Me on the fitting bike
Today was the first day of my time at Doug Fattic’s two week frame building class. Today was from what I can tell the most uneventful day as far as building, but interesting in terms of the history we learned and some of the things we learned about fitting. I’m a bit of an odd man out as I’m building a more racing / go fast bike and the other two guys are building a transportation and commuter / touring bikes. We started the morning with a bit of a history lesson about Doug and American frame building in general. Neat stuff, it seems there are a few schools of frame building and most of the big names can be traced back in those schools. Today was all about getting the fit down and transferring that into Doug’s frame jigs. I was first up, and there was little surprise as there wasn’t much change from my current position on my Allez. I brought the bars in and up a bit, but this is something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile. One nice thing is that I’m able to get a shallower seat tube angle (72) and a slightly more aggressive head tube angle (73.5). This should allow for a slightly more comfortable ride while hopefully preserving the nimbleness of my existing road bike. There was a lot to take in about transferring measurements (both from the fit bike and my body) to the jig and I’m not sure I’ve got it all down. Figuring out the distances for the head tube and fork still mystify me a bit, but thankfully its written down and I’m sure I can get Doug to go over it again if need be. Tomorrow we start to miter tubing. This will be interesting as some of us are missing lugs (me) and / or other tubing components that will make this a challange. One thing I’m still hoping for more understanding on is how to select tubes for given riders and tasks. I’ll have to ask Doug more about this tomorrow.
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