 |
LAB WORK: Connolly, second
from left, teaches senior David Lau, master's
student Jeff Zabel, Jaime Ashander and Bryan Johnson
to build bikes from scratch.
Rod Searcey |
The half-circle fishmouth
of steel tubing is flush against another tube, and sparks
are flying—so they say.
It’s difficult to see exactly how the tubes are
being welded together because the view from inside a
welding mask is very, very dark. But exclamations of
“Wow!” and “Sweet!” bubble up
from students in the bike design class. The comments
seem to indicate the metal pieces that will ultimately
become a bicycle frame have been beautifully, even classically
joined.
“It’s by far the best class I’ve
ever taken,” says senior Adam Piotrowski, standing
in a corner of the Product Realization Lab late on a
Tuesday night. “Everyone is passionate about bikes
and you can feel the energy and intensity.”
A lot of students are passionate about bikes on this
notoriously cycling-friendly campus. But the 11 students
enrolled in Mechanical Engineering 204: Bicycle Design
and Frame-Building are especially obsessed. Lecturer
Ryan Connolly calls them “bike nuts.” As
in, “There’s a certain limit to the number
of bike nuts you can have in a single room before they
start fighting about which designs are better.”
Piotrowski, for example, is building—from scratch—an
“aggressive” mountain bike with a carbon-fiber
fork. The materials science major has been cutting practice
pieces in the machine shop and looking for just the
right decal to put on his down tube. “You want
it to be so right,” he says. “Because it’s
the perfect bike.”
Now in its third year, ME 204 draws undergraduate and
graduate students from many corners of the campus, clutching
varied scale drawings. MFA student and sculptor Catherine
Harris is designing a road bike to ride on a honeymoon
voyage from Portland, Ore., to San Francisco. Senior
Jaime Ashander, who’s used to working in a physics
lab, is putting together a single-speed road bike for
commuting. Then there’s senior mechanical engineering
major Bryan Johnson, who’s into “urban assault”
biking. Those low walls by Cubberley Auditorium? The
bollards near Meyer Library? He’ll be able to
leap onto them and spin around on the front wheel of
the trials bike he’s building.
Instructor Connolly, MS ’02, is working on his
fifth mountain-bike frame—he also has built a
road bike—and he spends his weekends at the races.
“Ninety-degree weather,” he tells a student
who inquires about his recent 11th-place showing in
a Santa Barbara competition. “Twenty-four miles
in 2:07.”
Shop talk is like that: clipped and to the point. XTR
Shimanos. CAD (computer-aided design) programs. TIG
(tungsten inert gas) welding. Frame jigs. Head angles.
Shortened chain stays.
The three-unit course is offered on a grade-only basis,
and Connolly recognizes that the material is challenging.
“You pass if your frame doesn’t break, and
there’s no aesthetic critiquing,” he says,
recalling some purple and green paint jobs of the past.
And the end product is a bargain in anybody’s
checkbook. Thanks to donations of pricey components
from Bay Area bicycle shops, students can expect to
pay about $600 for a bicycle—be it tandem, cycle
cross, road, mountain or track—that would likely
cost $3,000 from a custom builder.
“A frame-building class?” visitor Ross
Shafer asked during a recent classroom session. “I
would have gone to college for that.” Shafer is
the legendary founder of Salsa Cycles in Petaluma, Calif.,
a hotbed of custom bike shops. He recently talked to
Connolly’s students about some of the basics of
the bike-building business. The class also takes field
trips to Petaluma custom builder SoulCraft Cycles and
travels to Morgan Hill to see how mass-produced bikes
are assembled at Specialized Bicycles.
Brian Rulifson, a third-year graduate student in product
design, had watched ME 204 classes in the shop where
he worked as a TA for a couple of years before enrolling
in the spring-quarter course. Although he holds a patent
application for a medical device and has designed a
collapsible aluminum chair that is held together by
one string, Rulifson says building a bicycle is unlike
any project he’s ever attempted. But when his
mountain bike was stolen, he set his sights on designing
a sub-$1,000 touring bike that will take him down Virginia’s
Blue Ridge Parkway. “It’ll have a rigid
frame and rigid fork, and I’ll put panniers on
a rack on the back,” he says. “And I’ll
love it for the whole 300 miles.” |
