It's good to see Steve's name popping up on this List as he is one of the lesser known, or at least in national terms, of the top UK builders.
Steve was a close friend of mine and we used to spend quite a lot of time together discussing projects and designs ; when he started up in business in his own right in the early 80s I gave him several commissions to help with his turn-over and he used quite a few of my designs for time-trial frames.
Steve was born in Harrogate and lived within about 440 yards of Chapel Works - the workshop based in an old chapel that became the hub of the MKM company. On leaving school, and without any real interest in bikes, he took a job with MKM as a general workshop assistant, at the time that Wes Mason and Arthur Metcalfe were in charge, somewhere around 1973.
He was a quick learner with a natural aptitude for brazing and soon moved up the ranks to become a frame-builder. At that time I used to take all my frames over to MKM for spraying, as I knew Wes well enough, and Ian White, the time-trilling star rider, who was in charge of the spray shop.
The original management team broke up around this time when Wes left to start up his own cycle shop, as did Bernard Macklam another of the firm's framebuilders. By this time Steve had developed his competencies and was a builder in his right, specialising in custom orders and the production of the firm's radical lugless TT special model, the Ultimate.
Unfortunately the new owners, the Crabtree brothers lived some way away from Harrogate and were not present at the factory each day to assure continuity of production and orders and soon the company started to decline and closed around 1979 whereupon Steve set up his own company Omega Cycles, based in a tiny concrete square block of a building , No 54C,at Thorpe Arch Trading Estate.near Harrogate; in WWll the site had been an army camp.
I never knew the origin of the company's name but assumed that Steve had chosen it on the same basis as the swiss watchmaker..to represent the best in frame-building. However it appears that he might just have borrowed the name from the range of budget frames - frames bought in from Falcon - that MKM had tried to introduce before their demise.
I visited Steve shortly after he had moved into his three -room premises...each room being very tiny. He was struggling to establish himself and had decided that he would have to rely on working as a sub-contractor to other firms in the first instance.
One of his very first orders, and possibly the one that enabled him to get
his business afloat, came from VULCAN, possibly via an earlier association
with Proteus; the order was for what I would call plain straightforward road
frames - ie Reynolds 531DB tubes brazed into plain long-point Prugnat lugs
with Campagnolo ends - ie the staple trade-frame diet of sub-contractors. I
think that Steve only made one batch for Vulcan possibly in 1980/81.
>From there on Steve's business survived on a diet of trade frames for quite
a few UK shops, supplemented by custom frames. He developed a skill in
building tandems, the bulk of them going to Richmond Cycles outside London,
and he built some lugless ones and a few triplets for a company in Denmark.
The fashion for lo-pro time-trial frames gave a boost to his business; due
to the popularity of the 24" front wheel Steve designed a special two-plate
fork crown that placed the blades behind the centre-line of the steering
column and thereby reduced the gap between the front wheel and the down
tube.
Due to lack of capital Steve did not have his own sand-blasting equipment, so he would regularly have to lock up shop and drive over to Bob Jackson's workshop in Leeds where he paid Bob for the use of his equipment. Similarly he paid Bob to spray his frames. Steve spent a lot of time driving to and fro.
Building without the use of any machine tools ie millers or lathes..or a jig...in the best of time-honoured fashion, Steve reckoned that, working a six-day week he could produce three "standard" frames - one-offs and tandems taking much longer. In an attempt to speed up production and to cut down on time travelling to and from Jacksons, Steve eventually built a sand=blasting rig in one of the spare rooms..a very tiny one. There was no cabinet..the room was the cabinet; the Health and Safety Manual had not been wtritten at this time!
Unfortunately for Steve his cash flow depended on his trade customers paying him regularly and quickly...but that was not always the case. In an attempt to increase his order-book of private as opposed to trade frames, Steve dropped the OMEGA name from his frames and started to use his own surname - ELSWORTH. He also decided to diversify into retro frames, starting by building a small number of copies of Ephgrave No 1 frames.
However marriage beckoned...and he needed to increase his income. Slightly disillusioned by frame-building, depressed by the amount of dust circulating after a session of sand-blasting..he was finally persuaded to hang up his torch and quit the trade when he received an offer of a job building kitchen cabinets out of chipboard by a company based on the same trading estate. Steve still lives in Harrogate and is now working in the computer trade.
For those of us who knew Steve we were persuaded that he was in many ways the Bill Hurlow of his era..or at least could have been, had his latent lug-cutting skills were only just been honed when he dicided that enough was enough. Steve's skill was prodigious...his bronze-welding the best I have ever seen. What a loss to frame-building his deaprture was.
About a year ago I was having a few beers with some collectors, after a local Bike Jumble. One of the group was a close friend of Steve and still lived near to him in Harrogate; I enquired whether he knew whether Steve was ever tepmted to start building frames again..even if only on a hobby basis. The response was a resounding No!
Norris Lockley
Settle UK