What’s that, pal? You built your bike did ya? Wrapped that bar tape? Put your own groupset on? Crimped those nipples aye? Well I built mine. From a pile of tubes, built. Fire and sweat. Full custom geometry. Like Ernesto Colnago used to before carbon ruined the party.
What do you mean look at the pinholes in the brazing and why does it rattle when you shake it? You can’t even buy this bike it’s that good.
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Materials: Steel, obviously
May I introduce the Cyclist Thread. It is made of steel because artisans like me wouldn’t use anything else, and was built – mostly by me – in 2014 under the tutelage of Pete Bird and Rob Wade at Bicycles by Design in Coalport, Shropshire.
It was a good place to learn because Pete and Rob have been building bikes since 1981 under the names Swallow and Ironbridge and have been teaching their art for decades, so they know how to control a newbies’ tears and rage.
I wanted to make a modern-meets-traditional racer (like I said I’m artisan and really understand the framebuilding oeuvre), so the tubeset I chose was Columbus Life, with the idea being Life is light and is wide as steel gets when stock lugs are involved.
On that note, this frame is lugged because lugged is the most accessible construction method, much easier than fillet-brazing or TIG-welding, the other methods used for steel.
The lugs are Aussie, mate, hailing from a company called Llewellwyn just outside of Brisbane, and they are the P3s, which afford a slightly sloping top tube (for that modern look y’see) and are wide enough to accommodate Life’s 35mm down tube.
Total cost for tubeset and lugs back in 2014 was around £400, or about a grand in today’s money. The week-long framebuilding course cost £975, and the paint, which we’ll come to, cost £360. So all in a full-custom frame and fork for less than £1,750. Bargain.
Future-proof geometry
Geometry was based on a bike fit by Pete with a central philosophy of ‘this will still fit you in 20 years without loads of headset spacers’. It’s why this bike has the tallest head tube of any of my bikes – a whopping 199mm. Which is just insane given I need to look pro. I really should have bent further forward on that fitting jig and said I still feel no back pain.
Eight years on and this bike still fits like an absolute glove, albeit one a closer to a middle-aged man’s driving mitt than a UFC fighter’s knuckle wrap.
Whip-sharp and racy the Thread ain’t, however it is undeniably comfortable and I am only sad I opted to file off the rack and guard mounts that came on the cast dropouts. I would have loved this to be a touring bike right about now. Pete did warn me, I wouldn’t listen. Framebuilding is wasted on the young.
A blueprint for this bike was made on BikeCAD, which takes the salient measurements of a fit and makes them work for a bicycle that needs to avoid toe-overlap, maintain chainlines and fit parts.
BikeCAD decreed 420mm chainstays, so I immediately filed one stay down to 416mm. Happily, Pete and Rob were able to rescue this mistake and both stays matched giving the Thread a much tighter rear triangle, which is what I wanted all along, obviously.
I have no idea what the fork trail is here but it feels pretty long. What I do know is this fork is the only part of the bike I made without someone having to grab the brazing torch before I blew through one of the tubes. Forks are easier to make as the crown and steerer are such thick metal, which is much more forgiving.
Fabulous fabrication
The basic concept of brazing is you heat the tube and lug you wish to join with an oxyacetylene brazing torch then feed in the filler material (usually brass), which melts and flows into the tiny gaps and pores in the tube and lug due to the phenomenon of capillary action.
I’m not entirely sure I understand how capillary action works (the C for A-level physics is telltale), but I did just read this explanation and you might like it too.
The crucial aspect is getting the tube and lug to just the right temperature so the filler metal melts on impact and flows into the joint, but not so hot that the tube burns. If the metal starts to look like grandma’s four-bar fire, you might want to order another tube.
As such, brazing is an art that I found I had no natural talent for, and which I certainly could not master in a week.
All this meant Pete had to fillet-braze the seatstays, which are stuck to the backside of the seat lug as if they are one homogenous piece.
They’re called fast-back seatstays, which look really neat but which are also much harder to braze as unlike a lugged joint, which sleeves together, it is just the end walls of a tube that touch so there is less surface area to join, the bits that do touch are more fragile as they are thinner, and there is more brass on show instead of hidden inside the lug.
The result here is bob-on perfect, but though I mitred the tubes, I’ll forever know my favourite part of the frame I built wasn’t built by me.
By the end of my framebuilding week I had made friends with the workshop dog, Sprocket, and I had made a custom steel frame with a fair amount of hands-on help.
It was a touch misaligned, which Rob wasn’t happy about, so he took it away and did some ‘finishing’, aka fairly serious remedial work about which he was too kind to say. It then arrived back in my arms like the gangly metal baby I had always wanted. It was time for paint.
Merckx-adjacent paint
The first bike I ever truly understood I wanted was my second-hand 5-speed Townsend kids mountain bike. It was orange and had one tan-wall tyre, which is where my obsession with tan-walls and orange likely comes from.
Eddy Merckx and Molteni then made sure the orange thing stuck, and for years I have wanted a Molteni-orange bike, the colour of Eddy’s most iconic team and the colour of his most iconic bike, his 1972 Mexico City Hour record bike built by Ernesto Colnago. You’re good, Ganna, but I’d like to see you ride 49.431km outdoors in a woollen jersey and maintain that quiff.
Thus the major colour of the Thread had to be orange, but the rest was decided upon by WyndyMilla’s then paint designer, Mike Watkins, of Mike Watkins Design. Paint was carried out by Stuart Harris at Ooey Custom, near Guilford.
The cream seat tube and stays I think you’ll agree is inspired, and the logo on the down tube? We know there is no finer logo.
The inside of the fork has the word ‘Cyclist’ written on it in slightly abstract font, and I love it but I am ashamed to say I neglected it for a while. I decided I wanted to shed a few grams so after a few rides decided to buy the Thread a carbon Columbus upgrade.
It did the trick, 300g lighter than the 700g steel fork, but it never looked right. Then we took this bike to handmade bike show, Bespoked, one year to be part of our Cyclist stand and Stuart from Ooey saw it.
He wondered aloud, part sad, part peeved, what had happened to the original fork he’d spent so much time on. I felt terrible.
I swapped the fork back at the next opportunity and though the Thread now weighs close to 8kg, it looks way better, which is the point of all bikes really. Plus it rides that bit more smoothly as the skinny steel fork blades with serious rake helps to give the front end spring.
Then the name: Thread, which I’m sure you’re all itching to know about. It was the product of a lubricated conversation with my erstwhile colleague Peter Stuart (now editor of Cycling News, God rest his soul).
We somehow decided that Thread was exactly the sort of try-hard name a new bike brand might use, and was especially good given the marketing puns it afforded. There could be the sprinters’ bike, the Thready Maertens; all-rounder, the Thready Merckx; the endurance bike, the Thread Whitton and the time-trial bike, the Thread Needle.
This, sadly, is the die-a-bit-inside stuff cycling journalists talk about on nights out and is the reason many of us struggle socially. Anyway, Cyclist Thread. It had to be. For Peter.
Finishing kit
I won’t go in too deep here except to say Dura-Ace 9000 was the last truly beautiful Dura-Ace Shimano ever made. (For the record, the most beautiful ‘modern’ – read, more than three gears – was the 7700-series, with the most beautiful ever, ever, imho, being the Dura-Ace 7400 AX aero group. If you need to while away some time, have a look at Shimano's archive and judge for yourself.)
The Dura-Ace groups also helps make this 2.2kg frameset build out to a bike that isn’t super heavy, and given Shimano’s PTFE covered cables and the old school cable routing, where cables sweep gracefully around, the shifting here is honestly better than most bikes today, even electric. It feels so sweet.
For reasons I still don’t understand, the seat tube for Columbus Life (or at least the one I used) is 30.7mm and seatposts are pretty much all 27.2mm or 31.6mm.
Thus my beautiful Thread is finished off with a crudely cut (by me) plastic shim that means the lug edges sit weirdly proud of the 27.2mm Cinelli Neos seatpost. And then there’s the pinholes and the rattle and the random blob of brass on the bottom bracket shell…
These things of course give this bike its uniqueness and provenance, plus I will always know this bike is mine. The pinholes are tiny holes in some of the shorelines (the gaps between lug and tube filled with brass) and happen when not enough filler has been used.
Some say this is indicative of shoddy craftsmanship, but I say it is was a deliberate move to mimic the stonemasons responsible for some the world’s greatest cathedrals. These buildings like St Paul’s or the Basilica in Vatican City contain deliberate errors because none but God is perfect. And so neither is the Thread.
This may or may not be why the fork rattles, a loose piece of filler metal that dropped into the left fork leg and which remains forever sealed in its tapered tomb. To extract it I’d have to cut the leg in half.
But it’s my rattle because this is my bike, which I mostly (let’s say 70%) made, got someone else to paint and then built myself. And yeah I wrapped my own bar tape pal. It’s from Busyman in Australia, in case you’re wondering, and it is leather and it doesn’t really match and I can’t tell you how much it cost.
Like I said, it’s my bike and I love it, tape to toe.
Photography: Mike Massaro