First, a couple weeks back I did the 90k bike leg of a half ironman triathlon relay.

I did the race on my trusty handbuilt steed and learned that being in pretty good shape + constant utilitarian bike riding + steel sport touring bike does not equal competitive athelete :)! I was dusted like I was standing still by so many Serious Atheletes with ironman tattoos on their calves riding crazy tri rigs with aero wheels. Our team finished 12/19 of the relay teams, and I will happily take the credit for dropping us to the middle of the back after our awesome swimmer put us right up at the front.

And the workshop!

A few concerted days of effort have produced great results. My Dad and I worked to raise the walls, though I ended up cutting them down a bit the next day after I decided they were too tall (the full 8′ plus a gable roof was just too encroaching on the rest of the neighbourhood, I felt).

Anyway, here’s the finished box:

Next up came the rafters. Note to talentless hack DIYers like me: it’s probably more economical in terms of time AND money for you to just order pre-built rafters. Though they eventually came together, it was a lot of work, stress and sweat equity poured into making this stupid things go together nicely.

Geometry works out marvelously on paper, but has this whole issue of not necessarily applying In Real Life. Believe it or not, I ended up using a great youtube video on marking out rafters to make it work.

Anyway, it’s all there now. Huzzah!

I’ve since finished about 75% of the strapping on the building for the board and batten siding. I priced out steel roofing, and it actually looks to be cheaper than asphalt shingles at this size, which is awesome.

Unfortunately (for my neighbours) I’m heading to Newfoundland for a week on Saturday, so I won’t get around to actually doing the siding or roof until a few weeks from now. But the building is essentially done! Woohoo!

The workshop grows tantalizingly closer.

Through the heroic help and guidance of two supremely awesome people (my partner Sarah and our builder friend/awesome gal Jen), we successfully made a concrete rectangle!

Here was our process:

When we last left off, there was half a hole in the ground. I did get around to finishing that! We dug out to the proper dimensions, and down about 12″.

The 12″ depth was so that we could fill it up with all the accumulated fieldstones and rubble from several years’ gardening. Here, a typically smiley Sarah beams over the heart-shaped chain we set up to be buried under everything.

Skip ahead a few weeks, and we’re on concrete delivery day!

The (massive!) delivery truck arrives.

Jen and I rocked out.

I made the wheelbarrow trips as the ladies did the work that required actual skill: levelling out the muck and spreading it around. They did a mighty fine job, good enough for the concrete delivery man to insist they start a business! (my pre-built walls behind them)

After much waiting for the concrete to dry a bit, we eventually got to stretch out and trowel that baby! Silky smooth!

A little treat at the entrance way…

Like a mirror finish!

I took the form off a few days later and everything looks good.

It’s kinda cool to make permanent structures, building something out of nothing (or at least pulling together disparate bits of somethings to make a holistic kind of something).

Anyway, next step: throw those walls up, and build a gable roof. Maybe this weekend? Who knows!

I’m a lousy photographer, but here’s an arty taste of the bike, built and spraypainted.

(click to embiggen)

Workshop

Stud walls: built
Pad surface: prepared, filled, tamped and levelled. Sarah made the world’s heaviest DIY tamper by sinking a mop handle into a plastic bucket filled with premix concrete. The end result creates a small sonic boom every time you hit the ground with it.
Concrete: pouring on Wednesday with superstar strawbale builder friend coming to help. Pro tip: if you need a good troweling job, get a strawbale builder.
Doors & Windows: waiting anxiously for the floor to be done so they can wiggle their way into the walls.
Roof: some kind of low profile gabled thing. My brains have not worked their way through this one yet.
Hydro: superstar builder/timberframer friend coming to help. For some reason using giant flammable cylinders of oxy acetylene doesn’t bother me so much as the though of messing with electrical.
Insulation: vapour barrier and foam insulation going under the pad, then the regular R22 stuff inside. Have to make sure the building isn’t super airtight otherwise that whole O/A brazing fumes thing will mean pulmonary edema.

Bike #1

I couldn’t wait for (or afford) pro paint at this stage, so I built it up and road it unpainted.

Results?

Amazing. It’s fun, beautiful, easy, freeing and comfortable. I’m first and foremost a transportational cyclist, and secondly a recreational touring cyclist, and this bike fills both those needs perfectly. It’s fast, pretty, strong, and fits just right. Certainly the mystique is added because I built it with my hands, some files, and fire. But I think the general consensus is the bike rocks.

Tools

I went hole-hog and got the Fattic design fixture. It’s damn good.

I promise more pictures next time. Blogging just ain’t my style to begin with, and then the work of finding, editing, re-sizing, and adding pictures to these posts just takes too much time!

Progress report!

Workshop
The grade is prepped for an 8 x 14 slab. We dug it extra deep to bury all the field stones and random scraps that had accumulated in a pile over the years. Next, I ordered one cubic yard of “A” gravel (small gravel with sand) delivered to the house. Since it’s been a super busy time with my work, Sarah did all the grunt work to bring the gravel in and level it off. We’ve let it set for the past few days, and it’s poured rain and been pretty chilly lately, so not much progress.

Pouring the slab will be a big-ish deal. To do so, we have to:

• Level out the gravel grade
• Put down vapour barrier (the shed will be insulated)
• Put down 4 4×8 sheets of foam insulation
• build a perfectly square 8×14 form
• lay down 4 4×8 sheets of steel mesh in the concrete as it gets poured.

At this square footage, it becomes slightly insane to mix it all yourself (I calculated needing around 90 bags of pre-mix for the job. Ugh.) So we’re going to see if a truck can come and hang out in the driveway while we frantically wheelbarrow the concrete back and forth.

Tooling
I bought an Anvil fork fixture and seatstay mitring fixture from a friendly builder in the states. I mainly wanted the fork fixture, but the SS fixture could come in handy. My torch, regulators, tips and hoses all arrived a few weeks ago. And I’m mere inches away from jumping on a Fattic frame fixture. It’s not as flashy as the Anvil tooling, but it’s a world-class fixture with decades and decades of engineering thought buried inside.

Bike #1 Status
I’ve finished the design array for painting the bike, and am now checking around for pricing. Noah at Velocolour in Toronto does fabulous work, but I’m going to check out some local leads in the next few days. I’m going to be building it up with an array of parts that might make some purists squirm: Campy Veloce shifters with mostly Shimano 105 components. And in a peaceful few hours within the turbulence of a sappingly busy life, I hand-built my wheels last week - 105 hubs with Mavic A119 rims. I love building wheels, I find it tremendously relaxing.

Onwards!

So. Thanks to the heroic efforts of two good friends, I got the table.

Picked up from the perfect chaos of George Vettor’s shop in Guelph. He got it from Marinoni (it was Marinoni’s first table, apparently) and used it to build the odd frame on over the past few decades. Included: bottom bracket post (Yes!), fork brazing jig (Yes!), a surface gauge (Yes!).

Two tricky things. First, the table has a little surface corrosion / miscellaneous gunk on it from years of not being used for building. I’m confident that with some careful and gentle restoration, it’ll be in tip-top shape with no problem.

Second, it’s really heavy. Like, really, really, really heavy. I had anticipated this by not really thinking about it - the big job was actually getting to Guelph (2+hr drive) in time to get the table (Vettor was courting a few other offers), and getting it in the truck.

Here, Fraser and I are pushing the top into the truck, with help from a passerby on the ground (while Vettor looks on).

We used lumber, leverage and rehearsal to get the top to go where we wanted it. At over 500lbs (48×36x1), you don’t really get to improvise with it, nor do you get second chances after leaning in it the wrong direction.

On the way back, after some exploratory figuring of how to get the table top into my burgeoning workshop space, we got a little nervous. Out of the truck, up eight steps into a foyer, turn a corner, then down about 25-30 steps into a basement, then across the basement into my room. The width wasn’t the problem - it’s a big old church, with lots of room everywhere. The weight became a serious concern - we could probably get it down (using 2×6s as runners down the stairs) - but would we ever be able to get it out again?

…

Well, friends, combined with an inability to pay for rebuilding the church if I burned it down, this was all too much.

Enter: shed.

Ok, more like: workshop.

Sarah and I have been thinking about building a shed in the backyard for a while. The incentive has arrived. To build bikes, I need to build a space to build bikes. And since I’ve got the boundless energy of man consumed by a dream, and the skills of someone variously employed as a cabinetmaker, general contractor, and landscaper, it’s a project I can probably take on. The main constraints are money and time.

So!

New goal: Insulated shed by winter!

Step one, make a concrete foundation.

Here’s a hole:

Well, half of a hole. Onwards!

There’s the romanticism of handicraft, and there’s reality.

Like most things, cash underscores the options available.

Framebuilding is not accomplished merely through grizzled artistry and an anvil. It’s damned expensive, time consuming and finicky work.

There’s the first few builds - the learning process, the portfolio boosters. This is where I’m at. At a cost of hundreds of hours of labour and thousands of dollars in parts - never mind the $5-10K cost of entry for tooling - it’s a pretty exclusive and undemocratic domain. I’m summoning a great deal of my meager resources to bring this project to life.

As a result, I’m trying to do things intelligently, buying used where possible, and DIYing my way through specialized tools.

Tomorrow, I pick up an old (the original?) Marinoni frame alignment table. It has an integrated BB post and some kind of fork brazing fixture. It’s scandalously inexpensive, and hopefully will be close to what I need.

Advertised as a framebuilding jig, I checked it out around ten months ago — well before I knew much of anything about building. When I arrived after the three-hour drive, it wasn’t at all what I had expected - a 3×4′ steel table with a machined & threaded post in one corner. It looked useful if I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t (and I was only driving a little car, so taking it back would’ve been impossible). I shied away from sinking the coin into the table at that point, but filed it away for future reference.

Anyway, providing it is what I remember it to be, this could be a fantastic entry point to putting my shop together. My slight hesitance comes from the language/technology barrier with the older Italian gent I’m buying it from: no digital pictures are possible, and our conversations have been able to establish the basics and not much else. We’re going on memory here.

So I go with two friends tomorrow to pick it up. Pictures to follow.

The plan: Build bicycle frames. For joy, for a living, whatever it takes.

The process: Track the myriad complexities on the path to get where I want to go.

The preparation:

• Develop deep & enduring love for bicycles: what they do, how they do it, and what they can be: check.
• Marry a wicked love for getting your hands dirty making things with strong skills in design, classic aesthetics, and creative problem solving: check.
• Learn framebuilding with master builder Doug Fattic: check.
• Put a shop together with new tools, old tools, and tools you dream up on graph paper: check.
• Lose sleep over budget spreadsheets and missed Kijiji deals: check.
• GO!
  

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In the meantime, recount my adventures on the high seas of Niles, Michigan learning framebuilding with Doug Fattic here:

• Intro
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Days 3-4
• Days 5-7
• Day 10
• Wrap-up