Do The Right Thing

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.

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