Why it must continue......

As I was warming up for a cyclocross race in Bend, Oregon I noticed that my cheap Chinese watchband was pretty much ready to let go. Not wanting to lose my faithful 1994 Timex Ironman watch that I had worn on every brevet and almost every race since I had bought it, I took off the watch and put it in my packet. The original band had lasted many years. The cheap replacements only lasted about 8-10 months and they were all from -you guessed it- China. Now I'm not insinuating that all goods from China are worthless but they are cheap and therefore subject to shorter life spans than stuff made elsewhere that isn't as cheap.
The next thing that got me thinking was announcing to a friend that our mutual friend was expecting a child-to this my friend said : " What's with all these people having kids ? I don't get it !". This made me want to say , " Well, how the heck did you and I get here ? Were we dropped out of a spacecraft ? Are we the only ones allowed to be born ?"=Of course I kept my thoughts to myself, after all...she had a valid point in that there is a bit of a population explosion that has been going on since before recorded history.
O.K., this gets me to my point: Custom frame building is a bit of a 'Niche" market,job, whatever you want to call it. By far, most of the bikes that people ride are made in Taiwan or China and are perfectly fine, if maybe not the most durable bikes ever created. After my generation is gone do I care if the craft of frame building continues ? -Yes, I do care....but why should I care if I'm dead ? First of all, the large companies who produce bikes do not build custom and this would make bikes for really tall and/or short people impossible to get if small custom producers were extinct. I, for one don't want to leave the task of building custom bikes up to larger companies as they aren't suited for the job, just as small guys like me are not suited to churning out 1,000's of bargain priced bikes for the masses. My other point is this: Just because I and my contemporaries have had our run at this pretty special livelyhood doesn't mean that someone else can't have a go of it as well. We needn't become an extinct species. Sure, some of us have decades of working at a low wage before getting to the point where we are no longer struggling to survive-that kind of life-long dedication isn't exclusive to one generation.There are new folks who want to try as we did all those years ago and I for one don't feel like telling them to forget about it .......this is why I teach a class at UBI once a year-I believe in the viability of hand made bikes and I don't put a time limit on it.
While I am not saying that everyone who wants to be a frame builder can pull it off, a few hardy and creative souls will with a bit of luck and with the ability to fill a need in their respective cycling community.For example , I do not build in isolation-I am surrounded by folks who ride where I do, appreciate what I appreciate and really use the bike for all sorts of occasions. I might have a lot of customers in far flung places but the core is here in Santa Cruz and the greater Bay area-I do things for this community and they in turn support what I do. I really see that as a sustainable thing- whether I am building bikes or someone else is. Maybe my brand name does not need to continue after I am gone but all the tools I have accumulated over last 30-odd years will no doubt find their way to someone else with their own vision, their own approach. -The shit don't stop with me.

We're not happy until you're not happy

For the last ten-odd years I have been buying aluminum and scandium tubing from primarily one company. That company pioneered the butting and alloying of these metals and created a revolution in frame building that I was a participant in , albeit in a very minor role. What I did was take pre-production samples of the tubing and build bikes for very high-level competitors. These bikes went to places like UCI world cup and championship races and got some serious press, not only for me but for the company I bought tubing from. This for me was a really great relationship and a chance for my bikes to be seen on the world stage of sport.
There's only one problem. Another revolution of sorts came along. the revolution this time was carbon fiber. One by one the big bike manufacturers began sourcing molded carbon bikes from Taiwan and elsewhere and there were good reasons for this. # 1, once the molds for the frames were engineered and made, thousands of identical frames could be produced with little skilled labor ( such as welders and machinists ) and the frames were very light and had a smooth ride. # 2, Since the molds were costly to make , the manufacturer simplified the whole concept of sizing-it used to be that you could buy 5-6 different sizes of a frame in 2-3 c.m. increments. Now you had a choice of three: Small , Medium and Large-maybe an XL if you were lucky. This allowed retailers and bike companies to not have to carry as many sizes, further cutting costs.
#3, The molded carbon frames were not as durable to side impacts and required more frequent replacement making for more frequent sales.#4, Having the frames made overseas allowed the bike companies to not have to deal with the various regulations and high labor costs over here.
Where am I going with this ? Maybe you have guessed. Now that the big companies have gone to carbon, who will buy these wonderfully engineered and precision manufactured aluminum and scandium tubes ? the answer is almost nobody........except for the few folks like me. Without the market to sell the tubes to the big companies there is no economic reason for the company I dealt with to continue making the tubing. They have told me recently that after twenty years of doing so,they are ceasing all tubing manufacturing . I guess I could get really mad at the company except for the fact that they had little choice in the matter. I think they really wanted to keep making the tubing that pretty much put their company on the map-they had invested a tremendous amount of energy and money into making this tubing , but in 2011 that means nothing. Market share and economic viability are what ensures survival in these troubled and competitive times.
For me, this means the eventual death of about 55% of what I build-that is, unless I can find another source of material. The problem for me is that the tubes I was buying up until a few years ago were manufactured right here in the USA. The quality was unassailable and I knew what I was buying. Metallurgists and engineers will tell you that it doesn't matter who makes a 7005 aluminum tube-the metal is the same and should have identical characteristics. The folks that engineered the tubing I was buying have a different view. They were at the forefront of the advent of this particular material and figured out the best way to form and heat treat it , right down to the finish on the surface of the tubes. Tubing from other factories and countries is visually not the same and I can personally attest to seeing more failures with other tubes.
I am angry not merely for the problems I will encounter now that my main source of tubing is gone-I am mostly upset that things got this way......that everything had to be made elsewhere so that the profit margin grew and that the product was to a degree, disposable-just as disposable as the domestic jobs that evaporated when the whole carbon revolution started. The irony is that by the time these carbon bikes get over here, they really aren't that good a deal for the consumer. A frame that costs $ 150 to the company that imports it will become a bike that sells for nearly the same amount as a domestically produced bike with the same equipment. The big difference is that when you pay a framebuilder $ 3,600 for an Ultegra equipped road bike you are paying a large proportion of your money to the actual builder of the bike. When you buy a carbon 'whatever' road bike with the same equipment you'll be paying mostly for marketing-advertisement and the many hands the bike goes through before getting to you. It isn't the same on any level except maybe the price.
The company that no longer makes my tubing didn't want it to end up this way. The folks that lost their jobs certainly didn't want things to end up this way, either. I definitely didn't want it to end up this way. I still believe strongly in the material I can no longer get. my customers still believe in the material as well. I just saw an article on a world-class racer who is still on an aluminum bike, as if it is now a novelty in a sea of molded carbon bikes . I am now faced with having a set of skills and a market that have possibly outlived their usefulness in today's bike market. To quote another builder, maybe I should have been a plumber.

Let's all make memories that we can forget.....

Even though the next handbuilt bike show is a half year away , I have been giving it quite a bit of though as of late. After thinking up all sorts of really questionable plans of action I have decided to make my booth a museum of my last 33 years of cutting and welding metal together. Maybe my career has not been as notable as some ,but nobody can deny that I have been at this trade for a hell of a long time. I'm ready to let my work tell the story of the crooked and makeshift path of what I have done these past decades-I'll do this and let folks decide if what I have done has validity or merit in this year of 2011.
What my work won't tell folks is that I started out building frames as a way to broaden my skill-base in the bike business , not much more than that. Maybe getting a nice custom frame for cheap had a big part in the venture , not to mention getting to build a frame for my sister, a far better athlete than I. Other things that a booth filled with old bikes cannot tell are the years of working in a one-car garage with only a few tools-at one point building six frames that were ridden in the 1992 Olympics by the Guam pursuit team......not a record setting performance but still , it was a few of my frames cobbed together in a little garage on the world's stage of sport. Another thing not told about my career by the display would be my entry into mountain biking in 1980 by way of a separated shoulder and a twisted ankle , followed by my exit from road racing by way of a broken collarbone, dislocated finger and about an acre of road rash. Another fact not gleaned from looking at my old bikes is that I spent the first ten years trying occasionally to build a cyclocross frame - only to fail miserably.
I'm doubtful that folks coming into my booth would know that I completed Paris-Brest-Paris in 1995.....something I still can't believe I was able to do. All those years of riding all day and into the night trying to qualify for a ride I had not a clue about.....those years and all those miles are behind me- I strain to remember much of it. At a show a couple of years ago I displayed all the medals for the rides I did and perhaps one or two people over the course of the whole show gave any indication of interest.
I guess whatever I have done is largely forgettable and insignificant in view of some of the things people have done with their lives. All the same, I'm going to put it out there-1978 to 2011 , an exhibit of a life spent crafting and cursing , riding and crashing, bleeding and dreading, coaxing unfriendly alloys into things that people can slowly or rapidly destroy with glee- Two-wheeled entropy experiments that have survived to maybe not tell the tale, just show some of the twists and turns of a life spent doing strange stuff with metal. I hope you all come and see.

So who's next ?

I realized something the other day. It appears that all single-man shops in any craft breed a few traits in the proprietor eventually. One of them is bitterness......it isn't the overriding theme of most crafts peoples lives but it is there and I can pretty much tell you where I think it comes from-building stuff by yourself. Maybe it is because so much stuff that people buy is made far away by people they don't know....people who generally do not use the product they are making every day and know little about it , other than what it takes to manufacture it. Maybe we who are one-man shops are bitter as we have to know what it takes to not only build things but also what one endures when there isn't anybody else to pick up the slack.
Essentially, we live in a life without slack. But wait-when you work for yourself you can set your own hours, right ? Yeah....you can work as much as you need to , which could be 16 hours a day if there's lots of work and lots of bills to pay. It really isn't like what most people who work regular jobs think-idyllic shop with a pot of coffee on all the time, pleasant classical music wafting through the immaculate and serene little olde shoppe with all the lovely pampered tools , each in it's own hallowed place always sharp, always clean and always at the ready. That is total bullshit. That's a mental picture of a shop where nothing happens and nothing gets built- It's a myth.

What isn't a myth is the reality of scraping out a living by taking steel, titanium, aluminum, carbon, bamboo, wood or whatever and building something that really works well. Heck, it could even be an artistic statement that works well......as long as it works.
As of the last four years I have been teaching an annual class in framebuilding at United Bicycle Institute. I do this because I not only have to convey the skills that I have learned , I also have to tear down the myth about being in business for yourself, particularly the business of building custom bicycle frames. What it is is hard work-showing up when you would rather be riding. Showing up when the unheated shop is colder than a well-diggers ass. Showing up to fix all the stuff you botched the day before.......and liking it just about all the time. Essentially, you have to like more than the process of building frames-you have to be able to make the whole chaotic swirling mass of shit that is a small business work , and you must do it without getting too bitter. You might think to yourself : " Hey, how the heck did I get into this mess ?" Just look in the mirror and laugh at the fool who suckered you into this crap. That in itself is a reason to be bitter, that you have succeded in taking your life and making it into a situation where all the responsibility is in yours and you have to be present and accounted for all the time. No calling in sick......no making excuses, it's all on you.
This is what I go over with students on the last day of class. United Bicycle Institute does not sugar coat the whole job-search or the 'new framebuilder on the block' story at all. What is presented is a realistic picture of what is possible and what is unlikely-Education without honesty is a total waste of time.
So......armed with the information that I have just imparted here, who will be the next generation of framebuilders ?

How not to order a custom frame

In this blog I have commented mainly on my fellow builders. Some I greatly admire, some I think are maybe not quite so admirable.....and some are just total posers. Maybe it is time to pay some attention to the folks that order the frame, our customers. I am quite lucky in that I seem to have what I think are the best damn customers on the face of the earth. They are fully aware of what I do and don't ask me to go way outside my comfort zone in terms of the build. Of course, 'comfort zone ' is not the best way to describe what is the way I choose to build but it is the best term I can come up with after a 10 hour day in the shop.
What I want to present here is a kind of guide-a bit of a sarcastic one and not aimed at my customers at all, unless of course they are looking for a cheap laugh. In my may years of torching I have been asked to do all sorts of things to construct a bicycle frame. Most of these things worked out......a few did not. I learned a thing or two from these unsuccessful builds and will present these 'rules for engagement' when ordering a custom frame.

1. Do not ask a builder who specializes in racing bikes to build you a fancy 'heirloom' art frame. There is no doubt that the builder will hate the experience of the lengthy filing and polishing and the customer will not wind up with the builder's best effort. Result ? Everybody hates everybody.

2. Don't try to order three bikes in one. a bike that weighs under 16 lbs. but can fit full racks and panniers , has ability to run two brake systems, has sliding dropouts, an eccentric bottom bracket and two sets of brake bosses so that two different wheel sizes can be used will no doubt be a big rolling piece of shit. Please narrow it down or figure on having more than one bike.

3. Never ask a builder to use some hardware and/or tubing he/she has no experience with. The phone call starts :" I really like what I see on your website but can you do something entirely different for me ? How about some stainless dropouts from Swaziland ? I hear on the web that they are really nice." I have personal experience with this situation and I can tell you that the result was pretty awful for myself and the customer.

4. Do not order a frame until you pretty much know what you want. This happens when a customer has a few friends who all ride the same builder's bike. Not to be left out, the person lacking the said custom bike sends a deposit in prematurely . In some cases the decision on the bike never gets made and the bike never happens......I have a few folks on the list that gave me money and kind of just disappeared.......weird.

5. Don't get your sizing done by anyone unless you are 100% sure in their accuracy. If I, the builder does the sizing and I mess it up , I build you another frame and take the mistake frame back. If some shop employee screws up your fitting and you get a frame that is wrong......you are going to have to deal with it yourself . Craigslist, anyone ?

6. Do not ask a builder to make a 'copy' of another builders work unless you want your builder to 'interpret' the design and have his own approach based on his/her strong suit . there is a reason each builder has his/her own style. Order from the person who's style is really what you want.

7. Please don't try to get a faster delivery time by bribing the builder with money , booze , flat screen t.v.s, free carpet cleaning , bootleg d.v.d's , etc. Plan ahead and wait like everyone else......it's the right thing to do.

8. Try not to visit or call constantly while your frame is being built-you will only delay the build and probably have a pissed off builder doing a hurried job to get you off of his/her back. I know it is hard to be patient and the whole process can be really exciting. Trust me, back off a little and you'll probably get a free pair of socks or a hat for it.

9. Don't ask for a free frame just because you have a blog. I have a blog....seven of them. Does that mean I am supposed to get seven free anything ? I think not..........and I wouldn't ask anyway.

10. If something isn't right with your frame , be sure and let the builder know. Don't take the frame to some other builder to have it fixed-this is not fair to the original builder who will need to know what he/she screwed up so that it won't happen again.

11. If you have a complaint about a builder, complain to the builder-don't crucify the builder on the web......you will only look like an asshole. If the builder takes your money and doesn't build you anything , that is a job for the courts or collection agencies...........not the internet chat forums.

12. When ordering a frame from a builder, do not hold back any information that might be really important. If you absolutely must have a level top tube, be sure and state this . There's nothing more humiliating than presenting someone with a frame and having them look at it as if it were a dead fish .

The Nontrager story

Yes, gather around...its story time again. There's a lot of tales of woe and misery I could tell you all but this story really needs to be told as I am finding that there are a number of folks that have inexplicably expressed interest in a very unremarkable part of '90's bicycle history that I , yes-one in the same-set into motion.
When I was a hobby builder operating out of my one-car garage in Santa Cruz in the mid '80's I got to know a few of the other local frame builders. One notable was Keith Bontrager who similarly was operating out of a bit larger garage on the east side of town. Keith was pretty helpful in guiding me through the machine shop auctions to find some good tools at a price I could actually afford. Both of us shared the same frugality as we both shared the same poverty-level income. While Keith was more ambitious and a lot more innovative than I, he still needed the occasional help with some brazing on a few bikes here and there.
Flash forward to 1998 : While I was working away as primarily a one man operation with the occasional employee, Keith had created a bit of an empire-a company with many products and about 20-25 employees. The other part of Keith's company is that he had taken in a couple of financial partners. As things can go, this relationship of certain partners got a bit sour after a number of years and Keith had to buy out the partners. Since Keith was still frugal and probably pretty cash poor inspite of his growing company an outsider with deep pockets was needed. Along came Trek at just the right time to rescue Keith from a potentially nasty financial battle with the former partners. ( of course, this is my recollection and I'm sure that a lot of former Bontrager folks could either give a more accurate account and/or correct anything I might be a little in error on.)
The first thing Trek did was to make the company a bit larger and more efficient . This was accomplished by moving the whole operation to another part of the industrial complex into a nice clean well-lit place , complete with OSHA compliant features everywhere. This was a real contrast to the dark and sooty catacombs that was the original shop. Trek was under the impression that this clean-up and re-tooling of Bontrager would be a profitable addition to the Trek family of brands. It was assumed that the Bontrager shop would continue on in Santa Cruz as before.
Sadly, this was not to be the case as Trek found out rather soon that the bikes were not selling in sufficient numbers to make the California operation profitable. Trek closed the facility and much if the raw frame building materials wound up on the loading dock, destined for the metal recycler. This is where I come in. A person within the Bontrager organization alerted me to the large amount of metal that Trek was literally giving away. Earlier attempts at auctions had not garnered much interest from the local builders so many pallets of steel were free for the taking. I was told to bring as many vehicles as I could round up and take away the steel. I called a few friends and we all drove to the shop and loaded up all that we could carry.
As it turned out, I was really the only person who wound up making more frames out of the old inventory. Since these frames were no longer made by Bontrager , i decided to modify the decals to say " Non-trager" as to indicate that despite all outward appearances, this was not a Bontrager. I offered these frames to bike industry employees at about $ 400 , much less than either a Bontrager or a Rock Lobster. I didn't want these going out to the public....I was trying to make a handbuilt USA made frame available to bike business folks who made even less money than I in a lot of cases. I charged less as the frames only took a few hours to build and the materials were free.
Like anything cheap and pretty good in the bike world , word got out and I would up building about 104 of these frames. I had some rediculous requests......can you make the frame for disc brakes ? Can you put on different dropouts ? Can you build it for a 6" travel fork ? I said no to all of these as most of the materials were pre-cut and specifically designed to be constructed into Bontrager frames and nothing else. After building these frames for about 9 years as a sideline, I began to see something that made me eventually pull the plug on the whole project and pretty much give the remaining materials to another builder. What I encountered was a few folks calling up asking for Nontragers as if it were a custom frame. Of course, it wasn't...it was a low-cost alternative to what I built under my own brand . What these folks wanted was a custom frame but they were unwilling to pay for it. These were not the bike shop grunts who I initially built these frames for-these were just folks who were looking for a deal.
As the big pile of Bontrager steel got smaller and the leftovers got increasingly rustier and difficult to work with(not to mention the resentment I felt when there were all sorts of bargain hunters calling me up with requests for cheap frames when I had a huge backlog of custom frames to build ) I came to the realization that the Nontrager thing had to die.
So, after about 10 years , die it did and the last Nontrager got built for Jeff Archer at First Flight bikes in North Carolina. Ironically, it was custom and it was made for a 100-120 mm fork. I don't think I charged anything for the frame - just having the frame there with all the other vintage bikes hanging up was payment enough. The way I see it, if someone won't pay me a living wage to build a frame under my own name Rock Lobster , I guess they came to the wrong place to get a bike.

This needs no intro...just check it out and be there.