Be careful what you don't ask for...

I think most bicycle framebuilders are folks that felt a strong desire to pursue the craft , as if it was the thing they most wanted out of life. I wasn't one of those-maybe for the first few weeks but after the reality of how hard it would be to earn a living at it sunk in , I was pretty much a hobbyist for the next nine years. I even quit for a time when my girlfriend at the time broke up with me and ordered me and my torch out of the apartment forever. I moved to a place where there was no room for a shop so all of my tools went into storage for nearly two years . I had only built about eleven frames so I was still in the beginner stage and blundering my way through for the most part. Little did I know back then what would later be my daily duty for the bulk of my working life. I would like to think that my motivation to build bikes was steadfast and unwavering since the start but I admit that I got discouraged and it fell from the top of my list as a job I could endure. Now that I have been at it fulltime for over twenty-one years , I have come to the conclusion that I always had what it takes to be a framebuilder , not that I am proud of the fact. What I see as necessary components for a potential career framebuilder are the following : # 1, A love of bicycles and riding bicycles , even if you can't ride for one reason or another. # 2, an inability to work for anyone else in any capacity other than framebuilding.# 3, A healthy dose of low self-esteem and need to make folks happy with what you can build so you can get kudos and not feel so absolutely loathsome of yourself for a minute or two.#4 , Some not-so-buried wishes to prove to people in your past that you could indeed amount to something-essentially put it back in thier faces , all those doubters.....pretty much everyone in your highschool. #5 , A need to confront an inanimate pile of metal and turn it into an elegant machine-this comes from your inability to deal with society and social situations comfortably. #6, The desire to have a job that not only skirts the need to conform to adulthood, it literally prevents the transiton. So........what I am saying is that to be a framebuilder needs to be an outcast , a bit of a psychological sicko , incapeable of earning a living in a more conventional profession , and last but not least-immature,insecure and for the most part an emotional house of cards. With these traits it is no surprise why a lot of us do not see eye to eye on what we do and get in to stupid little arguments about details that most people wouldn't even waste a fart on. And so it is, my profession-not what I chose in the beginning but I choose it now , after all....I'm fully qualified.

Look out, world.....here comes the UBI class of 2009.

Once a year I go up to U.B.I. ( United Bicycle Institute) and teach a framebuilding class, the steel tig welding edition. It's debateable wheather or not there will be room for all or any of the graduates of this program but with the talent in this group it is certainly possible that some of them will be in the next generation of bike builders.....all, no doubt will build more frames. Attending a class at U.B.I. is perhaps the best way to get your feet wet in the world of cutting and welding bicycle frame tubing. Taking my class is a good way of finding out what over 20 years of framebuilding as a job will do to your selection of off-color jokes and musical choices. This class survived it all and I didn't have to finish a weld on a single frame-something unusual in such an accelerated course. You want my opinion ? ...These guys rock !..I think you have it .

You know you are a framebuilder when.......

I guess I know what it this month in a big way , now that frame # 18 for july is about to go to the painter. Yes, nearly 20 frames built this month-that's why I have not made any entries on the blog lately. What's up for tomorrow ? Drive up to Ashland and teach a tig course at UBI......at least I'll only have to build one frame in two weeks instead of nine , but I will oversee the building of eight frames by the students. You can call me a poser, you can all me as s.o.b. , all sorts of stuff-but this summer you'll have to top off the pile of explitives with 'framebuilder', too. I wrote about the genuine fake framebuilder last time so here are the things that let you know when you are truly a framebuilder: # 1, The faster you build 'em, the longer the list gets. # 2, You get emails and phone calls from places where there's now way they should even know you exist.# 3, folks bring by deceased people's bikes to hang in your shop. # 4, Your shelves are filled with many frame tubes, so many that you don't stand a chance of using them all before you quit, die or both. #5, You are excited to build yourself a new frame, even though there's no way you need it and/or can afford to build it up. # 6, People order a frame and tell you: " Take your time...." and actually mean it. #7. There's a few projects hanging up in the shop that date back to the '90's that you swear you'll finish this winter. #8 , All of your bikes are filthy and you never take the time to work on them or clean them. #9 , Your hands are never completely clean except at the end of the two-week vacation that you never get, at least not in the last 4-5 years. # 10, You have set aside enough time to do X number of jobs and still take in another one even though it will burn you out , make you sick and most likely not get done on time. Well, those are the ones I could come up with. Add your own if you like . Of course, these are merely my obsevations and are not necessarily applicable to all, or even many framebuilders-just ones that are as primitive as me. Cheers, Paul.

Legend of the fake framebuilder

Details are sketchy in this story and my recollection of events is full of holes but the following is true, even if it isn't a perfect recollection . Back in the late '70's , my buddy was looking to work for a framebuilder-someone with a real shop with machines , paint booth , customers......all the stuff that makes for an actual buisness. My friend had built about ten frames but felt that he needed to get some knowhow from a veteran in the trade, most likely a Brit or an Italian......certainly not an American , unless one showed up who had the goods. One day a fellow came into the bike shop where my friend worked wheeling in a stunning black bicycle with no decals on it. The gentleman had a British accent and said that the bike was a Philbrook and that he indeed was the builder. My friend asked the supposed Brit what he was doing in Santa Cruz-to this, the gentleman said : " I'm here to set up a framebuilding shop in the hills here, Bonny Doon perhaps.". My friend was suddenly seeing visions of a new job in his dream career being the right hand man of this " Philbrook" character up in Bonny Doon in a clean, well appointed shop that turned out top-notch frames for discriminating clientele. From that day forward my friend went on bikerides with this supposed framebuilder up in the hills to scout out possible locations for the shop. My friend kept asking the Brit guy :" Hey, where are your tools ? Do you have any other frames here ?" The Brit kept riding , saying that in good time all would be in order and all the questions would be answered. This went on for weeks and after awhile folks in the bike shop were beginning to wonder if this Brit was really a framebuilder, or even a Brit at all. Some asking around was done ( This was long before the internet , so things like this took time to unravel.) Eventually , the identity of the stunning black bicycle was revealed......it was made by Jeff Lyons , right here in California, not in Britain. And the supposed Philbrook ? Philbrook is an actual builder in the U.K. but the man who came into the bike shop and charmed my friend was not a framebuilder or a Brit , but an impostor.....a psychopath who was living some sort of twisted fantasy life and bringing in anyone who fell for his convincing act. Yes , this guy had never built a frame , was a local Santa Cruz guy with serious psychological issues but with a gift for storytelling that fooled many people. When all was revealed, my friend was crestfallen. His dream of building with a mentor was shattered......but time would go by and my friend would go to the U.K., work there, work in Southern California for Santana and within 5-6 years start a successful bicycle company of his own that was real-not a fantasy and it would be built on integrity. So who would want to be a fake framebuilder ? Why would someone bother to cook up an elaborate story and try to convince people that he was a framebuilder ? Seems to me if one is willing to do that much , might as well go the whole route and build the damn frames. Faking it may seem easier but I'm not so sure. All this said, this story is an example of something that I see currently.......it isn't necesarrily as twisted as this example but the end result is the same-there are some folks ou there who advertise that they build frames when in reality, they don't . I don't think less of these folks if they don't build frames-they might have great skills in some other forms of work or art......my issue is that for people looking to get a frame built,these impostors make it tougher for the guys actually doing the work to get noticed. The impostors have a gift for conversation, self promotion and spin......something actual framebuilders might not posess as thier attention is mainly to the building process. I guess the fakers kind of hurt everybody a little bit , customers and builders alike. Keeping it real in this buisness to me is what its all about and I know i'm not the lone voice in that regard . The fakers are very convincing , after all-it's what they do fulltime. The folks actually doing the real work need to get more vocal and not hide behind the torch, so to speak. A lot of us who have good skills with metal aren't paying enough attention to the skills interacting with people. This opens the door to snake-oil salesmen fake Philbrooks and the like. It's time to open the shop door and show people the real thing......they will know the difference.

Why do we do it ?

What a strange and potentially frustrating thing to do with one's life.....to build bicycle frames for a living. I have done a few things to keep a roof over my head-worked graveyard at a donut shop ....no I didn't put the holes in the donuts. I worked at a Mexican restaurant , a furniture store , played guitar in just about every shit-hole bar and restaurant in northern California , spent eleven years in bicycle shops wrenching and selling -I even was a house cleaner for one summer. Little did I know that I would wind up spending 40-50 hours a week cutting and welding expensive tubing together. Twenty-two years in fulltime buisness and I'm still at it-maybe you might wonder why, maybe not-hell, I'll tell you not why I do this every day. Wrong Reason # 1, to get laid. It's a common misconception ( like that ?) that lighting a torch will get you a groupie.....at least a female one. # 2, to get the respect of my parents.......that's downright laughable: " So your boy is a Velder ? Vot dose he veld.......the Brooklyn Bridge ? The Sears Tower ? .....Bicycles ! oy, soch a buisness-where did we go wrong ? # 3, to gain notoriety......as I have found, there are easier and much funnier ways to gain notoriety......#4, to make myself feel that I am better than someone else, most likely another framebuilder (s).........that kind of emptiness is way too scary to contemplate. O.K.,Here's my reason, or at least the reason for the day : I like to go to the races and see my bikes go around in circles being ridden by the most jolly folks I know-then sometimes I like to make a fool of myself and go out there,too and go around in circles-pointlessly trying to keep up with real atheletes.....I also like the bitch of a challenge that this line of work presents-how it shows me daily what a stupid moron I can be, then a minute later it will reveal that I have learned something after all these years-something that i can get excited about, something that I will notice on the next bike that makes me glad that I haven't given up yet. I like to share these discoveries with my jolly friends and see if they think that the latest edition is better than the previous one. It's not a planned obsolesence thing, Hell-I am walking and talking planned obsolesence...I'm 53 years old and battered from years of clutzy bike incedents.....what I get excited about is evolution. I guess if you don't believe in evolution, the concept is useless to you. Absence of developement, forward thinking and experimentation would kill the whole thing for me, just as lack of tradition would kill it for some other builders ( and me, too...believe it or not..) I keep at it because I know that I'll no doubt have a chance to learn something exciting every once in awhile....something that other folks can get excited about, too. I guess that was more than one reason.......

I hope you are happy...

Yeah, another good source of info and supplies says 'fongool' to the framebuilder's chat world. Yep, all you guys who chime in with your dismissives have won another battle against enlightenment....what am I talking about ? Same old thing-In a perfect world the internet could serve as an exchange of pertinent information for everyone, even stinky anti-social framebuilders working away in garages and the like all over the world. The problem is the same old thing.....loud and animated bleatings from a few drown out the constructive info from the others. No doubt,here....the internet is the domain of all sorts of people looking for a scrap , some sort of debate-even if there is none.....these folks want to be the final word, even if that final word is bullshit from a narrow mind. Well, yet another learned person has given you the middle finger , depriving the rest of us from any useful information we could have gleaned. The person I refer to was a suppier of cutting edge brazing supplies......stuff that helps all of you stainless-steel junkies join your tempermental tubes to your shiny bits in an easier more reliable fashion. I know for a fact that if any one of us got in some sort of problem with any brazing/soldering situation we could call this person and with almost no exceptions he would get us out of it. So, all you crumudgeons.....are you satisfied ? Now that a voice of experience has been dispatched are you happier that now you can rule the internet with your opinons ? Hmmm, truth and usefule information got in the way of your quest for the last word ? O.K., now you can have the last word , even though your last word isn't useful information, most likely not based in truth and not helpful to anyone else in any way........my guess is that the word is " Ignorance".

Made in the U.S.A. ?

In the eighties when I was foolish enough to get a buisness license and turn my hobby into a fulltime job there were a number of small bicycle companies that struggled to do battle with the big brands of the day-Trek, Specialized , Bianchi.....mostly these small companies were producing all sorts of stuff related to the newly popular sport of Mountian biking. These small companies made frames, forks , cranks, stems , headsets , q.r. skewers.....you name it. I used to see all of these little operations flogging their colorful anodized offerings at Interbike, the big bicycle trade show. One by one these small companies started fnding out that building stuff in the U.S.A. was not only expensive, the process was tightly regulated and aggressively taxed by federal and state governments-not only that, the insurance costs for liability were not cheap. All of these factors, along with an increaslingly saturated market drove these companies down one of two paths: Path # 1, quit......liquidate and get a job in high tech. # 2, get bought by the competition. You see, in the mid '90's , the larger companies were losing market share to the smaller folks as a percentage of the buying public thought that the big companies had no 'soul' and the smaller compaines were producing hipper, more appealing goods. Another factor was the ability of small compaines to change and improve products -innovate at a rapid pace compared to the gigantic corporations with their layers of beurocracy and delay-ridden outsourced products. Trek, Schwinn and a few other industry giants began buying up smaller brands , trying to get a 'hipper' image....in effect, they were not really interested in the products of the small folks they were buying-what they were mainly after were the names and trademarks that folks associated with a group of people in a small building doing their best to created the best and latest stuff to ride in the woods. Since most of these small companies inspite of their popularity were not all that profitable, the big new owners set out to make them cash cows , dismantling the little operations, laying off most or all of the employees , selling off tooling and disposing of old inventory. Now these popular small brands would be just that-brands. All new products would be made offshore to lower costs and to boost the production numbers. Essentially , your old favorite brand from Nor-Cal would appear on something made in Taiwan and would have the outward appearance of the original but not the same quality . Prices on these products didn't get much lower, either. Net result ? Loss of U.S. jobs, loss of some of the driving forces in the pursuit of excellence and innovation in bicycles -but what I find saddest of all is the dismantling of these small brands , destroying the public trust. While I do believe that good products are coming from offshore, some are even better than domestic products, I feel that the golden age of the small shop-buisness in the bicycle industry has passed. The temptation of small companies to cash in by selling out to the big companies has made branding more important that substance , marketing more important than quality. Lucky for me, my company was too small, to pathetic and not innovative enough to get and offer I couldn't refuse. Am I sorry ? Believe it or not , I feel that my little treadmill is just fine.