Let’s make this post lighthearted beyond the “You got this” & “Don’t quit your day job yet” stickers on a tool box. What advice would you give an newly-fresh framebuilder?
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Do it, it’s fun , frustrating,
creative, problem solving. A lot of emotions come by .And a finished frame is super rewarding.
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A lot cheaper to just buy a frame but it’s a ton of fun and if you are a tool nut like me it’s great. Just may need a bigger tool box.
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You don’t need as much tooling as you might think. With enough patience you can build a frame without a jig. I would suggest a 3’ piece of aluminum square stock to use as a straight edge/ reference and a vice.
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Unless you’re an experienced fabricator, start simple. Start with a track bike. The joy of riding a bike you made is great and you’ll want to make another and that one can be the fancy or complicated one.
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I’ve really been contemplating whether I should just build a new frame for my singlespeed city beater as a first build before I build my fancy road bike… maybe I really should just do that. Get my hands on some standard size Columbus Cromor and such.
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+1 start simple or at least accordingly to your fabrication skills .Simple project will get you to bigger complex project quicker.
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Embrace the suck. Its a process and the only way to improve is to do it. Pretty sure the sentiment around here is, your fitst frame will suck (you’ll still love it and tell anybody who’ll listen just how cool it is) the 2nd one will be ok and the 3rd starts to get good. I haven’t found a way to cheat getting experience.
I try to enjoy the process, not just focus on getting through it or “finishing” Its like music, i don’t put music on for it to be over, i enjoy it while its happening. This is a hobby for me, its supposed to be fun.
Also, youll never be ready. Thats ok, nobody is. Start anyway.
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Be solutions-oriented. If something is a challenge, hard to fixture, you cut it wrong or short or weird or doesn’t look as good as it could - focus on the steps to the solution rather than getting hung up on what’s “wrong”. I’ve noticed this in teaching, some people are naturally problems-oriented and some are solutions-oriented, and regardless of level of experience, the latter tends to have an easier/better time overall.
The creative process is an emotional rollercoaster, and that never ends despite years of experience, you just get better at managing it/yourself throughout.
Framebuilding is hard. It takes a long time to get good at. There is always something to be better at. Unless you personally know some builders, you probably only see beauty shots of finished products or extremely curated parts of the process - 40 hours of filing doesn’t look cool on photo vs. the torch brazing photos we all know and love, but in reality, brazing is 10% of the process. Settle in, it’s a lot of work.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, especially with all the wild modern specs and components to build to now. You will have an easier time learning and getting better at building if you start with a more basic frame, and add one new challenge every time - a yoke, or an intricate stay, or modular dropout, etc. It will take longer to get better and understand everything that’s going on, the more “stuff” that’s on a frame all at once.
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The “you’ll never be “ready”” is great advice. I should have followed this much sooner. It’s not as scary as it looks, and it’s super rewarding! The other best advice I got was from a student of mine when I couldn’t get out of a self-imposed holding pattern practicing my welds: Just set a date, then go for it!
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Also - Paul Brodie once told me that there’s no point in building a perfect frame because then you never have to build another one. Perfection is fake. The goalpost always moves.
I think about that one a lot.
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Perfection is the enemy of really good.
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Absolutely!! Please don’t take this the wrong way. The joy and pride is well deserved 
Builder: Dude, it rides so sweet, I nailed the ride feel and it corners like it’s on rails.
The bike:
Seriously, getting to the point where you’re assembling it and taking it for it’s first ride is awesome. You’ll learn more every step of the way from receiving the first set of tubes all the way until you disassemble it for maintenance after thousands of miles. Part of making a good bike is making it so it can be built up and maintained easily by someone who doesn’t have the ability to file the drop out here and the front derailleur tab there.
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I would advise every beginner to get all the necessary components before starting: brakes, wheels, tires, gears, bottom bracket and crankset, fenders, stem, handlebars, etc.
My first frame was good, only the cantilever stems were a bit too high and soldered too far apart. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d had the wheels I installed later.
Don’t leave out too much. It’s frustrating when you later realize that your self-built bike is perfectly fine for everyday use, but you just didn’t think to add light mounts and cable guides.
Build the bike completely before painting it. It’s best to ride it for 100 or 200 kilometers. That’s the best way to determine if you’re missing anything. Soldering a side stand mount to an unpainted frame is quick and easy. It’s frustrating to do it on a fully painted frame.
Please excuse my poor English, I’ll have to use a translator.
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If you’re not already familiar with CAD, start now.
Try not to spend too long practicing. Once you’re confident that you can join tubes, go for it. The best practice you can get is actually doing it.
Consider making something like a stem or a balance bike as a good way to lead into your first frame.
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If you want to build a metal bike, practice brazing or welding as early in the process as is feasible. Knowing something about the process of melting metal will inform so many decisions that you need to make.
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Don’t go for gimmicks or trying to wow the crowd with something cool/different just for the sake of doing something different. Once you have some experience you can play around with stuff. Get teh fundamentals down first. Design, filing, brazing, finishing. Get some broken frames and reoair them. You learn a lot from seeing what has gone wrong and understanding what caused it. Plus the repair is good fab practice.
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Amen. Make a quality bike first. Once you understand how design influences ride, then venture further afield.
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I would mostly echo what others have said. If you just want to ride a bike you built, take a class. If you want to build more than one and are buying tools, remember that tubes are cheap compared to tools (and components).
Don’t have the mindset that your first handful of frames will be forever bikes. In fact, go in knowing you’ll replace them in a year or two. Because that’s the whole point, right? To build a bunch of bikes 
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Repair is such a huge one. It’s not as glamorous as building a full visionary thing from scratch, but you can learn soooo much.
I learned A LOT super early into building because I did A LOT of repairs. I was lucky in that my first shop was attached to a commuter bike shop and had a pretty steady stream of all types of steel coming in for repair in my first couple years. Nothing will teach you about construction quite like seeing how things fail and then cutting them apart and seeing what the guts look like.
Highly recommend frame repairs even if it doesn’t seem “worth it” (spoiler it almost never is but the real profit is what we learned along the way).
Also, if you have no metal or welding experience/knowledge outside of what you’ve picked up Framebuilding - learn some basic metallurgy. It’s really not that hard or mystifying, and understanding what why and how metal moves will help with frames a lot, especially when it comes to heat management.
You can find most basic concepts broken down into pretty digestible chunks on youtube, engineering study videos, stuff like that.
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