Steel is Real
There is a custom bike designing & building class offered at Stanford University. Throughout the 6 month class (along with other, “real” college classes, of course), students were taught everything about custom steel frame bicycles - the history, dynamics, design, and manufacturing. The class included an inspirational field trip to NAHBS (pronounced “naabs”), the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, where bike-obsessed nerds across the globe congregated to appreciate spectacular, hand-crafted bikes. At the end of the class, each student built their own bike, and the final exam was to have a complete bike that was ridable by the instructors.
These photos capture the extreme patience as the students spent long hours and late nights in the machine shop building their bike, carefully mitering, welding, filing, and brazing their bikes together, dreaming of the day they could finally ride away.
