Capricorn Bicycles Mpls, MN Bradley Wilson, Framebuilder

The Shop Tour

Utilized and properly dirty: this is pretty much how it always looks. There are three big benches that I typically work at (the photographer’s on the third), the main one in the center supporting my two most important tools, the bench vise and the frame fixture. Along the far wall is where I cut my tubes and where I keep my Sony boom box, which is usually either playing one of seven CDs I’ve kept there permanently or public radio.

Here’s my tubing reserve. The rack is fashioned from some dumpstered wire grids and lashed together with manilla ropes and crude knots. The tubes that I get all come sealed up to keep them from freely oxidizing. As you can also see they’re True Temper tubes, an American company and the only one that manufactures their tubes here in the states.

One of my more recent purchases, this is the contraption that cuts miters into tubes so that they join as precisely as possible. I used to do these cuts by hand, which took upwards of a full day. This guy helps me get that same job done in less than three hours. It still requires a delicate touch and the stays still get mitered by hand, but this thing is a welcome addition to the shop.

This is an old Rockwell drill press that I bought used from a carpenter in Red Wing. Nothing to impressive about it and about all that I use it for is drilling drain holes and holes for water bottle bosses. After buying it though I brought it into my basement, completely disassembled it, oiled every surface and moving part, and reassembled it. In the process I had a little epiphany that heavy equipment’s not so different from the bicycle: they each have a frame to hold the works together, a motor (you, on a bicycle), a multiple-speed drive train, bearings, and various springs and gears to round out the works. The serial tag says that it was made in Pittsburgh and it’s pretty neat to think that with all the imported crap from the Home Depot I’ve been reduced to buy in the last couple years that I have at least one tool, a machine from the fabled city of the steelers.

I’ve been intimately involved with more frame fixtures than a rational person needs to be. This one is awesome. I’m not just saying that because I own one. I’m saying it because Don Ferris is one brilliant dude and he gets 100 points from me for designing a fixture that is both incredibly easy to set-up and almost sexy. Not pictured is the Anvil fork fixture that I use.

I keep these hidden away because they tend to leave oily residues and metal shavings wherever they are set down. These are my machining tools: reamers, facers, thread-cutters. Once a frame is finished these are employed to transform rough, heat-distorted, undersized, non-standardized, and non-uniform orifices into precision interfaces.

This is my one worthwhile Ebay score. It’s a tubing bender. It was made in Chicago in the 60s and is a design still in manufacture today. I use it primarily for the racks that I make (you can see some hanging below the tool). There are mandrels for 1/4" tubes-3/4" tubes in 1/8" increments (and 5/16"!).

Where would I be without handfiles and emery cloth? I’d be lost. Everything would have square, unfinished edges. I’d panic a little before realizing I can just heat the metal to glowing red and hammer the shit out of it. Ah, but abrading cloths and steels are plentiful, and I fretter away hours per frame shaping brazes, lugs, and dropouts to just the right look. When I say “hand-crafted,” that’s exactly what I mean.

Another of my very favorite tools: my Harris torch. They don’t sell many of this model so when I ordered it they made one for me, which was nice of them. Unlike most oxy-acetylene torches this one has adjusting knobs above your hand so you can’t bump them with your wrist, which I often did. Not only that but there’s a “trigger” to automatically turn the gas flow off and on. This is incredibly handy and saves time and energy.

For a bicycle frame-builder like myself it’s a haven, a sanctum from the noise and distractions of the world. It’s the only thing I can rightfully claim as my own. Let me show you around.

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