Frame Building Courses – An immersive experience in traditional steel framebuilding

Spend a week in the Ellis Briggs workshop learning to build a bicycle frame properly, using the traditional hand skills of the trade.

You’ll learn to mark out, saw, file, fit, braze and align steel as you build your own frame from start to finish. The tools are remarkably simple. The skill lies in learning to use them well.

No previous metalworking experience is required. You do the work, while I work alongside you one-to-one, demonstrating each process and checking your work as the frame develops.

Framebuilding isn’t easy, and this course doesn’t pretend that it is. But with time, careful instruction and practice, precise hand skills can be learnt.

At the end of the week you’ll leave with a sound bicycle frame you’ve built yourself, genuine confidence using hand tools, and an understanding of framebuilding that you simply can’t get from looking at a finished bicycle.

A Craft That Has to Be Passed On

Britain once had bicycle framebuilding workshops across the country. Today, traditional lugged steel framebuilding is practised by a dwindling number of people, and opportunities to learn it directly are increasingly rare.

These skills can’t be preserved in books alone. Someone has to show you how a file should feel, what to look for in a fitted joint and how to read the heat as you braze.

The teaching method I use owes a great deal to framebuilder Doug Fattic, from whom I learnt. Doug spent years refining a way of teaching that introduces basic skills first, then applies them progressively as the frame develops.

Teaching them here at Ellis Briggs is one small way of keeping that knowledge alive. For a week, you become part of that chain.

Never Used a File or Brazing Torch?

That’s fine. You don’t need to know how before you arrive.

People who’ve taken my courses have included doctors, programmers, teachers and students, many with no relevant experience at all.

We start with the fundamentals and build the skills progressively. I’ll demonstrate, you’ll try it, we’ll look at the result together and you’ll learn how to improve it.

You don’t need to be ‘good with your hands’. You need patience, curiosity and a willingness to learn.

What Will You Build?

We usually begin with a bicycle and riding position you already know. From there we’ll establish the important dimensions and design a frame for you and the kind of riding you want to do.

A classic lugged steel frame gives the fullest experience of traditional framebuilding, although other construction and equipment choices can be discussed before your course.

As the frame takes shape, the exercises of the first few days become real skills applied to real work. By the end of the week, the finished frame is the physical record of everything you’ve learnt.