I’ve written a few stories about my time spent working with the American bicycle framebuilder, Doug Fattic. In this part I talk about how I came to study with him in Ukraine, and record some of the history behind the US framebuilding industry.
I’d had a long journey to Kyiv. After a week of intense work in Budapest (and some fairly intense recreation activities in the downtime), I’d reached a peak of anticipation. It seemed incredible that the trip had finally come together.
After the first frame
A year or so ago, I’d spent two fantastic weeks at The Bicycle Academy in Frome, the only organisation in the UK dedicated to teaching students how to build bikes. Or perhaps rather how to build a bike. Going from scratch to a fully functioning frame in two weeks had challenged me — while the careful teaching from Andrew Denham and Paul Burford had given me a solid grounding in fillet brazing which would otherwise have taken me many, many hours of practice on my own, I remained acutely aware that I had a long way to go before being able to build professional quality frames without someone holding my hand.
Not long after returning home from Frome, I started looking for a way to take my skills to the next level. I toyed with the idea of just working out a way of practicing at home until I worked it all out myself, but I could see that this would take a lot of time, expense and unnecessary mistakes.
I had experienced the speed at which I could improve with good feedback and the right focus on effective teaching. And so I looked for another teacher.
I knew that I couldn’t afford to travel to the US, and at first I thought this would limit me to the UK. Several established British framebuilders run courses alongside their custom businesses, but I had a feeling that some of them saw it as a sideline or alternative revenue stream. This made it fine for a casual enthusiast looking to learn the basics and have a hand in the creation of their own custom bike, but it didn’t seem right for my development goals.
I started hanging out on the framebuilding section of the Velocipede Salon, the main online forum for discussing the trade. The forum has a pretty even split of serious pros (including many of the really big names), amateur builders of varying degrees of skill, and those with an interest in handmade bikes.
Doug Fattic, an American builder based in Michigan, stood out as I read through past threads. He spoke about his teaching methods and background in a way that impressed me, as did his willingness to share information online in a way that some established builders shied away from.
Some other famous figures dropped in from time to time with terse, occasionally brilliant comments and advice that seemed both realistic and discouraging. Doug wrote long, careful replies going into the details of his techniques and equipment.
I saw that he had a workshop in Ukraine where he spent some time teaching and building transport frames for Adventist pastors in the more volatile parts of the country, where a bike remains the best and sometimes only way to get around. Compared to the USA, Ukraine seemed nearby and a lot more affordable.
A plan began to form, and I saw an opportunity to save more money by tacking it onto the end of an upcoming work trip. We exchanged emails for weeks, talking about everything from what I wanted to learn during my brief stay (I could only spare a week) to American politics. I booked tickets, and bought a phrasebook.
Despite my anxieties about finding my way around, I found Andrej and Maxim only a few minutes after stepping off the train which had carried me all the way from Budapest. Andrej, a small old Ukrainian man, had let out his apartment to me on Airbnb. He spoke no English, so his son Maxim had come along as translator.
We left Kyiv station, passing a defective three-storey water feature, and Andrej soon had us underway on the main road leading northwest out of the city. Even with the traffic, it only took forty minutes or so to reach the new yellow block of flats on the outskirts of Bucha, surrounded by pine woods.
Maxim explained the function of the touch-sensitive lightswitches and the heating. He struggled to explain the function of the bidet, and seemed relieved when I said us Brits didn’t really go in for them. ‘No, we don’t use them either’. Standard issue for a so-called luxury apartment development, perhaps.
Before long they left me alone, and I connected to the wifi to try to find out where I would meet Doug tomorrow. We had emailed each other dozens of times, but we had missed out a few vital details.
As I was making my dinner, he replied describing the location of his workshop: behind the lake, at the far end of the campus of the Ukrainian Institute of Arts and Sciences, a Seventh Day Adventist college.
Even early the next morning, the summer sun had me feeling warm on my walk from the apartment to the college. The arterial and main grid roads have good surfaces, but on the outskirts of town many of the side streets deteriorated into gravel and sand tracks, with feral dogs sunbathing on the verges.
I walked across the spacious green campus, trying to get my bearings against the satellite pictures I’d looked at the night before. Behind a large building where we would later eat, I found the lake. At the other side, I could see a low red workshop alongside some polytunnel greenhouses.
Doug came out to meet me and took a photo. After he had shown me around and explained how things worked on campus, we sat outside on chairs that sank into the sandy soil, and talked about the background of American framebuilding.
My partial memory of his personal take on the growth of the trade follows. I can attribute any mistakes to my bad handwriting.
A brief history of the American craft
The first American bicycle boom came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, much as it did in Europe. A decade before Ford, Schoeninger’s Western Wheel Works began mass-producing bicycles which the working class could afford. While the craze continued in Europe towards the middle of the century, the cheap automobile killed the popular pursuit stone dead in the USA.
By the Sixties cars had taken over as a mode of transport, and no connection remained between the pre-WWII builders of the great American six day racing bikes and those that came later. In a pretty familiar pattern of ebb and flow, most of the public by then considered bikes as a toy, something for children. ‘I had a ten speed bike and everyone thought it was an odd hobby, like curling’, said Doug. In the Seventies, a second boom hit, bigger than the first. In 1970, Americans bought 6.9 million bikes. In 1973, they bought 15.2 million.
A handful of builders such as Oscar Wastyn (from whom one significant branch of the framebuilding lineage descends) remained to keep American domestic framebuilding alive. Oscar’s father, Emil Wastyn, had built the first Schwinn Paramounts. Later Oscar would take this over. Oscar’s son Scott still runs the Wastyn shop in Chicago.
Albert Eisentraut, whom Classic Rendevous calls ‘the dean of modern… USA custom frame builders’, worked as a mechanic in Oscar’s shop and picked up framebuilding from him. Later, Eisentraut became probably the first person in America to teach framebuilding professionally, teaching Bruce Gordon and Mike Nobilette among others. ‘Albert used to file the lugs very thin’, Doug mentions.
England produced some of the best examples and so, for reasons of business-minded optimism, wanderlust, or perhaps ennui, a handful of young Americans crossed the Atlantic to learn the trade of frame building — Reade Tilley, Kingdom Magazine #18, Winter 2011.
For many serious riders, the decline of domestic framebuilding mean that if you wanted a really nice bike, you had to go abroad, and that meant England or Italy. In England the trade had never died down in quite the same way it had in the US.
So a lot of the young American framebuilders went over to learn their trade — Richard Sachs, Chris Chance, Peter Weigle and Ben Serotta went to Witcomb Lightweight Cycles, while Doug tried to go to Hetchins, the firm famous for the distinctive curly stays and elaborate lugwork
Doug had heard about Hetchins from seeing an advert in American Cycling magazine, which he stumbled upon in a library paper rack. ‘It’s lucky it began with ‘A’ or I would never have seen it.’ He wrote to them. They didn’t take him, but this began the process that would eventually see him learning at Ellis Briggs.
We were young upstarts, we weren’t European, we weren’t old school, there wasn’t the aura or myth of a bike coming from England so [customers] would come in and they would be quite dictatorial — Peter Weigle, quoted in Kingdom Magazine
Leap forward a few years. Many of the Americans abroad returned to ‘hang out their shingle’ back home (an aside — lots of American builders online use this phrase, usually in the context of not doing it until you’ve built a stack of frames and jumped through a whole pack of hoops. The phrase doesn’t really exist in British English, so for me it’s always seemed like something a roofer might do, but not a framebuilder).
In the US, these builders had to push up the quality of their work and make something nicer than what they had been working on in the UK. An exceptional attention to detail helped to justify the higher prices of American-made bikes, as well as compensate for the youth of this new generation of builders in their twenties and thirties who wanted to compete with established masters on the other side of the Atlantic. With no name to rely upon, getting started was hard.
Trade, not craft (and certainly not art)
There’s a lot of art around [in custom framebuilding] at the moment… And some of it is even functional — Tom Ritchey, ‘Old Skool x New School’ @ The Bicycle Academy, September 2016
Back in the UK, Doug had found that English builders were turning out an amazing quantity of bikes in a short time. At Harry Quinn, this meant two frames per builder per day. When he visited places like C.F. Hill in London, the builders saw themselves just as workmen. The trade had no particular prestige, allowing this kind of turnover.
For one thing, English racers saw their bikes as tools — ‘try asking a carpenter about his hammer. It’s just a hammer.’ The same bike that they used with mudguards to get to work on Monday was the one they’d raced in a TT on Sunday. (Remember that mass start racing only became legal in the UK in the 1950s, so semi-clandestine TTs defined British racing at the time. Dave Moulton has an interesting take on the class reasons for this ban.)
Andrew at Ellis Briggs took longer, perhaps a week per frame. Johnny Berry, whose work Doug admires more than any of the other English builders, built to what Doug calls ‘the American standard’, taking more than a week to complete a single frame as the main builder at Hetchins.
Compared to two frames a day at Harry Quinn, this meant that he made almost no money on the frames, and the income came from repairs instead. To make any money, Doug says, you had to either make frames quickly (and here he mentions a few names that he says makes up the 90% of builders), or make them really nicely. For the nice stuff, the really nice stuff, something like a hundred hours can go into a painted frame.
Doug ended up working at Ellis Briggs, once he’d managed to overcome Jack Brigg’s early opposition. The way he tells it, Jack had had an American lad come over before and waste his time, so Doug had to win him over. At Ellis Briggs they built to a higher standard than some other famous shops, but the place had other extra benefits for a novice builder. Jack had other people like Andrew to do the customer work for him, so he could spend time teaching Doug.
Ellis Briggs stood out because they had an alignment table, now seen as almost an essential bit of equipment for a framebuilder. Other English builders used a section of channel with adjustable feelers to check alignment, similar to the modern Park FAG-2.
As well as working at Ellis Briggs, moving to England gave Doug a chance to see other builders and compare their equipment. (In the Kingdom article quoted above, Weigle also mentions the reaction to the installation of a rickety, cheap pillar drill at the antiquated Witcomb workshop: ‘for the next couple of days the guys would come in and almost genuflect, it was like this deity hanging on the wall’.)
At F.W. Evans, Doug saw the kind of flat-metal jig that he would later develop into his own design, in stark contrast to the fixtures based around massive aluminium extrusions. F.W. Evans had the fixture on pulleys, so they could lift it overhead to free up the alignment table when needed.
When keen cyclists developed the habit of specifying novel details for new frames, my scale drawings frequently showed that the details could not be combined, as for instance when given measurements would not add up to a stated wheelbase, or when such measurements would require a fitting that was not procurable and might be dangerous or inadvisable if it were.
I have never believed in guesswork. Before I accepted an order I had to make sure that the specification was practicable. That involved literally thousands of small scale drawings to make sure, and in each case a full scale drawing on which to build the frame. By inventing the Evans Universal Frame Building Jig, I cut out all that work, for in five minutes I can set up the jig to any possible specification, and it is the simplest matter in the world to make slight adjustments so that an impracticable design becomes eminent practicable — F.W. Evans, 1939 catalogue
A lot has changed since then. Most racing bikes now come out of moulds with little human input beyond laying up the carbon fabric correctly. New technologies and standards make the bikes of today fundamentally incompatible with those from five years ago. International imports dwarf domestic production.
But Richard Sachs still mitres tubes with hand files, and the fixture on Doug’s table in Ukraine still looks a lot like the one in F.W. Evans’ catalogue. In lots of ways they remain the best tools for the job.
Read on in part 2, in which Doug’s teaching helps me take my skills to the next level.
