Tom and the CR Forum,
Some philosophical musings on the ideas of hand-made and mass-produced bicycle frames.
Let me start by citing three recent contributions to the CR thread:
1. <<...Hetchins was the archetypal 'hand-made' frame company.
They, essentially, put ornate lugwork on the map. And now, ... I
read that from the gitgo they explored methods to reduce handwork
and to find ways to gain 'repeatability' in their lug making.
>From my vantage point 'riveting 12 sheets of metal together to
gang up on the design execution' (I'm paraphrasing here...) is
not unlike casting the fancy cutouts and shorelines into the
finished piece-and they did THAT too! ...it appears to me that
seeking efficiency and finding production methods that reduce
hand labor have been part of this industry all along. The text
suggests that it could've been pioneered by, of all folks,
Hetchins...>>
2. <<...investment cast lugs are another step down that road to the efficiently made frame, .... [which] ends at the computer controlled manufacture of tig'd aluminum frames...>>
3. <<Who beyond Singer is making "rough" frames today. By that I mean hand-carved lugs, or even better, not-investment cast lugs, etc.>>
In reply to quote No. 1: you read right, mate. I would only add that what Hetchins were doing was not so much trying to eliminate handwork, as to LEVERAGE it. Efficiency is not a four-letter word! That was the point of riveting multiple sheets and cutting them together.
In reply to quote No. 2: there is rather a lot of ground between cast lugs on a hand-made frame and robot-welded clones. Let's not be too hasty about lumping them together in the same basket.
In reply to quote No. 3: how 'rough' is 'rough'?
Let us imagine some borderline cases, just to illustrate the points above.
Hand-made and mass-produced are not mutually exclusively categories. Let us imagine a Chinese factory with an army of lug cutters and welders; they could, in theory, turn out a thousand hand-made frames a day. At the other end of the scale would be frame builders who make either one or zero frames per year. (Zero frames per year for ten years running is not a serious contender for the title of frame builder, but I'll still consider you a frame builder if you take two years off to sail around the world or raise your kid.) So, productivity (or quantity of output) has really nothing to do with hand-made-ness; a frame can be hand-made, regardless of how many or few of them are so made.
'Hand-made' is properly to be contrasted with some category pertaining to the method of production, not with 'mass-produced' (which is a quantitative category, not a method of production). Here too we find a range of cases, not a black-and-white issue.
If some people want to say that a frame is not hand-made any longer if it contains pre-fabricated cast lugs, then I think we are in danger of turning the word 'hand-made' into nonsense.
If some people want to insist on having a completely hand-made frame, in the sense that not only the welder was a human, but, further, that a human (not a foundry) produced all the components and he produced them one at a time (not in batches of 12) with hand tools (no machinetools, no lathe, no Bridgeport, etc.), then I would put it to him that such a frame has not been built since the 19th century. Not even Singer draw and butt their own tubes. So, how rough is rough? The theoretical limiting case is that a frame starts life as a crate full of solid bar stock: everything (tubes, bb shell, lugs, cable guides, bottle mounts) is to be whittled, by hand--no electricity allowed--, from bar stock. ('Where's the customer?')
If you are going to allow that a frame can be properly called 'hand-made' which contains at least some pre-fabricated components supplied by third parties--Reynolds, Columbus, or Vitus tubes, for starters; bb shells and fork crowns, to continue....--then it is merely arbitrary and unrealistic to say that the addition of subcontracted proprietary cast lugs, or pre-fabricated industry-standard cast or stamped lugs, or fittings, or dropouts, or internal cable guides, or spraying or transfers for that matter, is the watershed criterion of where a frame stops being hand-made and becomes just another step down the slippery slope towards the computer-controlled, robot-tig-welded clone we all know and despise.
Hand-made lugs doth not a hand-made frame make. Our hypothetical Chinese factory could have robots do the welding, spraying, and application of transfers, after the army of lug cutters had sweated through the bar stock. I would not call this a hand-made frame, though it had hand-made frame components.
We could imagine many gradations leading from the completely robot-made frame made of totally industry-standard components supplied by third parties, to the arcane craftsman who starts with a crate of bar stock and a vision. Somewhere between the hand-made frame and the robot-welded frame lies the hand-made (or robot-made) sub-assembly, which is later finished off by a robot (or a human).
In my opinion, a FRAME is hand-made if it was welded by a human, not by a robot; where the LUGS came from is interesting, but not the criterion of whether the frame should be called hand-made or not. Where the lugs (and, where appropriate, other fittings, e.g., Alex Singer's famous panniers and brakes) came from will, at most, help to define the degree--the how much, not the whether--of the frame's hand-made-ness. One man's opinion....
Taken in the above sense, all Hetchins were (and are) hand-made. Many had lugs which were also hand-made--that is, cut and filed by hand, in batches (or, less often, one at a time). These frames exemplify what I might call the middle level of a range of hand-made-ness. Many frames fall slightly to the one or the other side of this, though still occupying the middle ground: some frames incorporated proprietary cast lugs, others incorporated pre-fabricated industry-standard cast or stamped lugs (Prugnat, Nervex)--these are quite definitely hand-made frames, though not every component which could have been hand-made was so. Still other frames tend more toward the limit of practically realizable hand-made-ness (short of the bar-stock visionary): namely, one-offs, built to customer spec and often incorporating quite elaborate embellishments, such as the customer's initials on 30cm-long scroll work. An army of Chinese could have produced them in the millions. It is no discredit to Hetchins that they found ways to make a few thousand with much more modest, innovative, and, dare I say it?--efficient--means.
Regards and tailwinds to all,
Flash
http://www.hetchins.org