Framebuilder

The other day I had another brilliant idea. I’m going to design and build my own bicycle frameset. Yet another hobby. Excellent.

The idea came upon me suddenly, and for the last week or two I have been doing a lot of research on the topic. But it’s not as though this is a new thing for me. I have always wanted to build a frameset for myself; when I was working in bike shops fifteen years ago, it bothered me that I could basically assemble everything on a bicycle, I could take a hub, rim and a handful of spokes and build a strong wheel, but the one thing on the bike I couldn’t assemble from scratch was the frame. I also have a lot of personal biases toward various design elements in bike frames, and it would be fun to combine them all into one frameset. Take the flat “track-style” fork crown that Richard Sachs does, and roll it in with the beautiful fluted seatstay design of Tom Kellogg’s Spectrum Cycles, and a few other touches, and paint “guglielmetti” on the downtube. But the thing is, back in the day I was living in an apartment and the whole thing was simply not feasible. Now that I have a big garage, I’ve been thinking that this framebuilding thing is less of a pipe dream.

So, I’ve since discovered that there’s an active mailing list dedicated to matters of framebuilding, and lots of folks rolling their own frames. This woman’s site was the final inspiration for me, and I have since re-read my old copy of “Designing and Building your own Frameset”, which I bought many years ago when I first thought about doing this.

Look for updates here, eventually. For now it’s still in the planning stages, but I think this is definitely something that’s gonna happen. Maybe this will be the first step towards my ultimate homebuilding goal, which is to build an airplane.