Last week I finished up teaching my first ever frame building class at UBI. The United Bicycle Institute opened a campus here in Portland a few month back, and I was invited to be a guest instructor for the most recent steel brazing class.
For the past two weeks I’ve been with a group of 8 people, most of whom had little or no experience with a torch. Over this two-week period they learned the basics of how to build a bicycle frame, including everything from tubing selection, designing, filing, brazing, and everything else you need to know to get started. By the last day of class, each person had a frame they had constructed with little to no hands on help from me.
It was a good experience, for myself, and hopefully for the students as well. The first week was definitely more difficult for me than the second, mainly because I was, for a large part, standing there talking about basic mechanics of bike design and giving demonstrations. There is a lot of information to present, and the trick is doing it without putting everyone to sleep. I don't know how successful I was with this. Nobody fell out of their chair snoring, but still, there were times it seemed to go on and on.
The demos are more engaging, and students start out the first day with practice sessions for brazing. This seemed to get people excited. Firing up the torch and gluing steel together with molten brass or silver is more fun than listening to me talk about the differences between oval and round chain stays, or round oval round. Oval round.
The latter part of the first week is when the fun really starts. By this time everyone has had several sessions of brazing practice, and has a full-sized drawing of the bicycle they intend to build. From this point we really start into the set-up and construction of the frame and fork. I talk less, and the students work more at their benches. And once everyone gets going they seem eager to continue.
This class has forced me to step back from my usual ways of doing things and to think critically about the processes. How is a bicycle frame constructed? If you've never built one you might look carefully at a frame and have no idea where to begin. It may seem like a huge undertaking. There is so much going on in a bicycle, and there are so many styles and types of bikes available. What do I build; where do I start; how do I make it ride well? If you back up a little and think about it, each type of bike has a certain set of processes that went into its construction. It's not rocket science. There are some tricks, and there are a lot of little things to know, but really, the process to build a basic frame is not incredibly difficult. It's a series of steps, one after another. Really, you do one thing and move onto the next. And you keep doing that until you have a complete frame. Once you've learned how to build a basic bike, then you can spend the next hundred years learning how to build a "great" bike, and a "beautiful" bike. But with this, like with everything, you have to start at the beginning.
So it was my job in this class to give people the basics, and to show one fairly intuitive set of processes to take people from the beginning to the end. I wasn't trying to show the 'fast' way or the 'right' way to build a frame, I was just showing one way it could be done, a way that seems pretty logical based on the knowledge of the students, and also based on the type of equipment we had available to use in class. I feel like I did an alright job, especially for my first class. There's always room for improvement, but a good sign is that nobody tried to punch me, and everyone came out with a bicycle frame that they'd built themselves. And, equally important to me, is that I had a good time.
I will be teaching more frame building classes in the future. If you're interested in attending one of my classes, keep an eye on the UBI schedule for details. We're in the process of figuring it out now.
Here are the graduates from my first class. See how they smile? That might be because they were squinting at the sun. Or it might be because they're each holding a frame they built. You'll have to ask them.