I’m Moving To Portland
For some time now, I’ve hankered after building bikes from scratch. I mean, building the whole frame from lengths of steel tubing, and hand-cast lugs. Actually, not from lengths of steel tubing, but from iron ore that I smelted myself, and then converted to steel in a Bessemer converter in my shed, and then rolled and forged and welded and heat-treated myself to make a product that’s totally unique.
Outsourcing? Pah! You can keep it. Here, it’s all about vertical integration, baby!
There’s one small fly in this ointment. I’ve never learned welding, or brazing. For that matter, "smelting", "Bessemer converter", "hand-cast lugs", "rolled", "forged", and "heat-treated" are all just words to me. On a theoretical level, I know they exist and have an inkling as to what’s involved, but how to actually do them?
But I’m in luck.
It turns out that you don’t need to know any of this stuff to make great bikes. All you need to do is wear girl’s jeans, and know about "colorways", as this vid I found on Urban Velo explains :
OK, I’ll confess that I’ve no idea what a "colorway" is. But finding out sounds a whole lot easier than learning the hard engineering stuff that might otherwise be involved.
I have no idea what this means but it makes me laugh. Can I have your pants?
Uh . . . I’m from the UK. Are you sure you want my pants?
that vid is too funny! So is this Portland OR in the USA that you are moving too, or one of the other Portlands?
“Colorway” from Wicktionary:
“The scheme of two or more colors in which a design is available.”
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colorway
In other words, if you color coordinate your bicycle — red rims, say, silver sidewalls, and purple frame — you’ll have created a “colorway.” In the old days, cyclists didn’t really worry about color coordination, but hipsters seem to find it necessary…