't a major factor in getting my reluctant ass to the doctor..) but for being able to get through a day of welding at the shop. My racing was making me a cripple.
After about five weeks of P.T. and doing core exercises it was time to go north to Oregon for the last big races of the season, the USGP in Portland and the nationals in Bend. Although my back was getting better , my racing was not and I had no expectations of any kind of results. I was going north to support the team and work in the pits. I was only racing because back in October I had paid the entry.
In Portland I had a pretty bad race on Saturday, crashing about 4-5 times and finishing pretty far back. Sunday I had 'good legs' as they say and was really surprising myself until with a lap and a half to go , the thick Portland mud destroyed my rear derailleur. I raced both days but had no real idea of how I would go at the nationals.
The next week I went to the nationals course and rode many practice laps in the frozen conditions , surveying every inch of the course. I didn't think I would have a good race but I at least wanted to have a safe one. When the day came for my heat , it was a clear sky but 13 degrees and very icy. I'm not used to the ice but I guess a lot of other folks didn't get the practice like me and were falling down all around me. I managed to get through the whole thing with only one really bad fall on my hip and a few stumbles. I finished without getting lapped by the winner, well beyond my expectations. I even had a race long battle with another builder, a much better racer than me, just not on that day. This was yet another thing that probably wasn't at it's root good for me.
Here it is, 2010 and I'm back racing again. After last year's back trouble, I have been doing 35 minutes of core work each morning. I'm more co-ordinated and I'm having a much less painful work day. I don't groan when I'm getting out of bed and I can actually bend down and pick up the morning paper for the first time in years without wincing in pain. There is a down side, though.....I'm racing better than ever and I won another race. The problem with this is that I could start believing that I have talent.......I cannot begin to do this as I have seen it in other folks and it is a sad sight. I may wear the same kit as the folks on the team and I do wear it with pride but I know full and well that I'm a bike builder, not an elite athlete . I do know some builders that have a legacy of great racing....Steve Garro, Scott Nicol, Rick Hunter......these guys were exceptional on a bike. Much as I love to ride and when I race, I definitely try my hardest , I know that there's a difference between me and the guys that win.
Racing is a test and not only is one's ability on trial , but one's sincerity as well. Someone who makes a sincere effort at preparation and on race day leaves it all on the course can be rewarded with a podium or even a win. Pretenders are lucky sometimes , but the cream always rises to the top. Builders can call themselves 'Master builders' but it is the folks that ride the bikes that make the ultimate assessment of one's ability to construct a truly fine machine. The saying of the team this year is " Don't start believing "........I feel it is when we start expecting too much or believing in our own legend we are heading for a bad fall. I may have had some good races this year and I might have a few more left in me but I'm not going to start believing..............

The shrinking pot

2010 has been an interesting year , at least for me. During this economic slowdown my business has not slowed down-it actually set records in terms of incoming orders in 2008 and 2009 and looked to be doing the same in 2010 until about mid August. Suddenly, the phone stopped ringing.....normally I would welcome some hours where I could just weld and not have to jump up and go to the phone every 10 minutes. Now , a typical day will be largely devoid of the phone ringing and I can merrliy weld away on the now rapidly shrinking list of orders. Last year at this time I had about three times the orders on the list as I do now in the fall of 2010. Is this the economic slowdown finally catching up with me , or did I do something to piss off the frame buying public at large ?
This is the dilemma of the self-employed small framebuilder: What ca we attribute a sudden silence of the phone to ? Economic trends ? More competition from newer builders ? Maybe our style has become outmoded as we have not evolved with the ever changing trends in bike building ? It is stuff like this that keeps people like me awake at night .......what did I do to cause this and what, if anything can I do to turn things around ?
Maybe , there's a reason I'm not really taking into account-perhaps what has caused this lull in new business is something I didn't cause and maybe it is something I can't do anything about. I know well that what I do is largely a luxury and not something of an impulse purchase.....people plan ahead to get a custom frame, way ahead in most cases. Sooo, if the slowdown in my business isn't caused by me and cannot be changed by me , what the heck do I do ? Maybe I should shut the hell up and do my job, at least while I have it. As I have said before , I'm very lucky to have work in this fickle field and the run of the last 7-odd years has been exceptional. All over the world people are looking at situations much more grave than what I am faced with-it's time for me to take whatever resources I have and do something for folks less fortunate than myself. If my business does not survive this slump I would rather go out on a note of having done some constructive and community-based work rather than having some sort of 'fire sale' or the like. Maybe a lull like this is a time when I can attend to projects long neglected........maybe all I need to do is to start restoring that old Colnago and as soon as I get about halfway though , the phone will start ringing again and all of my noble efforts will come to a grinding halt while I go back to earning a living.....or not !

This is why there aren't any pretty frame pictures

There's new noises in my shop-sounds of sawzalls and hammers banging and prying out nails. In a quest for more storage space my building superintendant has appropriated my office. I had a nice upstairs space that was part of my shop, although technically I was not charged any rent for it. I moved into this shop in late 1996 and have accumulated a lot of stuff since then. The 160 square ft. office was about 25% of my total space and it was a good place to store my old music gear that was choking my house. This photo is a view of where the office used to be, up a flight of stairs. It had a window that looked down on my workspace, a colossal 538 square ft.
This is not where you want to stand in the event of an earthquake. I have no doubt that a good deal of this stuff that used to be in the office will come cascading down with anything 4.0 or above on the Richter scale.
This used to be the office. I have no idea what it will become , but I know that I will no longer be welcome in this space. While it is always good to periodically purge and try to keep an orderly shop, this practice does not come naturally to me and I was not really ready to give up this space, especially on only two days notice. For better or worse, Rock Lobster cycles is shrinking. Maybe I'm only a Langostino now

The powers that be

Sixteen years ago I had the good fortune to to find an affordable shop space on the west side of town, only about 10 minutes by bike from my front door. The space was pretty small, about 530 square feet but there was a bonus included in the rent, or rather, not charged for. The bonus was an upstairs office of about 160 square feet that was up a small flight of wooden stairs. I don't know about you, but give a guy like me some extra square footage and enough time and I'll fill that space with lots of crap -most of which I probably should have thrown away.
Flash forward 16 plus years later and sure enough, the shop and the office are jam packed with all sorts of stuff that framebuilders accumulate : Lots of frames needing repairs that are abandoned, some day to be resurrected into rideable classics when the work load gets thin ,posters of bike racers and catalogues from bike component companies,bike magazines,jerseys-can't seem to part with them, even if the moths have eaten many holes in them......old frame drawing..on and on. In my sixteen years of occupying this space I had done a good job of filling every square inch of space and a bad job of throwing stuff out.
A few days ago the building superintendent came by and gave me a real surprise-my office was going away. The landlady was supposedly appropriating the 160 square foot office and stairwell for storage. I was to lose my universal catch-all space for all the stuff that wouldn't fit downstairs in the shop. My desk, computer , rollers , sales and tax records, shipping boxes and old musical gear would have to find a new home, most likely the recycling center at the county dump. The superintendent gave me all fo three days to re-arrange 16 years of accumulation. Saddled with this new unexpected task ,I was trying really hard not to be mad , sad and or sentimental. What I had to do was to get a lot of stuff organized downstairs and make room for whatever I felt was too essential to either give away or throw away.
With grim determination I began the task of looking through all the boxes and piles of stuff upstairs , trying to really not get too caught up in looking through memory lane and stay at the task of downsizing my substantial accumulation. Ignoring the stories in each box of stuff was pretty much impossible for me and I began to get sidetracked in looking at receipts for frames sold in years past , trying to remember the faces of the people who had ordered them. I came across names of people who have passed on, bike shops long out of business , prices that were so low that I wondered how I survived. I looked for a time at the old books but soon figured out that I could easily run out of valuable time spending the day looking at things I had ignored for over a decade. I came to the conclusion that placing the receipt books in a box and keeping to the task at hand was needed, although this sensibility did not come natural to me. I thought about all the years I had been building bikes and what all of this stuff represented to my personal history. After pondering this I had a moment of clarity, a kind of resignation that whatever value this mountian of stuff represented to me, most of it would have to go-personal history be damned.
I got in the mode of "Get rid of anything as long as it hasn't been useful in the last two years"......this amounted to nearly two truck loads. Lots of bike parts got donated to the local "Bike Church" self service bike co-op. A lot of metal got recycled-fancy US made aluminum tubing ,about the equivalent to $ 1,500 worth became $ 38.40 in recycle value. My oldest bike drawings, many of which were from the early '90's went into the dumpster . Old catalogues and magazines got recycled or went to friends. It was a blood-letting of personal accumulation like I had never had-more like something that should happen when someone dies, but I wasn't dead yet. Maybe it was the death of something else, the passing of my inability to cut loose of all the junk that I thought held my identity and told my story. I had the thought , who really cares about this junk anyway ? who wants to know in such rediculous detail the complete and unabridged archeological evidence of my time on earth ? If I had been ignoring it all these years , wouldn't it follow that even I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to it ? I started to feel pretty empty and started thinking in jest about leaving enough room in the dumpster for myself ! After all, nothing lasts forever.

Everyone wants what I don't have....

Maybe it's just me but there's a lot of chatter about the whole framebuilding question: Keep it a hobby or go pro ? I cannot offer advice on this, only personal experience. As a 22 year full-timer and former hobbyist, I have delved pretty deeply into both worlds and can't really say what is a better place to be-it really depends on your circumstances.
Back in 1978 I was a really lonely neurotic bike mechanic with nothing to occupy my time except any and all things bike. I had moved to a new town, knew practically no one and was not really good at making new friends. To add to that, I was pretty depressed and virtually excommunicated from nearly all of my family back home. I guess I chose bikes instead of drugs......or both, kind of-with the bikes being much more influential in the end. I became a hobby builder out of a drive to know all I could about bikes, right down to the way they were brazed together. I had no idea what the future held and really didn't care...it was all about the moment.
Now it is 2010 and I have been at this full time since 1988 and this week is all about fixing broken team bikes. I don't care what anyone says about building simple welded race bikes being the easy way out. Building fancy lugged frames for people who will worship and pamper their shiny expensive rigs is not easy but I don't see it as any more challenging than what i do. I build really light bikes for people that want to win races. These bikes can and do break.....not generally in a catastrophic way but more of a fatigue crack situation. I have four of them to resurrect this week , two more than I had all of last year. Backing up what I build and fixing it in a timely fashion- fixing it in most cases for no charge is what I would call, not taking the easy way out. The fleet has to remain functional and for better or worse, I'm the one who has to step up-these frames don't get sent back to Taiwan, they come to my shop.
While some folks might think I'm completely out of my mind for choosing this part of the framebuilding profession, I offer this thought : Lots of people want to do what I do- or at least what they think I do but most of them will not get the chance. They will try to create some sort of livelyhood out of bike building and realize that they cannot survive financially for one reason or another. They will have to remain hobbyists......not as bad as it sounds, but still short of some of these folks framebuilding goals they had set for themselves. The fact that I have remained viable for so many years is a testiment to something.....I'm not completely sure what but I'll have to say that a bit of personal sacrifice is needed.
One person who emailed me a number of months ago was wanting to accumulate the skills and tools to build a frame or two. This person scoured the forums and really sought out much advice from a lot of builders active on these forums. His conclusion was that a lot of these builders were unhelpful , pompus , coddled and really propped up by a huge fan-base and really weren't that great at all. He scrapped his plans entirely , disgusted and for the most part,quite bitter. I'm not in complete disagreement with him about some of what he said but the guys who actually make a living building frames are few, dedicated and willing to go to the shop on a Sunday and fix something for someone who was nice enough to buy a frame from them. This is my world-I don't need or want a hug for my sacrifice -I'm happy to be viable at this questionable trade and hope to continue as long as I can. My customers will make that decision for me but if I treat them right , I'll be able to influence that decision a little.