The Bicycle Book - Bella Bathurst

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dark, bearded Northern men. Besides, no one works with one element for the whole of their professional lives without taking on a few of its characteristics. His father worked in the Swan Hunter shipyard on Tyneside, and Dave took his passion for bikes first into teaching metalwork and then into framebuilding. ‘I loved making things, I loved fiddling about with things, I loved building things. But I never had a point where I thought, I want to be a framebuilder, I want to make my living at this. It was just natural that I got stuck into bikes because it was there that there were things needed doing.’ In his younger days, he did a lot of racing around the North East, got his pro licence, went to France for a bit. ‘I was never good. I was good, but I wasn’t good. Because I had a switch up there’ – he points to his forehead – ‘which …’ – there is a long pause – ‘… I wasn’t a winner. I didn’t want to win at all costs.’

      There are two types of people who usually sign up to his courses, he says. There are the experts who have been studying the science of bicycles for a long time and who want to build something to an exact specification. And there are people like Graeme and me, who like bikes but not to the point of perversion. Graeme Symington, who teaches cycling maintenance and road safety courses in Sheffield, knows much more about frames and framebuilding than I do. He wants to make a big solid classic porteur-style bike, bombproof in its construction but elegant as well. I want to make a classic lugged-frame road bike – a 1950s sort of frame but with modern gears and componentry. Both ambitions are judged to be well within the scope of a week’s work, even though Graeme’s metalworking experience is minimal and I have none at all.

      Obviously, the different demands we’re making from our bikes will dictate their eventual shape and weight. Graeme’s porteur will be a copy of the strong, elegant bikes once used by messengers and delivery boys to haul newspapers or shoeshine kit round the streets of Paris or Rome. They needed to take big loads at both front and back, so they had to be very stable. They also had to be capable of dealing with all weathers and of surviving for years with minimal maintenance. Graeme intends to use his for commuting, for cycle training in schools, and for ‘coping with runs to the shop, where it needs to carry shopping for a family of three’.

      Porteurs – and their long-distance equivalents, roadsters – are the spiritual ancestors of hybrids, the bikes which most adults now start out on when they return to cycling. Roadsters were the classic old Edwardian bikes used both for jaunts in the countryside, long-distance touring and city errands. They were big, roomy, comfortable bikes, well made and designed to be ridden slowly but steadily all day. They wouldn’t set the world on fire, but nor would they leave anyone looking like Quasimodo at the end of the day. The modern hybrid still has the roadster’s practicality, but has borrowed elements from two other bicycle types. The better ones should have a bit of the sturdiness and adaptability of a mountain bike while keeping the speed and responsiveness of a road bike. In practice, a lot of the cheaper, less well-made ones just have the weight of a truck and that’s it. The advantage to them is that they can be loaded with panniers and racks and baskets for groceries and whatnot, and their upright riding position helps to make the rider visible. The downside is that they’re dull. Most people treat them as the two-wheeled equivalent of an estate car; the bike you use to get to and from work, do the shopping, take the kids to nursery. Practical and useful, but totally anonymous. Which is fine, because the other very useful thing about hybrids is that they make riding anything else feel thrilling. If you’ve spent five years riding round town on a heavy bike festooned with laptop bags, then the first time you get on a road bike you’re going to feel like Chris Hoy. All that time spent hauling around a lump of cheap badly-adjusted chromoly might not necessarily do you any anatomical favours in the long term, but, in the short term, it’ll do your glutes and your confidence a power of good.

      Meanwhile, I’m after something more lightweight. A classic road (or racing) bike is not a thing to be laden at all, but a thing made of air designed for speed and hills and huge distances. It isn’t practical in the sense of either transporting big loads or being a particularly comfortable ride, but if both bike and cyclist can be made to match each other, then a good racer is unquestionably a thing to make the soul sing. And building a steel-framed racer here will inevitably be a nod to the classic road bikes of the past. Over the past few decades, the drive for faster and lighter bikes has pushed the majority of manufacturers towards newer, stiffer materials. Steel is regarded as a heavy, spongy, tolerant substance which has enormous tensile strength but which is far too slow and unresponsive for modern racers. And so, apart from a few specialist events such as Italy’s annual L’Eroica audax, the majority of modern road bikes long ago left Reynolds 531 behind and took to aluminium, titanium or carbon fibre instead. The bikes used by pros in the Tour de France will be made from woven carbon-fibre weighing at or around the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale – cycling’s governing body) minimum of 6.8kg. Anything lighter than that is judged to be too expensive to develop and too unstable to ride. Producing carbon-fibre bikes simply isn’t possible for small individual framemakers like Dave Yates. Since the fibres are moulded rather than brazed or welded, it requires a very different set-up to manufacture. Dave can and does make or repair aluminium and titanium frames, but for teaching purposes he likes to stick to good old-fashioned steel.

      Racing bike.

      If I’d wanted a fast bike purely for the city, I could have gone for a single-speed or a fixie. They’re the beautiful pared-down essence-of-bikes which have become increasingly fashionable for urban cyclists in the past few years. For those who live in places without many hills, they’re ideal. They don’t have racks or panniers or baskets, they don’t have derailleurs or cassettes or (sometimes) brakes. They’re just a frame, a set of wheels, and a prayer. Single speeds have one gear and a freewheel, fixies have one gear and no freewheel – in other words, the pedals will always be turning while the bike is in motion. Both are light, elegant and good for posing. In most cases they’re not about logos and branding, but about riding something bespoke. Hence the occasional double-take sight of someone blazing down the Marylebone Road on a white frame with gold rims or swanking around Hoxton on a frog-green number with hot pink tyres. Most are made of steel, which keeps the price down, but because they come without any of the bells and whistles associated with most bikes, they’re still very light. Messengers and fakengers like them because they need almost no maintenance at all apart from a squirt of lube once in a while, and everyone else likes them because they look beautiful and they get you where you want to be, fast. But since I want to climb hills – proper, grown-up hills – then I need a bike with gears: a racing bike.

      Once in a while, Dave gets someone who wants to make either a BMX or a mountain bike. Out there on the open market, a really good MTB with suspension at both front and rear can set you back more than a top-of-the-range modern road bike will, and an amazingly fancy one can cost you five figures or more. The money goes on the geometry. The sheer complexity of fitting suspension at both front and rear, and then in making that suspension strong enough to take anything that earth and wood and rock can hurl at it, and then in making it light enough to carry with ease, and then just for good measure making it simple enough so you don’t need a degree in aeronautics to repair it all comes at a price. The sheer pounding that a heavily used downhiller takes means that it’s no use stinting on materials: anything cheap or badly made will get destroyed by the first tree stump it meets. It isn’t that uncommon to hear downhillers complaining of getting through two or three front forks within the space of a single competition, and since the hydraulics in a good-quality fork can cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds, it’s not a sport for the parsimonious or faint-hearted.

      The bikes Graeme and I want to make are less demanding, and the parts are a lot easier to come by. So our first job is to come up with a series of measurements. To get a proper, comfortable ride on a bike, you need to know how heavy you are, how long your torso is, how long your arms are and what your inside leg measurement is. As a very rough rule of thumb, most men have proportionately longer torsos and shorter legs, while with women it’s the reverse. The length of your torso dictates the length of the top tube, the length of your leg dictates the length of the seat tube and the length of your arms will eventually dictate where and how you arrange your handlebars. Your weight will determine what type of materials you use. Clearly

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