Introduction Thread

I’m excited you’re joining the Forum. More pretty bikes and nice photos to see. Also, I’m very curious to see more of this XC bike.

gotta agree with @bushtrucker on that though.

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Hello all! I’m Flynn, from Nottingham UK. I got into riding during lockdown, fell in love and now I’m going to uni in September to learn the tricks of the trade. I’ve been messing around in Linkage and Fusion for a couple months and came up with some designs that I hope I can make in the future using the Uni facilities!

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Agreed!

Would love to see more composite/carbon fibre work here.

Perhaps a thread documenting repairs?… a man can dream :wink:

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Hello,
thanks to all the team for building this forum, I’ve been a long time spectator before signing up.
I’m Gilles from Liège, Belgium (by way of Madagascar), so please excuse my approximate english :wink:
I’m a bike mechanic living carfree for most of my adult life. I’ve been interested in framebuilding around the early 2010’s, when I had the opportunity to meet belgian framebuilder Nicolas Noblet (@noblecycles) via a french speaking framebuilding forum. Amongst other things, we cycled to London with some friends, to see the Bespoked event, which eventually led to have Nicolas build a rando frame for me, and having Christopher Igleheart building a segmented fork for it!
In 2016, I’ve started a collective workshop in my hometown of Liège (www.lacyclerie.be) with 2 friends; Yves, a bike mechanic, and Thomas, bike mechanic and framebuilder under the names Deroy/Cycles Rouge Gorge (@cyclesrougegorge) who learned classic lugged framebuilding under Armand Deroy, a local framebuilder. While developping the workshop, I had the opportunity to give a try at framebuilding with Thomas and then later having frambuilding and brazing courses with Konstantin Drust in Berlin, and Arregui Velázquez at ETB in Madrid. The last three years or so we developed our in-house brand “Huflå”; those are standard frames we can now offer in our workshop. Those frames are now 100% build by Thomas so that he can offer bikes at an easier entry price point on parallel to the full custom frames. As for most in the industry, the business part of it is complicated, especially after covid hit, when big investors put a lot of money in big shops and as the sales peaked, crushed lots of the smaller shops. All this meant for me I had to get a 2nd job as bike mechanic in Brussels to support the cost of life. So here I am, mostly doing framebuilding as an experimental playground to learn more, develop new ideas mostly around low tech, and trying to minimize the footprint and maximize the durability of cycling as a mean of transportation. In the same idea, I’ve setup a pixelfed account where you can see part of my work: karmawheels (@karmawheels@pixelfed.social) - Pixelfed
Thanks everybody for making this happen :slight_smile:

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Hello you beautiful frame building people! I’m Marcin from Gdańsk, Poland and I run a one man operation called GARAGE 66. I’ve been riding bikes for the most of my life. I was one of the last kids that got a road bike (my Dad’s idea) while the MTB craze started in my country, so I had to get used to being an outsider pretty quickly. Fast forward 20 something years, I started to modify old road frames somewhere around 2010 and immediately fell in love with building bikes. My first attempt at running a bike workshop folded after a short run, but I never stopped pursuing my dream. In the meantime I did metalwork and welding for different industry branches and became reasonably proficient with a TIG torch. Fast forward to last year, encouraged by my wife I dared to step into the spotlight and went to BESPOKED 2024 with my Pedersen tribute bike. This gave me some new motivation to chase my dream of becoming a full time frame builder. So here we are. I’m very happy having found this forum and I’m eager to learn from the great builders here. I like the strange and quirky, been dabbling in recumbent bicycles and various freakbikes from tallbikes to stretch cruisers. I also have a soft spot for a small wheeled racer, minivelos really get me going and I breathe heavily in the presence of a moulton.


(kudos to Josh Weinberg for taking a presentable photo of my ugly mug)

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Who you are and where you’re located

I’m Brian, and I’m the owner/fabricator/janitor at Liminal Machine Works in Springfield, OR.

What you enjoy building

Gravel and mountain bikes are my bread and butter, but I can appreciate a simple road bike. My main focus is “weird” bikes that can’t be pigeon-holed into a single category - hence the name.

What you enjoy riding

I mostly ride gravel in either the coast range or cascades on either side of the valley here. I’m a pretty novice mountain biker and an avid singlespeeder.

What you’re excited about learning

I love to solve problems, whether it be tools for the shop or bikes for a under-served need. I’m looking forward to seeing the solutions y’all come up with and learning for my own.

A little bit about your background

I started building frames after I completed the titanium framebuilding course at UBI in 2015. After the class I moved from Seattle down to Springfield to work at Bike Friday for a couple years, then spent the remaining time at Co-Motion before launching this business in 2023. I picked up a lot of skills over those years, mainly TIG welding, silver brazing (sooo many S&S couplers…), and CNC machining.

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I love this bike. I look forward to seeing more of what you cook up!

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Hey everyone!

  • I’m Dustin and I’m in SoCal.
  • Learning how to TIG weld and metalwork.
  • I have an '83 Schwinn World Sport and an '87 Trek 560 Pro, both resto-mods.
  • I’m excited to learn everything about building steel bikes!
  • My first “nice” bike was a 1992 Bridgestone MB-4. Then got into road biking and bought an orange LeMond Sarthe. Then got back into MTB in Bend, OR and nabbed a Soma Juice (my fav bike). Now in SoCal dodging traffic. I’m a writer by trade, started as a journalist and now I do technical and marketing writing.

I have an old Mongoose MTB frame that I’m planning to convert into a cargo bike. My design is essentially a copy of an Omnium. Been fine-tuning it in Fusion:

Tried to make it as easy to build as possible, but we shall see!

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Hello everyone,
Its time for me to introduce myself, since I will (hopefully) soon start the work on my first frame.
All in all I’m kind of new to the bike world (since around 2019). I always rode bikes for everyday use, however I would not have considered biking a hobby of mine. This all changed, when I got into bike repairs and building bikes from the frame up. At some point, I needed an excuse to build one more bike, so I got into fixed gear and gravelriding, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
Since I am quite tall (with a bit more than 2m), and have relatively long legs, its nearly impossible to find frames that fit, so I decided to start building my own frames.
I have (nearly) zero fabrication skills. I used my torch once so far, to do some modifications of an old bike, and do know how to use files and basic CAD. I’m quite excited to work on my manual skills, since I do a lot of programming during my studies and my dayjob.

Right now im working on my first bike-design, something inspired by the manzanita whippet, and the blackmountain cycles Monstercross. I will create a post about it, as soon as I get the first drawings done.

Until then, I’ll continue reading,
Cheers!

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Hello everyone!

  • Who you are and where you’re located
    I’m Deven. I’m from San Francisco.
  • What you enjoy building
    I enjoy any type of building. With wood, metal, or plastic, I don’t care.
  • What you enjoy riding
    I enjoy riding singletrack on my mountain bike.
  • What you’re excited about learning
    Im excited to learn anything from anyone who knows more than me ( which at the moment is a lot of people…)
  • A little bit about your background
    Im in high school and I want to become some sort of engineer. I am proficient with CAD and fdm 3d printing. I also have a job at my local bike shop building new bikes

Thank you to everyone who has already graciously responded to my build log. Updates on the way!

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I’m a life long bike nerd and professional 3D printing engineer located in Texas. In my day job I specialize in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), which is melting metal powder with lasers. I ride rocky and flat mountain bike trails, and my wheels rarely leave the dirt.

I’ve made lots of piece parts for my personal bikes over the years, but am working on a frame now, and joined this forum to learn and raise my ‘test pilot survival’ chance.

I don’t have a frame to show off, but here’s a 100% printed saddle I made. Its been my go-to saddle for around 3 years.

The pad is soft/pliable and printed in TPU using FFF. The shell is Nylon 12+CF and printed using SLS, and the rails are Ti printed using EPBF.

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Hi, my name is Pascal and I am a hobbyist builder based in southern Germany. I started with a framebuilding course at Christian Pyttel (for those who know) and in the meanwhile have finished frame no. 11. Most is fillet brazed with silver but also working with lugs, filet-less with German-Silver and also new into Tig-welding for the last one . My projects range from roadbikes, to city bikes, to kids bikes to cargo. So basically everything with two wheels.
Happy to join here and hopefully add a bit to a living forum (as internet used to be… :slight_smile: )
Besides Framebuilding I have too many hobbies: Renovating a house, repairing stuff, woodworking. For a living I work as tech-support for adhesives with a lot of background in composites and adhesive bonding - still love steel…

Below some pics of some of the builds. Happy to answer questions if you have…

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Wow, these are some beautiful frames!

Is that an Omnium fork on the cargo bike?

Thanks a lot. I made the 20" fork myself. Lugged crown, TA Dropouts, sturdy disc brake fork blades and a hole in the crown with a water bottle boss for the internal dynamo cable and a tab for the steering rod ball joint.

The whole cargo bike was also a bit of a practice work as I wanted to do smth usefull while practicing. Tried all sorts of brazing methods and material. Even though some of them look rather crappy all of them hold up to this day with 5years of use.

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I’m in SF too. What bike shop do you work for?

Very nice builds!
Which type of silver do you use for fillets and can you explain the “fillet-less German-Silver”?

For silver fillets I use the 34% Fontargen A319. The fillet-less German-Silver (or Nickel-Silver) e.g.Fontargen A102 is just a brazed joint between two tubes without fillet. Because the strength of the brazing material is higher than the steel of the tube thoretically you don’t need a fillet. There are some historic frames like that (e.g. Peugeots) and Christian Smolik wrote about it in his Frame-Building book. To the day the technique is rather controversial (once had a longer dispute with one of the guys of the bicycle academy) and I thought I’ll give it a try anyway. That’s the blue-gray frame in the bottom right and so far (6years, 5000km (too many bikes) and at least some alpine passes) it’s still holding up … Anyway I switched to silver fillets or TIG…

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Ah yes the nickel silver :slightly_smiling_face: funny that it has different names in different languages, in Belgium and NL it’s called nieuwzilver (newsilver).
I have an old frame that is made like that, it’s a low quality frame and it rides like crap but it held up to plenty of hard, unreasonable abuse in my student days. Bunnyhops, drops off tall edges, offroad riding with 25mm tires etc.

Especially funny that every language calls it silver, despite having 0% silver content. How did we get stuck with this stupid and confusing terminology?

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