Welcome to my blog!
How it all began!
I’m flattered that anyone would be interested in anything I have to say. So, thank you. This is my first, and hopefully not last post. We’ll see as this website format is truly frustrating and counter intuitive.
I do post a ton on Instagram, and make You Tube videos and encourage you to find me there! But this is different. Those are about the specific work I’m demonstrating. Here I guess I can rant about anything I want! This is my frame building website, so I guess it will be mostly bicycle related. Hopefully that’s what you’re here for anyway.
For those of you that don’t know my history. It all began as a child and having my dad teach me how to ride a bike. Then a lot of other stuff happened, and I am writing a book about it that may or may not ever be available in some form, and then I began frame building. I blame it all on Bicycle Quarterly Magazine. They got me just like so many before and after. It used to be a pretty amazing little Magazine written by a lunatic. It convinced me that I couldn’t be happy on a bike unless it was 650b Randonneur bike! Probably handmade and super light with lots of expensive parts. Now I’m not saying it was right or wrong exactly. Can you be both right and wrong about something in equal measure? It don’ts sound right, but that’s most things factually seem to be.
I used to joke when my customers asked me about it or brought it up. They’d say just about anything and I’d say, “Be careful, that magazine will convince you that you need a $7,000 bike!” And I was right too! Although It’s probably $10,000 now with inflation and all. I wouldn’t know as I stopped reading it back in 2017 or so. Part of me thinks I was right to quit, part of me wishes I wouldn’t have, and I think about picking it back up all the time… but even if I wanted to this damn smart phone addiction would probably keep me from doing it.
Anyway, it was a thing I kind of thought, and my roommate at the time, Rando Theo, just build a Kogswell frame up and got all the mismatched and wrong parts for it so he could see what 650b was all about. He wasn’t happy with that bike at all, and it didn’t look like the handmade randonneur bikes in the magazine. So, he started looking around and found M.A.P Cycles here in town. And I being crazy and a broke student found U.B.I. I didn’t’ have the down payment for a custom M.A.P 650b randoneur bike with light tubes and low trail and cool paint and a beautiful chrome rack. And I like working with my hands, and I more or less learned how to weld in Auto Body school back in the late 90’s, and I was learning how to do all my own mechanical work on bikes by volunteering at Bikefarm and bugging all the bike nerds to be my friend and teach me stuff. And, U.B.I’s frame building class only had a $100 deposit!!! And that was something I could almost afford! almost… I had no idea how I was going to get the rest of the money, but somehow, I knew I would. And that would be a Grandma I’d never met passing away and leaving my mom a little bit of money. And her letting me know this and letting me know she wanted me to have some for something good shortly after signing up for the frame building class. Really lucky timing. Other than the class being full time and the week of finals! And the final being half my grade in all my classes and I was taking 19 credit hours, when full time was only 12. So, I remember this was the end of the 2010 school year. Also, my Certificate of Completion says Summer 2010 or something like that on it. I still have it, framed and hanging in the shop. It’s hung in every shop I’ve owned.
So, I took the class and met a bunch of really cool people, Including Ahearne, Tony Pereria and Toothless Gary.
We’ll you may not, but I do love an unreliable narrator. And I’ve just become one, so I hope you do too, because I just remembered that I wanted to become a frame builder long before I ever read a BQ (Bicycle Quarterly). In fact, I didn’t know any frame builders existed at all at the time. I believe a bike friend was always telling me about cool old frame builders, back in the day. In fact, I thought frame building became a lost art back in the 70’s, and all bikes after that were made in factories in Asia, which is mostly true. So, I decided I’d be the one to figure it out and bring back this lost art! I Thought I would be the first in decades.
I did promise myself I wouldn’t get obsessed with bikes and take it easy and not take it too far at all and derail my whole life like I did with Model A Hot Rods! That was of course a lie too.
I made my first frame in that class at UBI. And found them while scouring the internet for anything I could find about the lost art. That’s how I found UBI, and that’s how I met Ahearne and Tony, and Gary. All great frame builders! I was Shocked. Then Ahearne told me there were at least 30 custom frame builders that he knew of here in the States, and half of them were in Portland. So, I guess I wasn’t the first one to bring it back. Oh well, it was still super cool.
And I didn’t get into it because of 650b, or probably even BQ. I was getting really uncomfortable on bikes and trying to figure out fit and decided my body was just too weird for any stock bike and that I had to make a custom bike if I ever wanted one that fit!!! I still believe this to be true, except when I don’t. I’m obsessed with fit, and think everyone is wrong about it all of the time, especially when they see a bike for sale that looks too good. Suddenly size doesn’t seem to matter at all… for a little while.
I spent months tracking down vintage frame building parts and vintage brakes and derailleurs and all the parts. I was going to make the perfect bike in that class. All 1970’s Campagnolo with the Rally long cage rear derailleur, rare factory Nuovo Record triple cranks, New Old Stock Mafac brake levers and hoods and wide touring Cantilever brakes. I was going to build the perfect 1970’s race bike, but as a touring bike with 32mm tires and room for fenders, and with lugs! The only thing I couldn’t find before the class were NOS Nervex lugs. Anything with Nervex professional lugs I just instantly fall in love with, and anything without lugs does just about zero for me.
I don’t think I’d even heard of 650b as I built this first frame, I wouldn’t even be convinced that I needed one until a few years later. I believe my first 650b frame was the 5th or 6th frame I made. But by then I was absolutely reading BQ, and had met Mitch of M.A.P Cycles as he shared a shop with Ahearne, and made the most beautiful bikes. And that’s the Truth!