2007: Azor aluminium frames being hand-welded

I recently spotted some bullshit about the difference between “hand-built” and “hand-made” on some site or blog promoting somebody’s bikes, or maybe it was just a blog comment. Huh? I’ve been designing and making (often pretty nice) things with my own hands for many years and have always used “hand-built” and “hand-made” interchangeably. Furthermore when it comes to bicycles, they’re mostly built with quite human labor intensive processes: Steel and aluminium frames are generally soldered, brazed or welded at least partially by hand, finish work is manual, and assembly is mostly performed manually on an production line of some sort. This is true for the bikes of small and large producers.

Certainly all of our (WorkCycles) bikes are made this way. Most of our city bike frames are hand built/made in Belgium. Some are hand built/made in Holland and China. Ironically enough the frames made in China are the most consistently straight and best finished. So much for China bashing.

The notable exception to our “hand-made” (or was it “built”) rule is the Bakfiets Cargobike frame which is built/made by a (very sophisticated) robot in a factory in South Holland province. The robot bends and miters the tubes and then welds them together. All of our bikes are assembled and finished by hand… though the mechanics do utilize machines such as a headset press and seat tube reamer to work more efficiently. Will the manual labor police disqualify them from being called “hand-made” for this?

Anyhow this is all just a long introduction for a fantastic film from 1925 somebody put up on You Tube (in two parts). Its called “De Avonturen van Piet” (The Adventures of Piet) referring to Piet Pelle, a promotional cartoon character of Gazelle. Between Piet’s adventures of taking his Gazelle bike to the North Pole we see a proud overview of the workings of the Gazelle Bicycle Factory. Amongst other processes:

The commentary is all in Dutch but you’ll get the idea of what’s going on: they’re hand making bicycles… or are they “building” them. Who cares! Its fun to watch.

1925: Gazelle frames being hand aligned

There’s a more complete version of the Gazelle factory video here but it doesn’t seem to have any sound.

Oh yeah, here’s Piet Pelle of Gazelle:

WorkCycles has just completed the first 130 bikes for family doctors in Rotterdam to ride to their appointments. Instead of driving cars the doctors will set a fine example for the city residents. Rotterdam, you see, is much less of a cycling mecca than Amsterdam or most any other Dutch city for that matter Perhaps this is a result of the more open, auto friendly streetscape created after Rotterdam was totally destroyed and rebuilt at the end of WWII. Of course by most of the world’s standards there are a lot of bikes in Rotterdam… just not compared to most other cities in the Netherlands.

[Show as slideshow]

In any case we built special utility bikes for the doctors (though not so unusual for WorkCycles really): Frame-mounted front carrier for their bag, 8 speed Shimano Nexus internal hub gearing, Shimano rollerbrakes front and rear, zinc carbonate primed to fend off rust even after considerable abuse, all powder-coated ivory white with the graphics for FAW Rotterdam who conceived and manage the project.

FAW (“Stichting Fonds Achterstandswijken Rotterdam” – Foundation Funds for Deprived Areas of Rotterdam) is an organization focused on supporting the practices of family doctors in Rotterdam’s poorer neighborhoods. Supplying the doctors with good bicycles has a number of obvious advantages:

The doctors set a good example amongst a clientele that statistically cycle less than the average Dutch and have poorer than average health.

Preparing and delivering 130 bikes to 130 eager doctors in one Saturday was somewhat of a test for little WorkCycles. It was definitely a logistical challenge (and very hard work) but in the end almost every bike found its new owner and was adjusted to fit them. We wrote each doctor’s name on their bike with a permanent marker to make sure that mass confusion didn’t erupt before they rode off to their own neighborhoods.

The project has also not been problem free; It seems that the wheel tensioning machine was incorrectly adjusted for some of the wheels, meaning we’ll be making a few extra trips to Rotterdam to do the necessary repairs. With the doctors spread out over a large city this is going to be tricky.

Could your company or organization use a couple hundred bikes?

(Newspaper clipping above from NRC Handelsblad – article not online)

This is a photo essay of bicycles, cyclists and bike passengers shot in an Amsterdam square by an American non-cyclist. To be specific its 82 pictures of bicycles taken during 73 minutes. He knows precious little about bikes, cycling or the culture he’s visiting (nor does he seem to care) and that makes his extensive commentary interesting and funny. The candid photos are priceless. On the downside the absurdly uninformed and highly repetitive descriptions get annoying.

Friends have actually been telling me about this site for over a year and I guess I figured that there were already so many links to it that one more would be pointless. Well, the site is still gathering great comments from Dutch folks eager to correct the fellow’s mistakes, clarify the unclear and defend their culture. A couple of the letters include some nice historical anecdotes.

Thus I gave up and posted it after all. Enjoy (maybe again):
http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/

Last week I posted a quick photo essay on where the more than a million bicycles of Amsterdam live. The answer was basically: everywhere except inside.

The following day this article about the same Amsterdam “Fietsflat” appeared in the Washington Post. Their photo isn’t very interesting so I added one of my own. The Bloemfiets (flower bike), once built from parts found in the trash for a long-ago girlfriend is now a loaner at the WorkCycles shop. It shows one way to decorate your bicycle so that it won’t get lost amongst the thousands of bikes parked on the street here. Its seems to be a pretty good theft deterrent too.

2,500 Bikes Look a Lot Alike At Amsterdam Central
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 15, 2007; Page A16

AMSTERDAM

“I thought it was right here.”

Mireille has that I’m-worried-but-I’m-not-going-to- panic-yet look on her face. It’s 5:40 p.m., the top of the afternoon rush hour, and she’s been searching for only two minutes.

She’s lost her bicycle in the Amsterdam Central train station’s high-rise bike lot, where 2,500 two-wheelers are crammed pedal-to-pedal, handlebar-to-handlebar on five soaring levels.

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In the Netherlands we simply ride our bicycles everywhere, often while carrying children, groceries, friends, a spouse, flowers, building materials or whatever else needs to get from Amstelkade to Bloemstraat. Thus we build bicycles with special carriers and don’t think much about how the now rather heavy bicycle can be carried aboard an automobile. Why would one put a bicycle in an automobile? That would be akin to putting a car on a truck or a missile on an airplane. Very strange!

Apparently its different for the Canadian Army Cargobike Infantry Division who are now using the Bakfiets.nl Cargobike as a key weapon in their antiterrorist system. The military Cargobike Weapons Delivery Bicycle is equipped with (very small) missile launchers and (light) machine guns operated by a (perferably small or female) gunner inside the bulletproof polycarbonate bubble. Each Cargobike is transported on a specially fitted Mercedes Unimog, ready for rapid deployment wherever needed, be it in the woods, in the tundra, in the rainforest, at a hip coffee shop or at a pickup hockey game.

May 9, 2007

By COLIN MOYNIHAN
To look at nearly any bicycle — from graceful racers with inch-thick tires to the clunky, rusted workhorses of food delivery fleets — is to behold a union of form and function that has existed for nearly two centuries. Bicycles, after all, have been transporting people at least since 1817, when Baron Karl von Drais invented a contraption in Germany that operated without pedals and required riders to push against the ground with their feet to propel themselves.

Look closely though, and there are aspects that transcend the utilitarian. People who ride regularly tend toward the philosophical when they describe why. Some view bicycles as political symbols with which to make a statement about carbon emissions from cars. Others are inspired by the mobility that bikes can provide in a crowded urban setting. Then there are those who are invigorated by the physicality of pedaling or simply savor the way the city looks when viewed from atop two wheels.

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