I have fallen out of the habit of posting. With Cirque looming I thought I'd tell a little story so that maybe you guys will still remember me.
This thread reminds me that I once built a frame in a very short amount of time.
It was about 14 years ago. I had just opened my shop. At that time I had only built one frame; and that was 10 years before that.
Several factors conspired to make me build a frame and fork in 3 evenings after working 10 hour days.
I had a great kid working for me (Mark Young). He was 15 and he had just started racing. Right out of the shoot he was winning junior and senior cat 3 races in our area. He was a very polite, mature, great sense of humor, and a good mechanic. I loaned him a track bike and he had good results at our local (Kissena) track.
A buddy of mine was a rep for a local bike/parts distributor. He had one of those early aero tube sets kicking around and he gave it to me. The set also included lugs.
Junior track nationals were coming to T-Town and Mark planned on riding. It occurred to me that the aero tube set would make a cool kilo / pursuit "funny" bike for him to use.
I wanted to get the bike together at least a couple of weeks before nats so that Mark could get used to it. The local bike club heard about this project and asked me to give a presentation at their monthly meeting. I was hungry for the publicity so I agreed. Time was running short and it took a while to get all the stuff together that I needed to build it.
Once I finally got going it was only 3 days before the bike club meeting. Besides time constraints there were several technical obstacles. I couldn't use the lugs because of the wacky geometry. I was forced to fillet braze, which I had never done. The tubes were not round so it was difficult to "jig up". That problem was compounded by the fact that I didn't have a jig. Minor details ;-)
Well I dove into it and somehow cobbled the thing together in time. For the talk at the bike show I assembled the bike unpainted. The next morning before work I gave the frame one coat of rattle can paint, and after work I put the parts back on. The next day Mark was riding it around the track.
Mark rode respectably at nats but was pretty far from the medals. A professional photographer took a cool picture of him during his kilo ride. It is hanging over my work bench. The bike, in all it's rattle can glory, is hanging on a hook collecting dust.
Today, Mark is an engineer in the wind power industry. He is married and a home owner in Seattle... He's a good kid.
Jamie Swan - Northport, N.Y.
NortonMarg@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 3/23/04 1:25:54 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> gillies@cs.ubc.ca writes:
>
> > I think it would be fun to give each framebuilder the same set of
> > tubes and lugs and tools and to have a "race" to build a frameset in 3
> > hours - fixed time limit - or something ridiculously short (including
> > paint job !) Afterwards, cirque attendees could vote on the best
> > frameset!
> >
> > The goal is not to torture the framebuilders, or injure them, however
> > much it might seem like torture for some of the perfectionists on this
> > list. Rather, the goal would be to allow people to see a frame being
> > built (if that's not a trade secret) and to see what sorts of
> > resourcefulness could be applied to building a frameset in a rather
> > short timespan.
> >
>
> Bernie Mikkelsen has building his standard frame down to under one day of
> work. They're fully functional, but they look like they were built in a short
> period of time. Nothing at all sloppy or unworkmanlike, they just don't have any
> detailing that takes time.
>
> I think that would be torture for the framebuilders, to do as you suggest. I
> can't imagine any of them wanting anybody to see something thrown together in
> that amount of time. Artists and craftsmen have their process and way of doing
> things, to ask them to do something so totally different isn't really fair to
> them.
> Stevan Thomas
> Alameda, CA