The Scottosphere

This detail shows the braze-on front derailleur, bringer of so much trou­ble. The star-shaped water bot­tle boss rein­force­ments are almost also visible.

In hind­sight, I should have put more dis­tance between the bike and the back­drop to reduce the shad­ows and reflec­tions. I guess if I were more com­puter savvy I could remove them dig­i­tally, but we don’t do that kind of thing here.

Look what dropped by my, um, stu­dio the other day.

We have some catching-up to do, don’t we?

July 12: My first ride on the new bike is like a dream. It’s fast, nim­ble, smooth, and incred­i­bly light! Got my first com­pli­ment after just 5 min­utes of rid­ing. The tem­po­rary stripe of black spray­paint and jury-rigged rear brake are tem­porar­ily for­got­ten, but I can’t wait to get every­thing fixed up.

July 16: Stripped the bike back down and returned it to my frame­builder, who will repair the mis-placed brake bridge and re-paint while I’m on vacation.

July 21: My frame­builder decides that low­er­ing the brake bridge will be too dif­fi­cult. Instead, he will buy me a new pair of longer-reach brakes. This is frus­trat­ing because I already spent $200 on brakes that match the dark gray color scheme of the other com­po­nents. The new ones will be heav­ier and are only avail­able in sil­ver. Fine, I give up!

July 27: Back from vaca­tion. Bike is at the paint shop await­ing paint.

August 3: Await­ing paint.

August 10: Await­ing paint. Appar­ently the painter is back­logged with com­mit­ments to a vin­tage motor­cy­cle show.

August 13: Bike is not ready for my company’s all-hands bike ride. Instead I ride a tan­dem with my boss (which is actu­ally pretty fun as kick­ing every­one else’s ass becomes a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort).

August 20: Frame deliv­ered! The painter must have got­ten word of my impa­tience, as he took one last oppor­tu­nity to tease me:

Con­tin­ued in part 8…

After a frus­trat­ing night with my unbuild­able bike frame, I was relieved to hear that my frame­builder, upon hear­ing the news, shared my frus­tra­tion and eagerly pro­posed a two-tiered solu­tion. First, he would devise a tem­po­rary fix that would get me rid­ing this week­end. Then, he would take the frame back when I leave for vaca­tion next week. While I’m out of the coun­try, he would move both of the trou­ble­some parts, strip the paint, re-paint and bake the fin­ish. I didn’t even have to ask. I like the way this guy thinks.

The front derailleur bracket was off­set by exactly half the diam­e­ter of the bot­tom bracket shell. This dis­tance turned out to be too short to drop the derailleur with an ele­gant custom-machined adapter, so Christo­pher melted off the bracket with a torch, moved it to its final loca­tion, and gave the heat-effected zone a tem­po­rary coat of black spray­paint. A lit­tle fil­ing on an old rear brake would solve the caliper reach prob­lem for now. He picked up the frame at break­fast and returned it after lunch. Impres­sive ser­vice for a Saturday!

So I’m build­ing the bike this week­end after all. And I’m not angry anymore.

Con­tin­ued in part 7…

Good news and bad news about my new Igle­heart bike.

The good news is that the frame looks incred­i­ble. The crafts­man­ship is superb, the styling is dis­tinc­tive, the welds are exquis­ite, and the color looks so good I want to lick it. My ini­tials are welded into the bot­tom bracket. I own this thing. How exciting!

The color is exactly what I wanted. My desire to have a unique color was granted: the painter mixed the tint by eye. There will never be another bike in this shade! It has a beau­ti­ful gloss.

Since I was promised deliv­ery by the end of May and I just got it on Wednes­day, I am under­stand­ably anx­ious to get it on the road and start rid­ing. I haven’t gone for a long ride in prac­ti­cally a year due to the poor con­di­tion of my old road bike! After weeks of scour­ing bike shops and the Inter­net for just the right parts—another epic story which I won’t bother to tell here—I set about assem­bling it after dinner.

And that’s where the bad news comes in. The rear brake bridge is set 2 mm too high, a prob­lem that I think I can work around. More frus­trat­ingly, the fancy braze-on mount for my front derailleur is attached about 15 mm too far from where it’s sup­posed to be, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to install any kind of front shift­ing sys­tem. So my build is aborted, my planned week­end vic­tory ride is can­celled, and I con­front the very real pos­si­bil­ity that I need to unbuild the bike and have Christo­pher strip the paint off, move the offend­ing parts, and repaint it. That could take weeks—and, iron­i­cally, there’s no guar­an­tee it would be the same color when I get it back. Who knows when and if I will ever ride this bike. Depressing.

Con­tin­ued in part 6…

Bare welded steel frame, prior to addi­tion of braze-ons.

Unpainted steel fork, hand made.

Con­tin­ued in part 5…

A one-off bike design is a labor-intensive endeav­our. The tub­ing must be cut and fish­mouthed with sub-millimeter pre­ci­sion so that all the pieces fit snugly together—no small accom­plish­ment con­sid­er­ing there are dozens of crazy angles, off­sets, and diam­e­ters to fac­tor in. All the pieces of the frame must then be held securely by a jig while the joints are tack-welded. The fin­ish welds must be made care­fully to min­i­mize twist­ing and stress buildup caused by uneven heat­ing. To avoid cre­at­ing an area sus­cep­ti­ble to future cor­ro­sion, a welder should be as con­cerned with the appear­ance of the inside of the joint as well as that of the out­side. For this rea­son, argon gas is used to dis­place the air inside the frame dur­ing the weld­ing process.

Beyond pure crafts­man­ship, there are plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for artis­tic touches on a cus­tom frame. My rear dropouts, for exam­ple, pay homage to those of a Wright Broth­ers bicy­cle at the Henry Ford Museum. The seat tube is rein­forced with a hand-carved lug. Above, my frame builder turns a cus­tom seat­post binder bolt on the lathe.

Con­tin­ued in part 4…

The first step in get­ting a cus­tom bicy­cle is the fit­ting process. At the heart of this pro­ce­dure is a ridiculous-looking sta­tion­ary bike on which pretty much every length and angle is adjustable. It sounded sim­ple enough. I showed up with bike shorts, shoes, and ped­als. We attached an appropriate-looking set of han­dle­bars and adjusted the geom­e­try to closely mimic that of my old bike. From this start­ing point, we could tune the fit to max­i­mize com­fort and efficiency.

Two things sur­prised me. First, that I could eas­ily tell the dif­fer­ence between seem­ingly sub­tle changes. Would I pre­fer a seat tube angle of 72.0 or 72.5 degrees? Just like an eye exam, when you have the abil­ity to switch back and forth between A and B, you develop sur­pris­ingly strong pref­er­ences. Sec­ondly, the num­ber of vari­ables involved is over­whelm­ing to the novice. I came in think­ing about quan­ti­ties that are fixed in steel, like seat tube length, seat tube angle, top tube length, and so on, but I hadn’t con­sid­ered the way things like crank length, sad­dle posi­tion, stem length, stem angle, and han­dle­bar shape and place­ment would affect my per­cep­tion of the other things. At least your eye pre­scrip­tion involves only three num­bers! (And you don’t have to break a sweat ver­i­fy­ing the results.)

One of the most sat­is­fy­ing things about the fit­ting process was dial­ing in geom­e­try based purely on bio­met­rics. The top tube height will pro­vide just the right amount of stand-over clear­ance from my crotch, and the sad­dle will be posi­tioned so that my patella is directly over the pedal spin­dle at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock, max­i­miz­ing power trans­fer. The lat­ter is ver­i­fied with a plumb bob.

As good as the fit­ting process is, I left with a few big ques­tions. One was crank length. Should I stay with 175 mm or switch to 172.5 mm? The fit­ting bike offered the abil­ity to change this vari­able, but while I could tell the dif­fer­ence, I still did not develop a pref­er­ence. The indus­try has devel­oped all kinds of “rules” but the biggest fac­tor seems to be cadence. I read a bunch of aca­d­e­mic stud­ies on cadence vs. effi­ciency, but within the range of “rea­son­able” val­ues the results seem incon­clu­sive. Maybe it’s just a preference?

A more chal­leng­ing vari­able was steer­ing geom­e­try. How would I like my bike to steer? Respon­sive, fast, and twitchy? Relaxed, slow, and self-centering? This is some­thing I had never thought about. Unfor­tu­nately there exists no gad­get to eval­u­ate all the variables—the fit­ting bike, being sta­tion­ary, has no need for steer­ing! My builder pro­posed some num­bers that resulted in a seem­ingly high amount of trail. Not want­ing to come this far and get some­thing I don’t like, I did my research, com­pil­ing head tube angles and fork off­sets for a vari­ety of bikes. We came to a com­pro­mise that achieves a high-side-of-average trail with an unusu­ally steep head tube angle and an unusu­ally small amount of fork off­set. (I am get­ting a hand­made fork, so why not?)

One deci­sion proved dra­mat­i­cally more dif­fi­cult than all the oth­ers. The reper­cus­sions could be quite seri­ous. On this deci­sion, I waf­fled well beyond the draw­ing approval stage. I con­sulted with friends, toured bike shops, and scoured the Inter­net for help. I refer, of course, to the choice of color. Color is not a strength of mine, and the com­plete lack of restric­tions made it all the more dif­fi­cult. One color, two col­ors, or three? Fades? Flames? Mask­ing? Metal­lic flecks? Iri­des­cent fin­ishes? Cus­tom graph­ics under the clearcoat? I spent two weeks with a PPG auto­mo­tive swatch­book to no avail. I wanted a paint job that was sim­ple, attrac­tive, and not overly flashy. I also wanted a color that was unavail­able in a store-bought bike. Finally, inspi­ra­tion struck in a Ducati motor­cy­cle show­room: I found a Sport 1000 motor­cy­cle painted in a gor­geous 1970’s retro yel­low. Incred­i­bly, Ducati lists no after­mar­ket paint for­mula for this color, but the painter said he would eye­ball it. We’ll see how that turns out.

Con­tin­ued in part 3…