Starting this Sunday, I will be taking a two week class in steel frame bicycle building with master framebuilder Doug Fattic in Niles, Michigan. As part of a crazy idea Marcus and I have been throwing around for a while, I’m going to see if I have the vocation for bike building that I hope I have.

Doug Fattic has built frames for over 30 years and has recently focused on building transportation bikes for his Ukraine Bicycle Project. These bikes are based on the resilient design of the European city bike that Marcus and I admire. After toying around with the idea of building a touring bike, I’ve settled on the city bike design for my class. Whether I build future bikes for fun or profit is yet to be seen, but I’m eagerly awaiting a chance to get to work.

Although I’ll be gone for two weeks, I will not be gone from Austin Bike Blog. I will continue to write my regular articles like Dumbest Product of the Week and plan on writing about my experience in the class. Marcus will continue to write about what’s going on in Austin bike culture and policy in my absence. In addition to writing about my own bike building, we have added a new article category on bike building with plans to expand our coverage of frame builders that we began with the the Texas Custom Framebuilders Show last month. 

So, it’s an exciting new subject for Austin Bike Blog coverage, and I’m looking forward to learning the trade and providing our readers with more in depth profiles of great frame builders. In the meantime, enjoy this prototype I whipped up using the design program at Pedal Mafia to build my ultimate commuter, triathlon/TT bike.

I think we may just have a market!

Related posts:

1. Doug Fattic Framebuilding Class: Building up my frame into a working bike ...
2. Learn to build your own frames from Doug Fattic ...
3. Austin Bike Polo Club gets their own blog ...
4. Thy Neighbor’s Bike – another great local cycling blog ...
5. New Yellow Shirt and other updates from Yellow Bike Project ...