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.