A big passion of mine is cycling. It always has been, so last year when I went to film how a bike frame is made, I was pretty excited.
I went to visit Lee Cooper, who is a frame builder based just outside of Coventry. He has been making bicycles frame for over 40 years so its fair to say, he's a pro! He knows everything there is to know about bicycle manufacture and his brazing skills are insane! Crazy good!
He takes a box of tubes and turns them into a piece of art, well I think that but I am bike biased. He does all the processes from cutting the tubes to notching them all the way through to brazing the frame together. A point to note on the notching is that Lee has a lathe to cut notches into tubes, but he also has a home made tube notcher. Its a grinder in essence that grinds the perfect notch into the tube. There are commercial tube notchers available, but I love the fact that Lee made his own tool! That's a proper sign of a genius at work.
To give you a bit of history about bicycle frames, if you went back 100 years, the most popular material of choice was steel. Partly because steel was readily available and other materials, aluminium and carbon, hadn't become commercially available. Fast forward to the 1980's onwards and the main material of choice changed to aluminium. This was because aluminium became readily available and cheap. Bicycles manufacture had moved location, generally speaking, to Asia (Taiwan in particular). Steel frames became less common. Fast forward another 10 years or so and carbon started to make an appearance. It became commercially available, it's super light, strong and people wanted it.
All materials have their pros and cons. Aluminium creaks over time and is difficult to repair, but its cheap. Carbon is also difficult to repair and expensive, but its strong. Steel is neither cheap nor expensive, it's kind of in the middle of the range. Its stronger than aluminium but not as strong as carbon and it's heavier than both. But the major beauty, is it is easy to repair. Well relatively, if you know what you are doing.
Now fast forward on the bicycle timescale to now. Carbon bikes are still really popular. Aluminium bikes are still available. But something that is on the rise recently is steel frame bikes. I think they're the best. I think, although a custom steel frame may be a little pricey, it's a lifetime investment. It won't creak like Aluminium and if you do break it, you can repair it unlike carbon.
Keep it real, buy steel.
Thanks Lee for letting me into your workshop for the day to film. It was a great day out!
#bicycle #steelframe #frame