Someone said to me today that I looked like an expectant father. Apparently I was never more than 30cm from my phone and I checked it compulsively about every 15 minutes. It wasn’t because I was expecting a new child. It was much more important than that. I was expecting a new bike! (That’s a joke by the way, all you people who have had children, good work.)
Yes, after a substantial development phase the labour on my frame had begun in earnest and I was hoping for delivery at any moment. Finally today I got the word, the frame was ready! Fantastic! Believe me when I tell you that I was very excited.
Now this frame has had an awful lot of thought and planning and work go into it, and it is an absolute one-of-a-kind full custom job. Some of the up-sides of having a full custom frame are that it should fit me perfectly and be ideal for what I want. And, of course, I will always know that no matter where I go no-one else will be on the same bike as me. There is also a downside though.
When the frame is fully custom-made, it can’t just be made the same as the last one. All the parts are different sizes, there are parts that weren’t even used in other builds and it still all needs to go together just right. The frame looked great. It had all kinds of cool things including full internal cable routing, and a T47 bottom bracket, the newest and best standard for great power transfer with no creaking and compatibility with just about anything. The problem though is that that cable routing and that bottom bracket hadn’t really been tried together in this particular configuration, and when we tried them together it turned out that they didn’t work. Just. By a tiny amount. Things only just didn’t fit together. But only just not fitting is still not fitting. So the frame was not quite ready for delivery today. It had, in fact, been a false alarm.
Tonight the frame is still in that great womb of creativity that Luke calls his workshop, ready for a little bit more growth and development.
It was a bit disappointing, but years of statistics show that full term development is better in the long run than premature delivery, so tonight I just have to gather my patience and wait that little bit longer. From what I have seen though it will be worth the wait. Meanwhile I will console myself with the old German saying “Vorfreude ist die schoenste Freude“!
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Both my road bikes are custom, the fit is good, but you do get small unexpected issues requiring further customization 🙂 Hope it gets sorted
Yep, that is always going to be the way. Happily though it all got sorted out today, and now I’ve got it and it’s ready to build!