Greetings all, I’m Chris from Sacramento Ca. Amateur and hobbyist builder with no want to make it a job. Up to now I have been focusing on building lugged road/cross frames. I have three frames under my belt so far but have three more drawn up to be built next year. I’m hoping to begin building with fillets soon so I’m practicing on that currently. I can’t build the MTB I want with lugs.
I’ve been slowly tooling up over the past 5-6 years with a frame and fork jig (Bringhelli), a fork bender, and a C-channel style of alignment system. Been enjoying building some tools like a butt gauge and fork rake gauge as well. No machine tools here, just vices and files. looking forward to learning from the pro’s here and the discussion.
@Daniel_Y I’m enjoying the new forum and wanted to say thanks for the effort and thought you are putting into this.
FWIW I changed from the first gen Anvil fixture to the Cobra framebuilding fixture because the Anvil couldn’t handle bent seat tubes and long-ass front centers like the Cobra can. I built 1 MTB on the Anvil after purchasing it (2nd hand) and sold it right after for the Cobra.
The Cobra one is a dream to use, I really recommend it.
Hey everybody!
My name is Hahn Rossman (they, them). I’m a career metalworker who has done a lot of welding, bending, machining of all sorts of bits and bobs for various industries.
I also worked at the bikesmith in Seattle in the late 90’s.
It was there that I first got the bug to modify frames. The owner (Val IKlietz) showed me how to braze thin walled tubing in the alley behind the shop! I made a bunch of chunk bikes
which was a great introductuion to cutting up and repurposing bikes with absolutely no sympathy and a high chance of breaking them later.
Then a new mechanic showed up with a silver brazed frame that he had made at UBI. We made some more frames at my welding studio, but I still thought that there wasn’t anything I needed that Jeff Lyon couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) do for me.
Then I stopped racing mountain bikes and got way to interested in road racing and cyclocross.
It turned out that I had a lot of time to be unhappy with the bikes I was racing on (with the notable exception of a cyclocross frame that Jeff made for me!).
I also started riding longer and longer distances. This led to the Rapha continental project (R.I.P) where I got to spend a lot of time with so0me amazing builders down in Portland and talk a lot of shop of with them.
And then the final straw was Randonneuring…and testing a lot of bikes for Bicycle Quarterly. It made me acutely aware of what I wanted in a complete bicycle and that it wasn’t available.
So I started building frames professionally in 2010 with a batch of single speed cyclocross bikes for SSCXWC that year in Seattle, and then have mostly made fully integrated bikes for randonneuring since then.
What is fully integrated? For me it’s the whole package frame, fork, stem, rack, fenders, decaleur, lighting, etc. Each part needed development*(and most are still evolving).
You can see some of my bikes on Flickr, but it’s probably easier to look at: rossmancycles.com
I have the first-gen Anvil and it works great for vent seat tubes and long front centers (or, as long as I’ve ever done, anyway, even for 7’ folks). I guess maybe Don changed it around later?
This is the Anvil jig I use to have. Maybe it isn’t the 1st gen. It took longer to setup and is more finicky than my Cobra one. I used a 20 degree bent seat tube with it, an FC of 800, HTA 64 / STA 76.
It’s been a few years since I’ve had it so I don’t remember all the details. I do remember having to do math to use the cone shaped pucks for a 44mm head tube, and it was quite tricky to get the STA right because it doesn’t have a seat tube offset feature built in like the Cobra one. If I remember right I had to jack the seat tube angle adjuster a certain way for it to work properly. I was intending on buying Verdone’s seat tube offset addition but I was on Joe’s list for the pre-order of his Cobra jig.
I got it as a package when buying out a retiring frame builder. I have a 6’3" friend who wanted a long front center (we ended up with 850mm) and it was too long for the jig. I sold it to a friend who always wanted an Anvil jig.
That’s the old “Master” jig, very cool. I have the Journeyman, which was the simpler/more minimalist one.
I just did a 850mm front center frame (65.5 head angle) for a guy who is 6’6" and it wasn’t particularly close to maxing out the jig. I’d guess you could get the head tube another 20-30mm out than I had it. With a slacker head angle you could easily get out to 900mm front center. After that, no dice, of course.
I turned some heat sink/adapters on my lathe for mine, because as you noticed the head tube centering cones were intended for 1 1/8 and 1" only.
I just wrote an Excel macro for the seat angle that calculates where to set the jig.
Things have definitely improved in many ways in the last 20 years but I can still set mine up in ~30 seconds and it still makes straight frames, so I still love the old girl.
It wasn’t a bad jig. Just wasn’t the right one for me. It had been previously owned by Granville Bicycles, and then Vanilla Workshop before them. Perhaps another builder prior to Vanilla as well. I got a lot of sweet gear in that purchase, including an Anvil fork jig, Alex Meade fork bender, and a couple other cool tools.
The slidy bits didn’t work too well, had to tap it with a light mallet. It was really heavy too, that backing plate is huge in person.
Awesome! Hi Hahn, good to see you here! I had NO idea you were involved with Chunk 666 – I do remember finding them on the interwebs and being amazed a long time ago!
I’ll jump in. Just heard about this forum, sounds fun!
I’m Ben, I typically go by ShieldMaiden Bikes on Instagram and the youtubes. He/Him.
I’m in Western North Carolina, so my ‘backyard’ trails are Pisgah and such.
Here’s me yeet-ing myself off a little drop a while back. Fun story, I crashed .5 seconds after this picture. Hah
I primarily only mountain bike, so those are the only style of bikes I’ve built (so far). For me, building bikes is more of a means to an end, and exploring what the commercial builders can’t (or won’t) do.
Lately, I’ve also been working on ways to make solving particular framebuilding problems more accessible to the average home-gamer. I’ve got a project in the works I’ve been keeping pretty quiet, but I’ll be posting about it on all the places soon enough. Should be fun.
I’ve been out of the game for a bit now, life got in the way. Currently putting all the pieces back together and will be back full-steam soon enough though.
As for my favorite type of riding, I always say any trail is a tech trail if you ride it wrong enough.
My background is primarily in welding. I’ve been in the industry for 13?-ish years now. I’ve worked as a welder, welding inspector, and currently now in welding education. If you’ve got any questions send them my way! I’d like to think I can help out.
Hi Everyone,
My name is Hugh (he, him), and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve been a bike mechanic for a whole lot of years, but just recently started playing around with a torch. I have built two frames so far and am currently working on a third.
I really enjoy riding anything with fat tires on dirt, and have so far only built mountain bikes (the one that I’m working on is more gravel-ish). Rigid single speeds are my favorite to ride and to build, but that is mostly due to their elegant simplicity. I’m also really enjoying long and slack geometry!
I’m looking forward to this resource and learning from all of you folks on the forum!
My name is Adam Sklar. I have been building bike frames since 2011 and full time professionally since 2016 where I live in Bozeman, Montana and it is currently -22F. Yikes.
I started off in the “will do anything” custom world but these days I like building really straightforward bikes that I know will be fun to ride. I mostly ride mountain bikes but spend a lot of time on the dirt roads around where I live and a few big bike tours each summer.
Lately the learning I have been excited about has been more business-based when it comes to making bikes. It has been fun to spend a lot more time designing parts and components that make fabrication and the final product better. It is a fun way to put my engineering degree to use and having the biz more stable has enabled me to make some really fun and cool stuff.
I learned a lot off of the bike building forums when I was getting started but I swore them off a few years ago after some bad experiences and a frustrating amount of bad information. I’m not sure how often I will be checking in here, but it seems like a cooler format and I wanted to say, feel free to reach out if you have any questions for me. I have figured out a lot of things the hard way and benefitted from the generous advice of many of the old timers too. I hope that is something I can share and give back and I am happy to chat if I have the time.
My name is Tim Brown, I am TimBr Shop on social media. I live in southern Vermont.
I have been riding mountain bikes for over 30 years.
I have built one frame from scratch, and have been picking away at a 2nd for several years. I depart from most hobby builders in that I build in carbon fiber. I worked for a little while with Frank The Welder and wanted to build my own bikes but didn’t have a tig or torches, and didn’t want to deal with heat treating, so I settled on carbon.
That was 2016 built on a frame jig borrowed from FTW. I now have my own scratch-built jig, and more experience from doing carbon frame repairs, and building small parts. My new frame will be a single-pivot trail/enduro bike.
My name is Sean Eagleton from Redwood City CA now out of portland oregon.
After growing up working as a mechanic, I took a frame building class with Hank Matthew’s and Brian of terraplane. I started building under the brand Destroy Bike co in 2011 and have since moved the company and had the pleasure of working over at simple bike co for the last year.
I love geeking out on fixtures and machines they are my favorite part of all of this. I spend way to much time on auctions and will sometime just listen to them at work to hear what machines are going for. If you’re up in the PNW and looking for machines I’ve always got an eye open.
I raced track bikes after highschool, got back into bmx, and have been riding a mix of frames ever since, lately it’s been my brakeless 26” bmx at the dirt jumps, but I’m also excited to work on my first mtb since I was 14 in the next few weeks, will post more in that soon.
I am excited to get to know you all,
I’ve never really been in many forums but Daniel has been an Awsome help to us and we are excited to see this grow into something the community really needs right now. Uploading: 32520B05-CB24-4753-BDDA-62264E894E2C.png…
I am Em (she/they) and I am located on Vancouver Island on the West Coast of Canada.
I build my first frame in November of 2019, and have been building a frame or two a month since then. I am self taught, but came pre-programed with some fab info from attending a trades heavy highschool in the 2000s. Prior to getting into frame building full time, I was a bike mechanic and service writer.
Growing up I was big into XC mtb and BMX - a bit of an odd pairing but it made sense for where I lived haha. After high school I got into BMX in a big way - I rode an obsessive amount and all but gave up mtb for 7-8 years (rip my body). Now I ride a pretty even mix of xc, enduro and dh with the occasional skatepark day thrown in to keep the shoulders tense.
I mostly build fillet brazed hardtail mtb frames with silly paint. My mtbs tend to push head tube angles and front centers to the max. I also really enjoy building dj/park frames, overly complicated racks, and segmented forks.
I have a couple projects coming up outside the realm of what I normally build - some Harley parts, and a dual suspension DH bike. The Harley parts are for a friend, and hopefully a good first step into the motorsport world. The dh bike is for myself, so who knows when it will actually be done!!
Both of these projects are pushing my limited Fusion360 chops to the limits, but I am stoked to be learning. On top of the Fusion learning, this coming year I am hoping to pick up a tig machine and spend a bunch of time dialing that in. I am not sure to what extent I will tig frames, but it’s one of those skills I feel like I am “missing”. Gotta collect them all.
Hi everyone!
My Name is Noah and I’m creating bikes under the serious bicycles monicker in Vancouver BC on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. . I’d like to think what I’m doing is anything but serious.
I just put together frame #001 and promptly (read the day after paint) put the bicycle on a plane and toured up the coast of Portugal with it. Trial by fire i guess. There was/is a frame #000 but it was more a bicycle like object with some very out there geo.
I grew up riding bikes on Vancouver’s infamous north shore back in the long stem, steep geo, v brake era. My how things change and I’d like to think I’m not very old (36)
Still do a lot of MTB stuff. Haven’t had rear suspension in at least 8 years tho.
It seams alot of that is moving more in the underbiking ATB direction. I also do my share of touring/bikecamping etc.
I’ve got number 003 in the jig at the moment, which incidentally I made based off of a konga design.
A little background:
I’ve worked in construction in film since I was 17 so I get to make a lot of stuff, mostly out of wood. I have a healthy motorcycle hobby and dable in flat track racing from time to time (it’s been a while honestly) Also have always been a bit of a car nerd, I’ve got an 86 bmw chopped into a pick up but that’s another story. So I’ve got a clapped out 9x36 lathe and a fair share of tools. I’m currently working out of a little one car rental garage in east Vancouver that I struggle to keep above freezing but it’s my space
I’m pretty much a child of the internet as far as my education is concerned. Watched A LOT of Paul Brodie’s videos. Spent many nights reading through old velociped/mtbr threads and taking notes. Thank you Garro, Sach, Walt etc.
I also drink that PVD post forward geometry kool aid pretty hard so we’ll see where that goes.
Super excited to be here on this forum, thanks for setting it up
Here’s a photo as ever kinevel from a few years ago and a recent one from the western most point of continental Europe on the “shake down ride”
Hello all, Chris Sikorski
I am a garage builder from CT. I build after work or on weekends. I have 1 gravel frame built and building a MTB. I am self taught.
