for a professional.

Anyone that follows this blog may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot of builds lately. That’s because it’s spring and I want to get my customers their frames as soon as I can so they can start enjoying them.  Normally I build between one and two frames a week, but this time of year I’ll build three or four. I don’t rush to do so, I never rush. What I do is limit my interruptions and avoid distractions. I could actually build more but I really prefer to keep my pace very slow and leisurely and I prefer not to work more than about 40 hours a week. So that brings me to may main point; Framebuilding should be easy.

As a Framebuilder I’ll never build the perfect frame, there is no such thing. My goal is to get better with every frame and continue the never ending journey toward the perfect frame. As you might expect the improvement from one frame to the next is infinitesimal and nothing the owner would or could ever know or recognize. Typically it’s the very little things and more often than not they translate into process rather than product. If you were to compare one of my first couple hundred frames to the frames I build now you may notice a small improvement but most of my gains were in how I built them, how long it took and how much finish work was involved. As I continue to improve (I’m now in the area of 3500 plus frames) I’m sure they are better than the first couple hundred but the main difference is that now it’s very easy for me to build them and I always get consistent results.

So I don’t know if there is much of a point here other than if you are getting a frame you don’t have to worry about whether the build went well or if I had a good day. The build always goes well and I always have a good day. It’s second nature for me… easy, and that’s the way it should be. I sure wouldn’t want to go to a doctor for a surgery and hope he has a good day and pulls it off. Professionalism is about predictable consistent results.

Below is a gallery of Terry A’s steel Extralite road. I’m finishing up Neil’s frame today and will be starting Andy H’s MTB which will be going to Ireland.

Here is a frame I finished at the end of last week. It’s a Custom Blend steel frame with fork. It features an internal brake cable, front derailleur hanger and the fork is made with Columbus EL Nivacrom fork blades. This week I’m finishing up Terry’s Extralite which I’ll post tomorrow and I’m starting Neil’s Custom Blend today.

Here is a pretty cool video of some guys on road bikes descending a pretty big hill and passing some cars. I thought it was pretty cool. You can tell from the sound track that the camera rider is having some fun.

Here is a frame I built for Chia of Singapore. It’s a Custom Blend steel designed around a 140mm fork with an ISCG05 mount and cable routing for Hammerschmidt. It’s 26″ wheel bike with tire clearance that will easily allow a 2.5″ with mud clearance or better. The TT is 22.6″ and the ST is 15.75″ to top.

Here is another Extralite frame I just built for Andy K. Like Marco’s from yesterday it’s a blend of Columbus Spirit and Life with a externally butted seat tube. In almost every case when building with the thinnest of the thin tube sets I prefer to sub in an externally butted seat tube. The reason is that at the top of the seat tube there is a lot going on. You have the seat stays and top tube welded in, the slot and you have to ream and hone the tube to the proper dimension for the seat post. What I have found is that when you load all that stress into one area of a very thin tube the long term durability of the frame falls into question. Even if you do everything right over a 10 or 20 year period of time the probability of failure in that area is higher than I like. Add to that poor maintenance, rust or ham fisting a post that’s to small and the likelihood of failure goes up. Using an externally butted seat tube removes that risk and does so with only a small weight penalty.