Thomas,
There's building frames and then there's building frames. I think most people are capable, with some guidance, of building a ridable frame. There is no question that 25 or 30 years of experience will hone one's abilities. I'm in the process of a lugset for a customer right now that is at the outer edge of my lug decorating ability. I was just thinking as I was lining up all of the extended lug points (Nervex pros to start with) last night and I realized that this part of the job is probably the hardest. It's not brain surgery but it takes patience, experience, and skill to pull this off without any screwups. Extending lug points on Nervex lugs is tedious. Cutting hearts, spades, CLUBS, and diamonds on lugs with extended points is more difficult than without. Then going along the front and side of the Nervex lug with the "lacework effect" is nerve wracking. Each modification has the potential to go south and undo LOTS of work which would require one to start over. This sort of work is not neccessary in order to build nice frames, but the end results will normally be extraordinary frames that will endure time and use and still have value due to it's "character" years down the road.
I don't think anyone has ever entered framebuilding "for the money", if so I'm sure a rude awakening followed shortly. Framebuilding is not a profession; it's a disease! If you can't shake it after 30 years then there's a pretty good chance you will die with it.
Brian Baylis
La Mesa, CA
>
> Mechanically, I don't think mitering tubes and brazing lugged joints together is especially complicated, so any klutz like me could assemble something that looks like a bicycle and would be rideable, especially if I had a model from which to copy the geometry. But, as the old saying goes, the essence is in the details. How good would my mitering be? How complete would my brazing be? How straight would my frame end up? I'm sure I would fall short of a mid level production frame like a Trek o
>
> I recall an old article in Bicycling where an ordinary joe off the street built his own lugged steel frame, assisted and taught by Bruce Gordon. (Yes, Bicycling has fallen far from it's former heights.) With Bruce watching and setting up the geometry, mitering and brazing sounded reasonably simple, but when our hero was working on the lugs, he couldn't get the seat lug to look decent. Too much on one side, to little on the other, somehow it just wouldn't come out. Bruce rescued him by drawin
>
> Tom Adams, appreciative of the art and the artisans in Kansas City
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Wornoutguy@aol.com
> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 9:08 PM
> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Subject: [CR]Venoration of classic bike builders
>
> Maybe my post will sound like I am just jealous but is it really that hard to
> build a bike frame? Or could it be that it is too much work for what you
> earn doing it? I started out in the classic auto restoration business and
> believe me making some old rusty hunk of junk into a show vehicle is no easy
> task (though not as difficult as building a bike frame) Every shop I know of
> that had been around forever doing show quality work got out of it to do
> collision repair since that is where the money is. I have a feeling the bike
> industry is the same way. I may be wrong but my gut feeling is that many of
> us could be master frame builders but it doesn't pay enough to feed our
> families. Not only that who would teach us. Sam D.