I went to college for environmental biology and wildlife ecology at CU Boulder and got a Masters degree around 2002. While working for my graduate advisor I leaned GPS and GIS and used those for research projects and am part of a handful of published papers. This enabled me to find work at CO state parks and then City of Boulder as a GIS Analyst and then GIS supervisor. I was on a great career track in GIS until I took a Framebuilding class and thought I could make a good living at it because it seemed so many others were able to. I moved to CA to be closer to my ailing parents and left a good paying job. I used my savings to buy tools and “hang out the shingle.” For the last 10 years I’ve been making bikes full-time but just scraping by so I’ve been picking up contract work when I can to fund my “fully custom” bike building habit that I still think I suck at while not charging enough to make a profit. Whenever I’d raise prices I’d get less interest and fewer orders.
Don’t do what I do. Keep your day job and keep it a hobby or side business. Or if you want to risk it go big and start up a production style frame company that has some angle that separates your bikes from the rest. Or have capital, contacts, and design prowess to get batch bikes made in Taiwan and become a marketing mogul. The solo custom builder business model is tough, you have to be able and happy to do it all (marketing & publicity, accounting, administration, tool making, and of course frame fabrication) and it leaves very little time and money to do other things like take time off and travel. That’s my experience at least. I’m too far out of the loop to go back into GIS so I will be making far fewer custom bikes and replacing that with contract building and hope it all works out.
Mitch - I rode BMX in the late 90’s early 2K and was coached by Nate Wessel (on your rainbow fade frame) - always thought that was a sweet bike!
Cheers
I’m a mechanical engineer, frame design and fabrication has been a passion project and an opportunity to introduce my kids to the process of creation and real work.
Working with up-and-coming riders, and a few engineer / designer friends to test out new design and fabrication methods.
Man that takes me back to the hours I wasted playing Matt Hoffman pro bmx 2. That soundtrack and Nate’s long sleeve etnies top are burned into my memory. I always payed as rooftop though.
If only I spent that time actually riding bmx… sigh.
That was one of the things I was thinking of doing! I think there’s a lot of opportunity to sell freelancers needed services (bookkeeping, accounting, tax prep, insurance, banking help, etc. – not courses), but not sure I have the patience/desire to get licensed again...
That’s not to say it’s a bad idea across the board, just that it’s certainly not essential for everyone.
From my perspective, as a writer, the best way to create back-up streams of income is through licensing and royalties–the same type of work, the same relevant expertise, seamless with the other work.
I have a torch in my shed that I try not to burn myself with and I’ve made 2 frames so far.
For work I am an industrial designer at Fezzari Bicycles. I’ve been there for about 6 years. Before that I was a bike mechanic at a local shop and before that a ski resort. I don’t really see myself ever making frames for anyone but myself unless by some miracle I get a lot better at brazing. But my Felt TK3 frame developed a crack on the seat tube / top tube junction and I can’t weld aluminum so I’ve started to design my 3rd frame to use the spare omnibus cranks from that frame.
Just found this thread. I aspire to be even a hobby builder! Up 'til now it’s just been racks and a bit of frame mods for friends. So bike stuff isn’t even a part-time job for me yet.
I went to school for mechanical engineering and ended up hating it. I spent ~20 years in internet software as a web developer and then 4 years as a technical program manager…grew to hate that too. Around the time COVID hit, the state of depression I’d been in for several years boiled over into a severe panic attack. Long story short, I decided to take some time away from work. To satisfy a long-time itch (and keep me out of trouble), I enrolled in a machine technology program (Laney College). After the first year of school, I was able to get a job as a manual machinist in a rocket factory (Astra)…I just crossed the 2 year mark there in June…now I mostly program and run CNC machines. I also just finished all the requirements for my machine tech certificate. First job I’ve had in a long time that feels like it’s something I was meant to be doing!
Thanks for sharing! I am always intrigued by the mind-hand connection. To me there is satisfaction and calming when I am physically doing something: making something with my hands, or pedaling a bike with my feet.
I’m a classically trained trombonist and have been a musician by trade (and sometimes concurrently a music student) for the past 25 years or so. I also teach music, mainly private lessons. So I’m no stranger to picking a job that barely pays the bills - and yet, I thought I’d go into frame building!
In my history of music-adjacent jobs, I was recently an admin for a symphony orchestra. Once Covid hit, the situation there (boss) turned pretty toxic and I decided to quit. Having been building for about 7-8 years as a hobby at that point, I decided I’d try to take the frame building thing and go for it. Not too long and I realized I needed a job. I’ve been working part time managing a violin shop for almost two years now and am still trying to sell enough frames to even break even on my shop rent. It is tough! I still play trombone and it helps to pay some of the bills, but I’m glad I enjoy it because the effort to reward ratio is way off - just like frame building!
I’m actually still excited about building, though. I have a few things in the hopper that I think might help me turn the corner, including a forthcoming review on the Hardtail Party YouTube channel. I’m also pretty excited about MADE. I find inspiration in all the stories here from those who don’t build full time to the ones who do and the struggles everyone deals with. Thanks for sharing.
For the last decade I’ve been working for a small company in New Hampshire serving as our lead mechanical engineer supporting NASA’s hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (HIAD) program. This is a new type of heat shield that is able to pack down in very small volumes and deploy into large aeroshells that use atmospheric drag to slow down spacecrafts, payloads, etc. It is the current frontrunner for the entry, decent, landing (EDL) system needed to bring humans to Mars. In November of 2022 there was a flight test called LOFTID, that successfully demonstrated the capability of the technology. Its pretty cool to have built something that has traveled at Mach 30 and was the largest blunt body to ever enter the earth’s atmosphere. My main focus for this program was on the flexible thermal protection system (FTPS) where I developed a fabrication plan, performed mechanical component testing, created prototypes, developed semi-automated systems to aid in manufacturing, built the FTPS articles, and managed the project for my company. I strongly do not recommend trying to sew ceramic fabrics.
Since I’ve started dipping my toes in the framebuilding world I’ve had to learn a lot of different fabrication techniques. In a lot of ways this has made me better at my job and has given me a much more well-rounded skillset and overall perspective. There are so many talented people on this forum that continue to inspire me and I will continue to offer my gratitude and sing your praise.
Really interesting! I think I have a HIAD in my car (air bag). Kidding aside, what you’re doing clearly gives you the critical thinking to understand and improve any mechanical assembly. Bicycles are like any other mechanical thing, you’re limited by the parameters it has to meet, but within those parameters, there’s a lot of room for innovation.
Totally off topic, but you got my brain going with the comment,
Which brings up a ton of fabrication questions. I’ve worked with kaolin wools, but I’m not sure how it could be made into a fabric. Woven? Felted? Some top secret method? Have you gone past kaolin to a more exotic material? And if you were to sew it (not advised), what would the thread be? More ceramic, or high-temp wire? Finally, how did you solve the problem of joining ceramic fabrics? I don’t have the background to figure this out, but the challenges posed are fascinating. You don’t have to answer any of this, I’m being a materials nerd.
The FTPS is made from a multi layer stackup with higher temp capable materials on the outside and progressively more efficient, but less temp capable insulators as you get closer to the inner, gas barrier layer. The outer fabric is a silicon carbide woven fabric. It looks very similar to carbon fiber but is a couple orders of magnitude more expensive. Combine this with being an extremely brittle and irritating (think home insulation but 100x worse) material, it can be an extremely difficult, frustrating and stressful material to work with. I can’t get into too many details about how its joined, but I can state we developed our own SiC sewing thread in-house. Post flight image showing some detail.
I work for a software engineering company so my actual work changes with whatever client I am helping in that particular moment but in the last 4 years I am full time working for a motorcycle company
I was in charge of their road lineup until Dec 2021 when I got totally burned out, took a 4 months hiatus and went back at it after that with much less responsibility - and a happier daily routine. Much happier now, much more free time to spend on my other many hobbies
I’ll join in on this! It’s pretty inspiring to see the different paths that led us all to framebuilding.
After working in shops all through my mechanical engineering degree in Boulder, I took the UBI brazing class in 2016 to build my first frame.
Nothing happened for a few years until around 2019 I had free reign of a Bridgeport and a Hardinge at a design engineering job. I used that shop to build an Arctos clone I had CAD’d up and a seatstay and chainstay mitering fixture.
My design job was a lot slower during Covid, so I was able to build a handful of frames for friends while bikes were out of stock. And since no one was traveling, I went out to Yamaguchi’s school in 2021. The dream is to pick framebuilding back up as it really scratches my hands-on itch.
For the last 2 years I moved out to CA from CO to work as a design engineer at a bike company. It’s a lot of CAD and paper-work, but really exciting to solve framebuilding issues on a mass production scale - and think how a solo person could build them differently!
@KenyonBikes
I’m interested! My day job as a Prod Mgr has me thinking in terms of 10M users per year - which is a VERY different scale than my framebuilding endeavors! My mind naturally goes to solving problems for HUGE scale.
I often waste time/energy/money devising tools and processes to create 100’s of frames when really, I need to make 1!
Would love to hear your experiences in the bike building world!
