Christmas through the years

Once again it is Christmas, how quickly the months and years fly by. Looking back, it is hard to believe I have been through 83 Christmas Days and the surrounding holidays.

Most have been good and happy occasions, but no one Christmas stands out as being different or special.

My childhood memories should have been special, and I guess in a way they were as I seem to remember them the most.

From the age of 5 (The earliest Christmas I remember.) to 9 years it was the war years, 1941 to1945, and every Christmas was so much the same that they all blend together.

I had a brother seven years older than me, and we would go out into the woods and find a Christmas tree, bring it home and decorate it. That was fun. My brother would usually climb a large tree and cut the top off, rather than cut down a small one. There were no Christmas Tree Farms, or trees for sale.

My Christmas stocking was one of my knee-high socks that I wore every day, and I could guarantee every year there would be an orange in the toe of that sock. Yes, an orange was a Christmas gift. Oranges did not grow in England, they had to be imported from Spain or some other Mediterranean country. And bananas, I never saw a banana until the war was over, they came from the West Indies or Florida.

In the leg part of my knee-high sock would be a rolled-up coloring book, and there would be a box of crayons or sometimes colored pencils.  Sometimes there might be a special edition comic book like a Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Balloons were another thing I never saw until the war was over, all manufacturing went into the war effort, nothing as trivial as balloons were made.

I do remember one year going to a Christmas Party, and Santa came dressed in a red hat and white beard but was wearing a khaki army overcoat. We were told that Santa Claus had joined the Home Guard. The Home Guard was mostly older men, veterans of the First World War. They were issued a uniform and a rifle, and would have been Britain’s last line of defense, had the country been invaded.

I think the reason my childhood Christmas memories are good, was because my expectations were met. Had I expected more and then didn’t get it, I might have been less happy. But why should I expect more? I don’t remember the other kids I went to school with getting more than me.

In later years after the war, in my late teens or twenty’s, I had left home and lived in rented rooms. If I didn’t get invited to someone’s house, Christmas was a boring, waisted day. I had no TV, and all movie theatres and restaurants were closed.  Each Christmas since then I do tend to think of those spending Christmas alone.

Later I married and had children of my own, and those Christmases were special of course. Since coming to the USA, half a lifetime ago, it has become a tradition every Christmas I talk on the phone with my daughters, and granddaughters. Now in recent years I have Great Grandchildren too.

I think for me the older I get, the more content I am, and in a way every day is Christmas. It is hard to single out one special day and make it better that the rest. My expectations are always being met.

I have been blessed in my lifetime with the ability to build a few good bicycle frames. The fact that there are some out there that enjoy my past work, for me is the gift that keeps on giving. I could not ask for more, at Christmas or any other time.

I wish you all a joyous Christmas, or whatever it you celebrate at this time of the year.

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Is the beauty of a bicycle in the way it rides, or the way it looks?

When I built my first frames in England in the late 1950s, early 1960s, I was trying to build myself a better frame. A typical frame of that era had a very shallow, 71-degree seat angle and a long top tube. This did not suit my small stature of 5’ 6”. (167.64 cm.)

When making a maximum effort, I found myself sliding forward and consequently sitting on the narrow nose of the saddle. The result was it was extremely uncomfortable and had the effect of the saddle being too low.

The answer seemed obvious to me, if this was the natural position my body wanted to adopt, put the saddle where it needed to be to accommodate it. I also looked at the way the bike handled at speed, there was a tendency to wobble on fast descents. Also, the bike tended to feel sluggish when getting out of the saddle sprint, or to climb.

Over the next 10 or 15 years I built several different frames with varying angles, and each frame had extra front forks of various rakes, (Offset.) Some of these experiments improved the bike’s performance, and others made things worse. It was a long, slow learning process.

By the early 1970s I had pretty much got my own frame geometry figured out. But now I was being asked to build frames for other local cyclists. By now the trend in Italy and in England was the build road frames with 75 or even 76-degree head angles. I went against this trend as I had experimented with these angles years before and found it did not work too well. The handling was skittish or squirrely.

73-degree head had been established as the ideal head angle as far back as the 1930s, and it still worked. However, the old idea was to have a very long fork off-set, and zero trail. This is what lead to the speed wobbles of those old bikes. I had found that I ¼ inches (32 mm.) fork rake worked better and finally settled at 1 3/8 inches. (35 mm.)

With feedback from other riders, I found that a 73-seat angle worked fine for the taller riders, but I would gradually steepen the seat angle as the frame got smaller. The top tube was lengthened as the frame got taller, but at a lesser amount that the seat tube. This was offset by a longer handlebar stem on the larger frames. The idea was to always have the front part of the handlebars directly over the front hub. This meant the handling was consistent throughout the range of sizes.

Having spent many years designing and building a better bike, it became my main selling point.

Here was a frame that would fit better and handle better. (See the advert (Left.) from the British Cycling Magazine from 1975.)

Strangely, I have seen few framebuilders or manufacturers advertising their product on the premise that it rides and handles better than their competitors.

I feel proof that my frame design is valid, is the fact that I still have a following 26 years after I built my last frame. Many owners are original owners and will not part with their bike. I regularly receive emails from owners saying their FUSO or other bike I built is their favorite ride.

I was recently asked, “What do I think of the current American builders?” I don’t really know enough to answer that. I only know what I see at NAHBS each year. I see beautiful pieces of art, outstanding paint and metal work, but how do they ride? Or does anyone even care? No one will ever go out and race on such a machine anyway. Race bikes are no longer made of steel.

As far as I can see, the corporations who today build the carbon fiber bikes that are raced, are doing little that is innovative as far as geometry. They still build the basic 73-degree parallel frame that dates to the days when it was easier for a builder to build a lugged steel frame that way.

It is difficult to find a CF fork with a 35 mm. rake anymore. Today frames come out of a mold, angles and geometry could be unlimited. Within UCI rules of course, but even within those rules there is room for change. The UCI will also follow what the manufactures want. Disc brakes was an example of that.

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Owning and maintaining a paint facility

One of the largest outlays in setting up a framebuilding business is a paint facility, by that I mean to include a totally enclosed, dust free paint booth.

It is a large expense to set up and maintain, because it takes up a lot of space. It therefore it prohibits one from working out of their home, or some tiny hole-in-the wall shop. In most places you can’t spray paint in a residential neighborhood anyway. You have to own or rent space in an industrial area.

Rent is a huge overhead when running any business. It is the reason I eventually went out of business in 1993. The demand for road frames had dropped to a level where I could not generate enough income to pay the rent on a 1500 sq. ft. industrial unit.

I could have maybe squeezed into a 1000 ft. space, but the rent would not have been that much lower, plus I would have had the expense of moving, costing money I didn’t have.

My paint booth was totally enclosed, it measured 20 x 20 feet. That is 400 sq. ft. and with at least a 3-foot clear space required all around it, as a fire precaution, actual floorspace required is 676 sq. ft. You can perhaps appreciate that any space under 1500 sq. ft. for the rest of the shop would be a squeeze.

At one end of the booth was a large fan that drew the air from inside the booth and exhausted it through a 2 ft. diameter vent through the roof. The air was drawn through replaceable filters that caught the paint over-spray. Thus preventing it from being exhausted outside into the atmosphere. These filters had to be replaced every month.

At the opposite end of the booth were air intake filters. These were “Sticky” so they caught dust and prevented it from entering the booth. The booth had a partition inside, one side to hang frames waiting to be painted, the other side was where the painting took place.

The partition prevented frames waiting and those just pained, from getting over-spray on them. I also had an electric paint curing oven that baked the paint to 250 degrees. This was another essential piece of equipment, as It allowed paint to cure in less than a hour. It could then be sanded for the next coat, rather than wait a day or more for it to air dry.

Owning a similar facility with a paint booth, is also the reason why I never started up again years later when the demand for road frames picked up. My shop cost $30,000 to set up in 1983, today that figure would be closer to $100,000. Too large an initial outlay, with no guarantee I would ever see a return on the investment.

Is it essential to have a paint facility? I am often asked. The answer is no, but it was for me. Many framebuilders build frames and ship them somewhere else to be painted. But the paint job is more than half the profit in building a frame.

To me, the paint is as important as the building of the frame, and the two go hand in hand. The paint is what the customer sees, it is too significant to be left in the hands of some outside entity. I would never build frames and not have total control over painting them.

There is the cost of shipping the frames both to and from the painter, and there is also the time factor. When you have your own facility, you can handle a rush job easily. Mistakes and flaws can be fixed immediately, and even a complete strip and re-paint is not the end of the world.

The one drawback is, you have to produce enough frames to warrant the expense of owning your own paint facility. One or two frames a week won’t cut it. Initially I painted myself, but at the height of my production in the mid-1980s, it became necessary to train and employ a full-time painter. I produced as many as 30 frames a month. It was a good and profitable business.

When the demand dropped below 20 frames a month, I could lay off employees, but I still had the rent and overhead on the large industrial space. Times have changed. In the eighties if you wanted a top of the line bicycle frame, it was hand brazed, lugged steel.

Those days are gone forever, and it is the reason why builders like myself and others are no longer building frames. And really I do not need to build anymore frames, there are thousands of them still out there. They come up for sale every week on eBay and Craig’s List, many of them hardly used and still in mint condition.

Even on frames that have had a lot of use, the paint has held up well, which speaks volumes for my always having my own paint facility.

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Uncertainty

I first arrived in the United States in January 1979. I flew into New York’s Kennedy Airport, and was picked up by my new employers, Vic and Mike Fraysee, owners of Paris Sport.

From there it was probably and hour’s drive to Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. About seven miles from New York City on the other side of the Hudson River. The frameshop where I worked was at the back of a bike store that the Fraysee’s owned.

The terms of my initial visa that I had when I entered the US, was that I would return to England before the end of the first year. I could then renew my visa and come back again.

I planned to return to the UK for the Christmas Holidays 1979, which gave me almost a year to work and save for the trip. By the fall of that year, it was clear money was going to be tight and I needed to find some extra cash to meet expenses.

On the corner of the same block where the frameshop was, there happened to be a large warehouse type building. It was home to a company that packaged Christmas wrapping paper. They were hiring seasonal part time workers for an evening shift.

And so it was, I started moonlighting. When I finished my day job building frames, I would work 6 to 10 in the Christmas wrapping paper plant.

It was probably around early November that year, as I took my one-mile morning walk to work, I rounded the corner just off Main Street, Ridgefield Park, to a scene of utter devastation.

The Christmas paper business had burned to the ground in a fire during the night. Only the four brick walls were standing, the roof was gone, and firefighters were cleaning up. All that was left of the place where I had worked the previous evening was a blackened, smoldering pile of rubble.

As I walked slowly past on the opposite side of the street, the cold realization was sinking in. I no longer had a part time job, no extra income, and possibly no Christmas trip to England.

However, within two weeks, the owners of the business had salvaged and repaired some of the machinery and had started up again in another building close by.

With only a few short weeks left before Christmas, they were now desperate to replace their lost stock, plus make up for two weeks lost production. I not only got my part time job back, I was now working a full 8-hour shift, from 6pm. to 2am.

There was a feeling amongst the workers, of wanting to help the owners succeed. They had not given up, we were not giving up.

I was also working two shifts on the weekends. The result was I probably made more money than if there had not been a fire. I made the trip to England with cash to spare.

I often think of this incident and a quote in the form of a question,

“How boring would life be without uncertainty?”

 We need certainty in our lives to feel secure. We need to be reasonably certain that we will wake up in the morning, and that our loved ones will still be there. That our job will be there and the building not burned to the ground as I found.

Then every so often, life throws us a curve, something unexpected. Without the unexpected, life would be boring. Curved roads are more interesting than straight roads, we don’t know what is round that next bend.

Within uncertainty, there is adventure, excitement. I have always found in the past whenever a relationship has turned sour, or I have lost a job, when I look back years later, it was for the good.

Disappointments, for the most part are only temporary. Quite often they bring about an outcome that is better than originally expected. Throughout my life I’ve had many disappointments, but very few regrets.

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Marketing

David R Ball PhotoMarketing is always a tough nut for the artist.

All he wants to do is create, but then there comes a point where he must market what he creates in order to survive and continue creating.

It is tough when you have a product that you know is superior but lose sales because some large corporation has more marketing clout.

This happened many times with me in the early 1980s when customers would be on the brink of buying one of my bikes, then at the last moment opt for a Japanese Nishiki, on Centurion. Both good bicycles of that era but could never compare to a hand-built frame made by an individual craftsman.

The only reason they did this was marketing. These large manufacturers could place full page color ads in Bicycling Magazine. But at $10,000 a pop for a such an ad there was no way I could compete.

Instead I relied on bicycle dealers to sell to a small group of hard-core cyclists who could appreciate the difference between a limited production hand-built frame, and a factory mass produced item. I built a Nationwide network of these dealers by attending the Interbike Trade Show each year.

Each dealer would have bikes in stock that potential customers could test ride. Once a person test rode a Fuso, or other bike I built, and compared it to a production import bike, they could tell by the way it rode, the way it handled, this was a better bike, often for the same amount of money.

These independent bicycle dealers were my sales force, handling all the marketing for me, leaving me to spend my time building frames. For the dealer there was a 15% mark-up on a frame, not a huge amount, but when you add to this the markup on the components. Plus, back in the day, the bike store built the wheels and of course charged labor for the assembly of the bike.

It was a profitable partnership for the dealer and me, one that worked well through the 1980s, until the market changed. By the early 1990s interest switched to Mountain Bikes, which killed the road bike market.

For me to sell direct to the individual customer was a hopeless proposition. It had worked well for me in England though the 1970s, but there was a big difference in the mentality of the customer in the UK.

For a start my UK customers were almost exclusively racing cyclists. Having chosen a framebuilder, they would trust him implicitly. They would spend an hour at the most, getting measured and discussing the order. If they lived more than 75 miles away, the order would probably be sent via mail, or taken over the phone. The customer would order a frame and would most likely buy the components and assemble the bike himself.

The American customer, on the other hand, would drive hundreds of miles across state lines to visit with a framebuilder. Having done that, they would expect to spend the whole day at the shop, hanging out, watching me work, asking all manner of questions, that went way beyond the scope of the actual frame I would build for them. And there was never a gaurentee that an order would be forthcoming.

I think the big difference between the British and American customer is, the UK customer recognizes your skills but treats you as an equal. However, he respects your time and realizes it is valuable.

The American customer also recognizes your skills, but treats you like some kind of celebrity because of it, to the point at times, it is embarrassing. However, he has no respect for your time, and if he is buying your product, he expects your undivided attention that goes way beyond the time it takes to actually create that product.

It is the American way. Money talks, and the customer is King. A philosophy I never quite bought into, and was the reason I ran a strict ‘No Visitor’ policy, and sold my product through bike dealers. If I had it to do over again, I would do the same. One cannot run a profitable framebuilding business if you are spending more time talking about bikes than actually building them.

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