Posts tagged “davidson”  

I like fire. I like setting fires. In high school, I used to steal chemicals from the lab so I could colour the family home’s fireplace. LIthium in enough quantities would create this red/fuschia flame, while cupric chloride would make green flames. Luckily no one at the shop has taught me to use the brazing torches, otherwise I would have slagged frames left and right and burned Davidson Bicycles to the ground by now.

That’s why Will Meyers is brazing my new frame, not me. Here he’s doing a fillet braze around the head tube. Notice the glowing red spot visible from inside the head tube; that’s the steel where he’s laying down brass. I didn’t have my camcorder otherwise I could have shown you how he carefully flicked the torch to keep a steady temperature without over cooking the tubes. The flame is a lot less than when he brazes lugs.

As a fan of bicycles, you’d have to be completely oblivious to not know that there’s a renaissance of sorts for steel bicycles, particularly at the low volume, artisan end of the market. Many individuals are leaping into the trade with wonderfully ornate bicycles, but sometimes I wonder about the design choices they make. People want to believe that they have an instinctive feel for what is sound design, the assertion that if it “looks right, it is right”. The basic skills of framebuilding do not differ that much from other trades such as jewelry making or other more mundane fabrication employment, but a bicycle is a lot more complex structure than a broach or a welded iron bed frame. Not a whole lot of engineering goes into traditional steel framebuilding, so experience building and repairing steel becomes the guiding hand in design.

Take for instance the right rear dropout. It is one of the most highly stressed areas of the frame. It may not be the best place to get really fancy with one’s file. And even when you might think that a design may be quite conservative, you still have to worry about the metallurgy of the dropout itself. Is it forged or cast, how consistent is the product supplied by the manufacturer?

In the photo above is a broken dropout from a company supposedly run by elves (who happen to be enamored of the French). I’ve seen at least 7 or more of these bikes come into Davidson Cycles for the same repair; we’re almost like an official repair contractor for the other bike company. Yes, it’s steel and can be repaired, but it isn’t cheap or convenient.

photos of the repair after the jump

We were in Taroko National Park, descending from the marble-walled gorge to the Pacific Ocean, when we pulled off to visit the Eternal Spring Shrine, built to commemorate the workers who died building the Central Cross-Island Highway. Unfortunately, recent fallen rock (probably due to typhoon swelled rainfall) closed the access to the shrine. We weren’t the only ones disappointed, as there were several tour buses of Taiwanese school children who were also denied entrance. Well, they might have just been there for the restroom access before the walkway to the shrine. The kids freaked out when they saw us crazy Westerners on bikes. After a lot of hand gestures, I coaxed them into posing with my Davidson BMX bike.

Here are the first shots of the S&S BMX from Davidson Handbuilt Bicycles. This is a titanium frame with chromoly steel fork, S&S couplings, a rear derailleur, and disc brakes. The concept is that a BMX is the most fun way to get around short distances and in the cramped quarters of the urban environment, where cars, pedestrians, and random infrastructure hamper the freedom of a road bike or fixed gear. The only thing about a BMX bike is that once you can get a straight shot at open pavement, you spin out of the low-ish single speed gear. But if you add a derailleur…well, then it’s like adding booster rockets to get you to orbital altitude. And if such a bike would be fun in on the streets that my front opens onto, then they would really be fun when I explore other cities.

Just out for an everyday ride on a Davidson titanium carbon belt drive travel bike in Vegas.

Uploaded by mathowie | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

Today’s my day off, so before I prowled the city, I needed some fuel. My picky girlfriend recommended New China in the U for authentic eats, so I got me some orange beef and watched people rubberneck at my new Davidson BMX bike locked up outside. I couldn’t believe the number and diversity of people who stopped and did a double-take. Bike nerds, a guy with a baby sling, construction workers…

I’ve been thinking about the name for my bike. Now that the bike is all built up and capable of flight, somehow “goblin” doesn’t seem to describe it properly like it did when the bike was merely a oddity on the welding jig. I’m leaning more towards something like the Davidson “Sonic” BMX. I’m also trying to talk Bill Davidson into doing a 10 frame run of these bikes in cromoly without the S&S couplings. Just the vertical dropouts with disc mount, one size (20.5” top tube), one colour powdercoat. We could make them during the winter when the custom bike orders slow. The bike is unbelievably fun, there could actually be a market for it.

My custom Davidson ti BMX bike is pretty much all tack-welded together, meaning that the tubes are all fixed in place with a small bead of weld so that the frame can be handled. The next step is for the finish welding, where the weld is run completely around the circumference of each joint. The frame cannot be finished on the jig because the welder needs to move the frame about to access the surfaces.

The sequence of joints to be welded has to be carefully planned, otherwise the alignment of the frame tubes will twist due to asymmetric shrinkage at the welds.

Earlier I had talked about my next bike acquisition, which I decided would be something totally off-the-wall. I double-dog-dare you to find another custom titanium BMX with S&S couplings and disc brakes and a rear derailleur. Not that I tired to come up with something unique. I just thought about what my current stable of bikes lacked, whether it be a particular style of bike or combination of features. This is what I came up with. It's being built by Davidson Bicycles, which is within Elliott Bay Bicycles. And I wrench there, as well as handle the buying.

I got a text message from the frame builder on my day off: "It was a good day in the frame shop for BMX bikes." So I had to go down and see the bike on the welding jig.

They say that the proper number of bikes is always one more than you already have, and that's especially true when you have a done deal on a custom ti frame. Ah, but what form should that frame take? I don't need a custom road bike since I am quite happy with Bianchi's stock 49cm geometry. My Sycip travel bike is so spot on for so many purposes that the potential weight savings of a titanium construction don't quite justify replacing it.

One genre of bike about which I've been fascinated has been bikes with small-wheels or, as the Japanese have dubbed them, mini-velo bikes. Whenever I brought these up in conversation with Bill Davidson, he mentioned a now forgotten style of racing called Formula 1 BMX. Little information is available now, but it seems as that as BMX racing was waning in the late 1980s organizers tried to diversify by having street BMX races. Instead of berms and doubles, the races were held in parking lots with tons of cones marking the course. The bikes resembled mountainbikes with 20" wheels and a rear derailleur only. Ultimately the race series folded, as mountainbikes would dominate growth in cyclesport and the product market for the next few years.

When thinking about what to do with my next bike project, I remember how much fun a BMX can be. My one complaint is that the single-speed set-up with low gearing really hampered getting around town in a timely fashion. Then it struck me that a BMX with a rear derailleur would give the bike some wings.

It was a good day. Out for a ride in the bright sunshine I spotted a family riding together

with a trailer attached to an Electra and an Xtracycle with kid.

Then a PBR Kit

on a fellow cyclist training on the roads near Lake City.

Later, a S&S Belt Drive

at Elliott Bay Bicycles.

Also saw a stoked Xtracycle with a new battery pack. A chain bowl and the dirtiest Timbuk2 bag evar.

Days Like These

It was a good day and it's the days like these that Seattleites wait for during the long, wet, dark rainy season. I didn't even let the argument with a Lotus driver phase me. That was more comical than anything.

The sun is expected for the rest of the weekend and we're heading South out of the city and into the industrial Seattle. Towards Kent and Auburn where all the warehouses are, Ikea, and a big golf course.

Listening to

Shake em up, shake em up, shake em up, shake em

-- Ice Cube, It was a Good Day.

Davidson’s Will Meyers brazed lugged steel.Will has been working at Davidson for years. Here he’s brazing a head tube lug. The coolest part is how the metal glows red. You can’t see it well because of the resolution of youtube, but the last thing he does in the video is dab a little more brass wire on the joint.

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Max does the final welding at Davidson Bicycles. I talked him into welding some eyelets onto my ti road bike, thereby allowing me to run a rear rack and fender on my rain bike. The video clip might imply that the process was faster than it was in reality, and setting up is tedious. But since it was titanium, the clean up

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In the distance, the Space Needle pokes up through a fog blanketing the city.

Pam’s got a new rain bike and it’s pink … really pink.

The pink bike — aka “Mary Kay”— was made by Davidson Handbuilt Bicycles and painted with matching fenders.

That’s an 84 Signature and a 2008 Hotspur.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.

We’ve posted previously on the Hotspur — a handbuilt, oversized, Titanium-tube frame with a carbon seatstay — and I raced it this weekend on a rolling course in Ravensdale Washington. The bike performed as expected with a solid ride that was very similar to the Modal, but weighing less, and riding like a straight-up racing bike. Bill Davidson and Mark’s design achieved a lighter, stiffer Ti bike with that distinctive “springy-road” feel that Ti aficionados love. The bike climbed, accelerated, and descended, like I’d expect and excelled at rolling.

Most remarkable about racing the Hotspur was it reminded me of my old 853 frame — a ride that set a benchmark for my future reviews. I could subtly feel the road and the frame reacting to it. By all accounts (including our own) the new Madones, Tarmacs, et al, are all excellent racing bikes, and the intent of the Hotspur was to demonstrate that Ti can compete with carbon.

For the Hotspur frame, Bill Davidson decided that to use the Feather Tech oversize titanium tubing. The key feature is the custom milling that Feather Tech employs to create external butting on very large diameter (for titanium) tubing.

Though Davidson Bicycles’ new Hotspur frame precipitated from Bill Davidson’s ideas on what a high performance bicycle should be, Bike Hugger provided the impetus to bring the idea to reality. Bike Hugger had previously worked with Bill on the Modal concept bike, based on some of my ideas about travel bikes. Setting aside the Modal’s unique features, Bill used Byron’s off-the-shelf race bike as starting point for the Modal’s geometry and then tweaked the geometry to improve the fit. Then a funny thing happened when Byron actually got to ride the bike. The Modal turned out to fit and perform better than Byron’s regular race bike.

Which begged the question: what would happen if Bill built Byron a bike designed for performance? This gave Bill the perfect opportunity to pull out some tricks that he’d been waiting to use … some subtle refinements on the titanium materials.

Today in Portland, Davidson Handbuilt Bicycles debuts the Hotspur frameset. In an age of single-season-use carbon frames built built for some Pro Tour rider and amongst the surge in intricately crafted, lugged steel, Bill Davidson makes his own statement: a bike is a rider’s tool that should acknowledge age-old lessons while not ignoring new technology.

Tracking for its debut at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, February 8th in Portland, the Hotspur frame is welded.

The Hotspur is another Bike Hugger project bike.

Details posted on 2/08/08.

From the Bike Hugger Photostream.