and unresponsive. In practice, it’s possible to have an entirely straight fork with enough offset to give a comfortable ride. By fitting the blades into a ready-made curved jig and then leaning down on them with our full weight, it’s possible to bend them into a couple of EU-approved banana curves, giving a bit of shock absorption but not enough to slow the ride down much. The two fork blades then get slotted into the fork crown and brazed in, and after that the drop-outs (the pieces which hold the wheels and rear derailleur in place) are attached to the chain stays. All of them are comparatively small joints but tricky, since the steel is thinner and lighter, and the risk of burning a hole consequently that much greater. The slot in the chain-stay must be perfectly angled and mitred, and we seem to end up pushing a lot of brass down what looks like a very deep hole. Once the metal cools, pedants – including me – then get to spend hours filing the join down so it looks more attractive, a detail which, when the bike is completed, will be noticed by no one except other pedants and dachshunds.
Then we join the head tube and seat tube to each other. To connect the two, the end of the seat tube must be perfectly filed down and mitred. If it isn’t – if there’s too much stress on one part of the joint but too little on another – then it’s the joint most likely to crack or fatigue. At this point, my choice of lugs comes back to haunt me. The ones I picked out have frillier edges than normal, and therefore need more careful brazing. Moving round them with the torch, learning the way the heat sucks the brass towards it or pushes it away, remains endlessly fascinating. We mill the end of the head tube down to the right size, stick it in the top of the fork crown and braze them together. Even at this stage, the whole thing has begun to look less like a series of GCSE metalwork assignments and more like a bicycle.
And then there is the moment when, after three days and a lot of coffee, all the different bits and joints are put into the main jig and brazed together. This is the moment of truth, the point at which everything either comes together into one priceless diamond-frame or disintegrates into a load of unrideable parallelograms. The different components might all look great on paper, but no one can really tell you how harmonious it’s going to look when it’s all connected or, more importantly, what kind of ride it’s going to be. Once it’s all been brazed together, it’s left overnight in the jig to cool and settle. The following day, we take it out, poke the fork stem up through the head tube, examine our handiwork and agree unanimously that it looks like a bike. The forks are curvy, the bottom bracket proportionate and the top tube so straight you could hang pictures with it. Once in a while, I glance at the point at which the seat stays attach to the top of the seat tube. In mass-produced hybrids, the join is usually done with a big clot of weld. But in old-style racers, there should be a couple of sharp, cleanly pointed ends, like one-sided spears. Having managed to get those brazed and filed down so they come to a perfectly curved point just below the saddle is a moment of deep private satisfaction. One of the last tasks is to swap to silver solder in order to fit in the bottle bosses (the two little holes in the down tube which take the cage for a water bottle). Silver has a lower melting point than brass, and thus the flame has to be held higher and moved away quicker than with most of the brazing. But silver is good for the smaller tasks where a really clean finish is required, and for joining things to the centre of butted tubing where the steel is lighter and potentially more fragile.
At the end of the week, both Graeme and I have frames. Once they have been shot-blasted and all the excess brass removed, they look as clean and professional as half the frames hanging from the rafters in bike shops all over Britain. A few months later, painted an unrestrained blood-red with gold outlines round the lugs and then fitted out by Rob Sargent in Finsbury Park, I have something I think is properly astonishing. It rides like a dream. It accelerates up hills. And, believe me, there are very few kinds of smugness greater than the smugness of being asked where you got your bike and being able to say, ‘I made it myself.’ Back in Sheffield, Graeme has a similar experience. ‘It is a bike that I can’t ride without people stopping and asking about it (might be because it’s painted bright yellow). I tell far too many people that I built it myself, an immodesty that I put down to my enthusiasms rather than my vanity.’ Sitting in the Coningsby café during our lunch breaks, we had stuffed ourselves with dreams of all the places our fabulous new frames would take us. I wanted to try my bike out in the hills and glens of the Scottish Borders and then see how it did in France. Graeme was mulling over the idea of a full-scale north-to-south trip down through America. But the truth of it was that it didn’t matter where we were going to take them, or why. What mattered was the dream itself. As Graeme said later, ‘There is magic in framebuilding.’
I’d felt the same. Watching Dave with a brazing torch and a stick of brass was as close as I’ll ever come to watching an alchemist at work. Not merely because there’s something occult about watching that flame scorch its white-hot pathway across the steel, but because at the end of it all we’ve been part of the transmutation of those materials from disparate parts to unified whole. And because in the process Graeme and I both learned so much about what a bicycle is and how it works. As Dave says – slightly more prosaically – making a bike is really just plumbing. But it’s definitely magic plumbing.
Chapter Two
You Say You Want a Revolution
To get to the place where Dave Yates is now, to be able to calculate so cleanly the angles and weights that separate a mountain bike from a tourer or a BMX from a racer, takes more than just experience. It takes history. Every part and every angle of a bicycle has an ancestry, a time when something else was tried and found either to fit the purpose or to form a mechanical dead end. It doesn’t really matter if the aim of the framebuilder was to produce a bike that was light or durable or speedy – in order for Graeme and me to have built our dream machines, someone somewhere long ago had to do the R&D. The loss of a second or a gram or a millimetre of travel will always have been achieved by one man’s trial and another man’s error.
And, perhaps because the history of the bicycle is relatively short and well documented, much of that history is still contentious. For as long as there are bicycles in the world, there will be people squabbling about who invented them. The truth is that it was a collaborative process – not quite invention by committee, but more a cumulative uncovering of basic mechanical principles. The British contribution was threefold: an Englishman came up with the tangential wheel and leather saddles, a Scotsman came up with crank pedals and another Scotsman working in Northern Ireland came up with pneumatic tyres. For the sake of European harmony and a quiet life, it’s easiest to agree that the French invented everything else.
On the other hand, if you go to Germany they will tell you unequivocally that the bicycle came straight down the line from the draisienne, or velocipede, a heavy, wooden two-wheeled contraption without pedals or steering mechanism invented by a civil servant in 1817. In his professional life, Baron Karl von Drais was Master of the Forests in the Duchy of Baden. In his private life, he was an enthusiastic amateur inventor. His first project – a horseless carriage – had failed, but his new running machine met a more generous reception. Made out of wood and iron, it looked like a big old-fashioned version of the pedal-less bikes that children now learn to ride on. Though its front wheel was moveable, it weighed a minimum of 20kg and the only way of guiding it was to lean from side to side while pushing it along with the feet. Its unreliable trajectory meant that city riders couldn’t help straying onto pavements, while its huge weight often left them with painful ruptures of the groin. The combination of heavy fines, hernias and public ridicule was not a winning one. Even so, great claims were made on the velocipede’s behalf. Its popularity spread, and soon much of Europe knew about the new fashion. In February1869, three young men on velocipedes announced that they had managed the 53-mile run from London to Brighton in only 15 hours, a feat which would have been more impressive if someone had not shortly afterwards walked the same route in 11½.
Some time later, a blacksmith from Dumfriesshire named Kirkpatrick Macmillan was arrested in Glasgow for dangerous driving. In June 1842, Macmillan was found riding along a pavement on a velocipede, knocking down a child in the process. More unusually, he claimed to have made the journey from Old Cumnock, 40 miles away, in only five hours. The secret, he claimed, was in the adaptations he had made to his machine.