I suppose that with over fifty years brazing-torch-in-hand..I should have known better! But then how many of you frame-builders out there would really have left a beautiful maiden, a budding cyclist, in the lurch.
The request, when it came to me from a close friend and fellow member of my bike club, the Settle World-Wide-Wheelers, (www.settlewww.org.uk) was straightforward..or so it seemed. All he wanted was for me to build a bike up for his young niece, a young twenty-something, with ambitions to burn up the tarmac..in a long-distance sort of way. In short she had decided to ride the famous End-to-End ride - the Lands End-to-John O'Groats..all 1500kms of it ..in twelve days...in early September 2009. The calendar on the workshop wall already stated May 24th 2009
I should have known that this order would not work out to be just straightforward..for a start the customer lived some two hundred and fifty miles away and would not be able to visit the workshop for a measuring up session or even to sit astride a bike so that I could at least get a general idea about height weight distribution etc etc.
The planning for the ride indicated quite an aggressive amount of riding each day, because the route and its terrain are very varied..a lot of urban miles and even more in desolate countryside with difficult long climbs and some severe exposure to winds. I could not determine whether there would be a back-up vehicle, whether the cyclists would be carrying any loads...but decided on what used to be known in the UK in the 1950s as a fast day bike..or simply a good Club machine.
Such bikes are usually very standard in design, nothing too steep or too slack in angles, nor too long nor too short in the wheelbase..must have mudguards, and the potential for at least fitting a rear rack for lightweight panniers, must have a comfortable mile-after-mile absorbing ride and predictable handling. Yes..quite a straightforward frame design. That was my first wrong assumption...not the frame but the assumption that the rider was of fairly standard design too...
At five-feet four inches and with an inside leg length of twenty-nine inches I thought of all the frames that I had built for customers with these most basic of dimensions. No problem....
Just a few days after having accepted the order that had to be delivered in less than three weeks ...that's the whole bike, not just the frame.. I should have known better..I should have seen the storm-clouds gathering on the horizon..as a former student of the Classics, I should have consulted The Fates, or studied the tea-leaves in the bottom of my mug...instead of which I started to mitre tubes...
A day or two into the process my friend rang me to remind me..had he actually told me in the first place ?....that his niece was a "little on the stout side". At that point I heard a little jingle inside my head..but maybe it was the start of the alarm-bells ringing...
I should have known better..and switched off the oxy-acetylene bottles then and there...but I didn't..Nil desperandum illegitimi or words to that effect.
To be continued..possibly..
Norris Lockley..Settle, UK