Last weekend I rode around the London Marathon and down to Peckham for Bespoked, a bicycle show for those who like to build bikes rather than buy them. Some amazing craftsmanship on display. The event for me was a mix of talks, a workshop and a browse around some cool looking bikes. My interest had been piqued about a month ago when I stumbled across the event and liked the look of the talks titled Why Does the Bicycle Resist Design? - with Rob Quirk & Richard Seymour and How To Shoot Bikes and Remain Culturally Relevant: John Watson The Radavist.
The workshop was fun but flashed past way too quickly. Our task was to make a Headtube badge. I should really have thought about his in advance since the first task was “sketch the outline of the thing”. The sketches below show just how sketchy this was.
The rest of the session was then getting familiar with the jewellery making tools to cut out the top piece (I went for an outline DUNC) and the back plate (had basically run out time at this point).
Would have been cool to see how they were soldering these together and bending the badge but time was not on their side. The final badge arrived in the post a few days later.
The highlight for me though was chatting to the folk at Stayer. Building my own frame has been on my bucket list for a while. I have tinkered with rebuilding from old bikes and have always maintained my own bikes but the idea of welding together a frame has always been a goal. My eyes were drawn to the bike below on the Stayer stand since you could see the brazed joints.
A 15 minute conversation around the outline of the frame building 101 course over at their East London workshop and I was sold. 2 days later I was booking onto one of their courses in July. Am beyond excited.
And am already thinking about converting an old Kona into a cargo bike with one of these.
Really enjoyed the talk by John Watson at the Radavist - kind of summed up this really warm and friendly community.
In other news this week. Duncan did a great job at his PhD upgrade.
We had an interesting afternoon discussing AI at Bartlett in the Friends House.
And the sunsets in the North East are even nicer than I remember.
Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:
- a great website from Duncan Smith via his talk at CASA on the ENHANCE project.
- NHS potentially close sourcing its open source sites via Edent
- the Radavist web magazine