Could anyone spare some time to answer a few questions?

[Simon Taylor]

The search for authenticity. (see andrew potter's book "the authenticity hoax")
His theory is that the search for authentic turns out to be just another way for people to display
their status as separate from mass culture, ie: we're special individuals, so we buy or commission
to have special, individual things hand made for us.
But it's a false promise, thus, 'the authenticity hoax'.

Desire for the authentic is well motivated, but misplaced.
The bottom line is status seeking, (not just superior status, but also 'apart')
and while seemingly progressive, it's reactive.
You don't find authenticity where you're looking for it in 'stuff'.
-g

Brilliant.
Thanks for this.

"...authenticity has overtaken quality as the prevailing purchasing criterion, just as quality overtook cost, and as cost overtook availability.
Authenticity: Purchasing on the basis of conforming to self-image.
Customers now purchase...based on how well those purchases conform to their own self-image. What they buy must reflect who they are and who they aspire to be in relation to how they perceive the world."
James H. Gilmore. Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want

[Mark Kelly]

The search for authenticity. (see andrew potter's book "the authenticity hoax")

There's a good review of said book from way back, courtesy of Canada's "Quill and Quire"

[Doug Fattic]

He could do that if his staff did all the prep work that allowed him the free time to braze them. These weren't 1/2 day frames without some serious support system work occurring. Same deal in London SE at Witcomb Lightweight Cycles atmo.

The quote from Harry Quinn was just representative of the speed of making a frame that was typical of many English builders after WW2 until the 80’s. What he more accurately said was that he would start a third frame before the day was over. Instead he took time to answer my questions about his past and how he made frames. He did have one helper but it wasn’t obvious to me how much he did. He had brothers in another shop that also made frames in Liverpool. What impressed me was that they talked about learning from their father around the time of WW1 when they were about 13 years old. Apparently that was the age to stop playing and start working. I remember doing the math in my head so I could estimate how old they were.

Harry Quinn may have embellished his speed a bit to impress a young Yank but as near as I could tell from the interviews I did with many builders was that one day was an average amount of time many British used to make a frame. At Ellis Briggs, Andrew – Jack Briggs' journeyman builder – and I would take the better part of a week to make a frame. Framebuilding added prestige to his bicycle retail shop but wasn’t what he counted on to make a profit so there was time to careful and file more.

At nearby Bob Jackson the master builder George Foster watched over 4 to 6 (I don’t remember) young guys (they all seemed less than 20). My recollection was that as a group they could turn out about 1 frame per person per day. They compartmentalized their jobs somewhat to speed up the process.

One thing I want to mention about how frames were made and sold in the UK back then was that there were a number of builders who had their own work shops well out of public view. They made frames for shops that were sold under the shops name. The builder was anonymous. R.E.W. Reynolds was an example of a shop that sold under their own name but actually got them built elsewhere. I was always trying to figure out who built what where.

[Will Neide]

Doug.....can you PLEASE write a book about your experiences. I would happily buy one. Can I prepay? :)

[e-RICHIE]

The quote from Harry Quinn was just representative of the speed of making a frame that was typical of many English builders after WW2 until the 80’s. What he more accurately said was that he would start a third frame before the day was over. Instead he took time to answer my questions about his past and how he made frames. He did have one helper but it wasn’t obvious to me how much he did. He had brothers in another shop that also made frames in Liverpool. What impressed me was that they talked about learning from their father around the time of WW1 when they were about 13 years old. Apparently that was the age to stop playing and start working. I remember doing the math in my head so I could estimate how old they were.

Harry Quinn may have embellished his speed a bit to impress a young Yank but as near as I could tell from the interviews I did with many builders was that one day was an average amount of time many British used to make a frame. At Ellis Briggs, Andrew – Jack Briggs' journeyman builder – and I would take the better part of a week to make a frame. Framebuilding added prestige to his bicycle retail shop but wasn’t what he counted on to make a profit so there was time to careful and file more.

At nearby Bob Jackson the master builder George Foster watched over 4 to 6 (I don’t remember) young guys (they all seemed less than 20). My recollection was that as a group they could turn out about 1 frame per person per day. They compartmentalized their jobs somewhat to speed up the process.

One thing I want to mention about how frames were made and sold in the UK back then was that there were a number of builders who had their own work shops well out of public view. They made frames for shops that were sold under the shops name. The builder was anonymous. R.E.W. Reynolds was an example of a shop that sold under their own name but actually got them built elsewhere. I was always trying to figure out who built what where.

Similar ^ to Witcomb Lightweight Cycles. The shop was behind the store. There were 4-5 cats who were "framebuilders" and there were 3-4 who did whatever tasks it took to keep them fed with filed parts, tapped shells, prepared lugs - whatever. No one built a frame end to end, and no frames were 100 percent custom unless you are talking paintwork. It was a framebuilding assembly line of sorts. They built for others, too. And that was typical for all shops.

[seanile]

the engineers i can't understand needing to go on a course these are the ones that should be analysing almost preceeding their own eduction ,so instead of thinking about it for themselves they take what has been done before and replicate it, not saying theres anything wrong there ...just saying

i just wanted to dig this comment back up and provide my thoughts. in my opinion, the technical aspects of basic bike frame construction have for the most part proceeded from theory to law. and as engineers do in school, they can either learn the laws through top-down lessons by being given the end result and deconstructing it, or they explore the proof that leads to the law from the bottom up by reconstructing the process to get to the law.
basically, law is taught or re-proven, so if you trust the legitimacy of said law, which i think most do for basic bike construction, then why waste the time going from the bottom-up, and re-proving it when the core components and explanations are readily available at the top-level?
the greatest advantage that being an engineer provides, again atmo, is the ability to understand the law's proof more thoroughly than others who haven't been given the same technically inclined education.

disclaimer: i don't build bikes, but i felt mike's comment sought a student's perspective, which i could provide.

[Mark Kelly]

the greatest advantage that being an engineer provides, again atmo, is the ability to understand the law's proof more thoroughly than others who haven't been given the same technically inclined education.

To me the greatest advantage that being an engineer provides is that understanding proven designs from first principles allows them to be deconstructed and reconstructed in a novel manner. This can lead to the introduction of a new design and obviate the need to make 50 or 100 of the thing before you trust it.

[seanile]

To me the greatest advantage that being an engineer provides is that understanding proven designs from first principles allows them to be deconstructed and reconstructed in a novel manner. This can lead to the introduction of a new design and obviate the need to make 50 or 100 of the thing before you trust it.

exactly, im on the same page with you. it's a much more efficient process that benefits the development of the profession as well as accelerates the builder's career when the sequence is (in rough terms) be taught/deconstruct/redesign vs construct/fail/reconstruct/succeed/deconstruct/redesign

[Amaro Bikes]

"be taught/deconstruct/redesign"
Only problem is that "be taught" is getting seriously misunderstood and underestimated, shaded by the need to get into the "fancy" deconstruct/redesign parts.

Deconstruct!?! Oh boy... here is the infamous word....
I've always heard from some of the best ever cooks/artists/writers/etc a general thought I absolutely agree with: before you get to think of deconstructing or think conceptual/abstract on anything (novel, paint, cook, design...), you have to master the very basics of that question. You have to climb the full mountain to reach the top, no steps can be jumped on that stair. You want to deconstruct the roasted chicken recipe? You should first have gone through endless practice on standard roasted chicken till you master it.

Today, we all want to go straight to the top of the climb, start drawing abstractions of our thoughts, cook exotic mixed flavours and write the ultimate conceptual meta-novel. Yeah, right, why should I spend some years drawing portraits or cooking omelets if I want to express my uniqueness and something no one else have ever done before?
We're seriously $&?#! up!

[Mark Kelly]

That's an apples and oranges comparison, but to extend your cooking metaphor:

I spent a bunch of time as a process engineer on product development teams working with PhD level food technologists. Nobody spent four years roasting anything: the idea was to cook enough product to develop an accurate model of the process, then optimise the process in the conceptual space before commissioning equipment to take the optimised process to industrial scale. Scale up was one of the things I loved because it's intensely mathematical, very little scales linearly.

My point is that with an the right theoretical underpinning, a different approach from the traditional repetition of known process is able to be taken and will probably lead to new processes.

No chickens were hurt in the making of this product.

[bencooper]

As someone with a physics/astronomy degree, it used to really bug me how little most bike designers seemed to know about physics and mathematics. there was (and still often is) what I'd call "cargo cult bike design" - things done a certain way because they've always been done that way, not because anyone's seriously thought about why they're that way. Why are wheels almost always 3-cross? Why do forks angle the way they do? Why have we settled on certain wheel sizes?

It's telling that one of the most rigorous books on bike design is still Archibald Sharp's book from 1896. There are others, but it's still very up-to-date, and Sharp also rails against unmathematical bike design. One of the few people who I've heard really think deeply about bike design recently is Mike Burrows.

No chickens were hurt in the making of this product.

And, speaking of just doing things without thinking about what you're doing, I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story of when British Rail engineers were designing the APT high-speed train. They were very worried about bird impacts at such high speeds - they'd designed a reinforced windscreen but it was still a worry, so they borrowed from Rolls Royce a machine that fired a dead chicken at high speed to test aircraft canopies. They tested it, and the chicken went right through their windscreen. They did the sums, made a new windscreen, and tried again - and again the chicken went right through. So in desperation they called Rolls Royce who sent an engineer over to look at what they were doing - and told them that they had to defrost the chicken first.

[Mark Kelly]

I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story

Make that certainly aprocryphal - I first heard the story when I was an aeronautical engineering student in the 70s.

BTW if you fired the chicken fast enough it wouldn't matter if it was thawed or not: once the speed is above the speed of sound in chicken flesh the deformation wave can't travel fast enough to disperse the impact energy. The speed of sound in chicken flesh should be around 1500 ms^-1, that's a bit over mach 4 in air.

[bencooper]

True - and I think it's great that you know the speed of sound in a chicken

[Amaro Bikes]

That's an apples and oranges comparison
I spent a bunch of time as a process engineer on product development teams working with PhD level food technologists. Nobody spent four years roasting anything: the idea was to cook enough product to develop an accurate model of the process, then optimise the process in the conceptual space before commissioning equipment to take the optimised process to industrial scale.

Sorry, but I feel less intrusive into framebuilding question a cook figure than many engineers (not to speak about fitters).

A "PhD level food techonolgist" is not a Cook. Same way as an Engineer is not a Framebuilder.

[Will Neide]

Sorry, but I feel less intrusive into framebuilding question a cook figure than many engineers (not to speak about fitters).

A "PhD level food techonolgist" is not a Cook. Same way as an Engineer is not a Framebuilder.

Critical thinking isn't isolated to ones degree or training. If you can logically think, observe, learn, apply, and repeat then you are far more likely to be able to "pick things up" quickly. Obviously, no two people are alike, and experience is a huge factor. But, What someone does with that experience, and an individuals ability to extrapolate data from that experience, are big indicators of which learning curve they will be on.

[e-RICHIE]

Whatever.

[P K]

BTW if you fired the chicken fast enough it wouldn't matter if it was thawed or not: once the speed is above the speed of sound in chicken flesh the deformation wave can't travel fast enough to disperse the impact energy. The speed of sound in chicken flesh should be around 1500 ms^-1, that's a bit over mach 4 in air.

So the deformation wave at impact isn't faster than the impact energy of a (frozen or thawed) whole chicken travelling at mach 4, good to know. Does that mean under mach 4 we're cool?

[Rody]

After 6 pages of theroy and hypothesis, I'll answer "the" question for ya...

I make bikes

rody welding.jpg

that make people HAPPY!

happy roy small.jpg

Who wouldn't want to have that type of impact on other's lives?

Rody

[Wan Gerin]

Great discussion!
Well said Rody. Except I'm a novice builder and not yet capable of building for others (at least from a sales point). The bottom line for me is I make bikes because it makes ME happy.

My work may be slow, my brazes may be messy, but I love every second of it. We all have to start somewhere.

[suicideking]

I was surprised to see that most people agreed there is not a resurgence of handbuilt bikes. Just looking at these boards, one would guess there is threefold the number of handbuilt bike builders then there were in the nineties. The cottage industry surrounding handbuilt bikes would probably be a better witness to the growth. The number of people building jigs for people to build bikes has doubled in the past 10 years. IMO