We’re opening soon.
We raised over 100% of our funding (thank you) so now we’re getting everything set up. We’re planning to open the doors to The Bicycle Academy’s in June 2012.
Make a bike. Make a difference.
Learn how to make bikes, keep the skills and give your first bike to someone who really needs it.
We’ll teach you how to make a bicycle frame.
With help from Brian Curtis, who has over thirty years’ experience in making bike frames.
You’ll learn the skills, tips and tricks to make more frames.
And you can come back to our workshop whenever you want to make your next frame.
We’ll give you everything you need to make a bicycle.
We’ve got the workshop (in Frome, Somerset).
We’ll have jigs (so you can piece the parts together, and keep things straight).
We’ll have brazing equipment (so you can weld the frame together).
We’ll have work benches (so you have your own space to work).
We’ll have everything else too; the tubes, a lathe, pillar drill, vices, hacksaws, goggles, gloves, wrenches, cutters, pliers, files, tape measures, flux…
And your first frame goes to someone who really needs it.
We’ve teamed up with the charities Re-Cycle and World Bicycle Relief to produce a bike specifically for people in Africa. Our TBA Africa Bike is tough, and thanks to the fantastic components that World Bicycle Relief produce it can last for five years without much maintenance. The tyres are puncture-resistant – good for travelling over rugged ground. It’s simple, so it’s easy to look after and it doesn’t need lots of fiddly parts if anything does go wrong. It’s strong, so it can carry heavy loads. And it’s flexible, so it can be used for all kinds of different things like going to school or work, collecting food and water, helping health workers get from A to B, and even as an ambulance.
Meet the team.
Andrew Denham: founder, director and frame builder’s apprentice.
Andrew, 29, is a mechanical design engineer who loves cycling. And he gets things done. He founded the Black Canon Collective mountain bike club, now in its fourth year of designing, raking, digging, cutting, and building trails at a magical spot in Longleat woods. Andrew is also the organiser of the ‘World Famous’ Cobble Wobble bicycle hill climb, an annual (steep!) celebration of cycling, cobbles and tomfoolery in Frome, Somerset. Andrew is the director of The Bicycle Academy and is learning to build frames as Brian’s trusty apprentice.
Brian Curtis: frame builder and brazing master.
Brian knows a lot about brazing bicycle frames. He’s seventy years old and has been making frames since BMXs were born. Before that he was one of the UK’s top motocross scramblers, riding on the frames he built himself at Rickmans. Brian still welds every single bike for Curtis Bikes, the company he founded, and make all the bikes at Curtis Frames, his very own brand of bikes. He is our resident frame builder and brazing master.
Chris Sheppard: Workshop wizard.
Chris is a trained Engineer having served his apprenticeship at Brewis Engineering in Frome. With a background in making tools, jigs and fixtures, and a keen interest in problem solving Chris went on to run the whole milling section at the works. Along with making things Chris loves riding bikes, he’s been mountain biking since the beginning and is a qualified mountain bike ride leader and skills instructor too. Chris will be teaching alongside Brian, sharing his wealth of knowledge, and working to design and make our range of TBA frame building jigs and tools.
And 200 people behind the scenes.
There might be three of us in The Bicycle Academy workshop, but there are many, many more people who helped us get up and running. Our brazing stations, pillar drill, jigs and tools are all here thanks to a crowd funding campaign. In just six days we raised over 100% of the funding we needed, thanks to donations from 183 people and 23 more who offered their time and skills on top.
Make your frame in Frome.
Our workshop is in our hometown, Frome in Somerset. The workshop is only 200 yards away from a brand new pump track that’s being built in a local park and is on the Sustrans cycle network’s route 24. Frome, the home of the Cobble Wobble (organised by Andrew each year), is cycle friendly with plenty of mountain biking and great road routes around and about. It’s also a great place to stay. There are independent shops, restaurants, pubs, cafés, B&Bs and hotels (some with bike storage) aplenty.
Getting to Frome is really easy as it’s only 45 mins away from Bristol (Britain’s first cycling city) by road and has a well-connected train station.
If you’re planning to stay nearby we can give you discounted rates at local B&B’s that have bike storage and are a five-minute ride away from the workshop.
Our workshop.
Our workshop is in the middle of Frome. It’ll have everything you need to build a frame from scratch: brazing stations, a lathe, a pillar drill and a kettle for much-needed cups of tea, of course. As well as a library with every frame building book you can think of and we sell a few materials too (like different steel tubes, brazing goggles and gloves).
How we work: fillet brazing.
We build bicycle frames out of steel. And fillet brazing is our thing (or bronze welding as it’s sometimes called). Why? Because it’s the most versatile way to build steel frames (we can set the angles of the joins ourselves), and it’s what Brian knows inside out and backwards. He’s famous for it. To begin with, we won’t teach how to make lugged frames, but you’ll come away being able to join any two tubes together any way you want to. So you’ll have more skills at your fingertips than if you’d learnt to build a frame with pre-made lugs.
Lugged vs lugless frames. What’s the difference?
Lugged steel frames have a kit of parts: steel tubing and specially (pre-made) sockets, called lugs. Frame builders cut the steel tubes to the right length, mitre the ends and put them into the lugs. Then they braze (solder) the lugs and the tubing together, filling the gap between the two with a silver or brass filler metal.
Fillet brazing (or bronze welding) is a way to make bike frames without the lugs. Frame builders cut the steel tubes to the right length, mitre their ends and then, using a brazing torch, melt the filler metal into the join, which creates a fillet between the two tubes. Fillet brazing gives us a bit more freedom because it means we don’t have to rely on the angles set by lugs. And it’s what Brian is famous for.
What does fillet brazing look like?
Here are a few photos of Brian’s fillet brazing, Brian only ever cleans the flux off the joins (as pictured below) but some people like to file the braze to make it look like the tubes blend together once painted. You can do either.
Our courses.
Frame Building.
We’ll teach you how to build lugless steel frames over four days (Monday to Thursday or Tuesday to Friday).
You’ll make a TBA Africa bike, which we’ll send to Africa to help people who really need it.
Once you’ve graduated from our frame building course you’ll be able to use The Bicycle Academy’s workshop to build your own frames.
Brazing Masterclass.
Brian Curtis will teach you, one-to-one, about fillet brazing (or bronze welding as it’s sometimes called). The course will take one day, on a weekday, over six hours. If you’ve had some experience of brazing already but you want to know how to fillet braze, this is the class to come to.
Coming soon…
We’re also planning to run fork building and jig building, along with wheel building and some bike mechanics courses too.
When can you take your course?
We’ll open our calendar (to those people who pledged for course places in our first round of crowd funding) for bookings on a first come, first served basis. We’re full at the moment but there’s a waiting list if you’d like to add your name to it.
Put your name on our waiting list.
If you missed out on our first batch of course places, don’t worry. We’ll be open for more courses later this year. Fill out this form and let us know which courses you’re interested in. We’ll add you to our waiting list and get in touch if something you might like comes up.
Why build bikes for people in Africa?
For many people in Africa, bikes are a lifeline. They help children go to school or work and they transport food and water. We’ve teamed up with the charity Re-cycle to design a frame specifically for people in Africa. Our TBA Africa Bike is tough, and thanks to the fantastic components that World Bicycle Relief produce it can last for five years without much maintenance. The tyres are puncture-resistant – good for travelling over rugged ground. It’s simple, so it’s easy to look after and it doesn’t need lots of fiddly parts if anything does go wrong. It’s strong, so it can carry heavy loads. And it’s flexible, so it can be used for all kinds of different things like going to school or work, collecting food and water, helping health workers get from A to B, and even as an ambulance.
Charities who distribute bikes in Africa often face problems with the bikes themselves: sometimes they’re not strong enough to ride in rural areas, or they’re hard to maintain, or they just don’t last very long. By designing one simple, single frame and making standard components for it, we’re hoping to face – and stop – these problems head-on.
Follow your frame.
Every single Africa bike we make at The Bicycle Academy has its own special code, so you can track your bike to see where it’s going and who it’s helping. We hope to donate our first batch of Africa bikes in late summer 2012.
Why will we give your first frame away?
It’s fair to say that the first bike you build will be the worst bike you build (although it’ll work fine). So why not keep the skills for next time round and give your first bike to someone who really needs one?
Will you be able to build your own frames?
Yes. On top of our courses, the workshop is open all week to all The Bicycle Academy graduates to work on their own frame building projects. We keep costs down and only charge for the time you spend in the workshop and any materials you use.
We know frame-building classes aren’t cheap. And if you don’t have a workshop nearby with all the kit, it’ll be hard for you to make another bike. Which means you might want to keep hold of your very first frame. But The Bicycle Academy is different. We’re open every week for you and other graduates to come back and build your own frames, at your own pace, as and when you want to. So rather than putting all your focus into one frame, you can build your first frame knowing that it will be one of many. And it’ll change someone’s life.
If you live too far away to come to the workshop a lot, you can buy affordable jig building kits, materials and other things you need from us. So you can do most of the work at home before coming down to use our brazing stations to finish your frame. You may even want to set up some brazing equipment of your own at home.
We’re making frame building easier for everyone and helping people in need at the same time.
Are we a business or charity?
The Bicycle Academy is not a charity. We’re a for-profit limited company, but one that cares and has giving at its core. This means we can grow a sustainable business and we don’t need to rely on grants for support. For a great example of this type of business, take a look at TOMS.
We’re a bicycle frame-building school and open workshop so we will teach people skills and let them use our workshop , but we also want to do something really good for people in need. So we’re working closely with the charity Re~cycle and World Bicycle Relief to make frames for Africa that we will donate once we’ve made them into working bicycles.
How did we get started?
Andrew came up with the idea in November 2010, and founded The Bicycle Academy as a Ltd company in December 2011. To get the project started Andrew ran a crowd funding campaign in November 2011, which you can find out more about here.
