One of the builders that I have much respect for is Selberbruzzler in Austria. Not just because they build some great bikes, but also because they've been very open with what goes on in their shop. Good and bad.
In a lot of big business, there's a standing hush-order on anything that could be interpreted as negative. I think that's counterproductive -- what happens when that thing you wanted to just go away finally gets shown in the light of day? It looks even worse because they tried to cover it up!
So, with that in mind, I'm going to parade out some of the mistakes that have been made along the way, and how I've dealt with them.
First up, in making Lisa's all-road bike, right at the very start I go off on the wrong foot. I had slotted the top of the tube and put in the holes for the water bottle bosses, then brazed the bottom bracket shell onto the seat tube. Then I measured out the locations of the breather holes for the top tube and the stub for the seatstay yoke, drilled them, and put that in the jig to start the mitering for the rest of the main triangle. It was then that I noticed something just didn't look right... Yep, those breather holes were in the wrong location -- I'd reversed them. If they had intersected the tube at the same location, it wouldn't have been an issue. But since they don't... I set that aside and started over. Lesson learned. I may be able to use that assembly on a build for myself, and I've got a time trial bike in the early design phase that could be the ticket.
Then there's the road bike I made for the RockSteady Junior Triathlon team that I help coach. I've got it at 99.9% build -- the only thing left is to put on bar tape and cut the steerer. I've actually already ridden on it, a little shake-down cruise up and down the road in front of my house. But in doing the parts build, after the frame was complete, chased and faced, painted, the whole nine yards, I found a fundamental error that I KNOW I checked before I lit the torch. I was threading in a GXP bottom bracket cups, and having the worst time with it. It'd go in a thread, then pop out. I got the taps out, and re-chased it. Then went at it again. Well, the right side went in half-way, then stopped. As in turning it didn't produce and movement -- in or out. Oh man. So I took the taps out to another frame, and then had the "oh crap" moment, realizing that the bottom bracket shell on that bike had been put in backwards. Sure, I'd chased the threads just fine, just as backwards as the shell had been assembled. I ended up ditching the GXP bottom bracket and crankset, and going with a Shimano type outboard bearing unit, and just making sure those cups were in there good and tight (with some thread locker for good measure). Yes, it works, and for a bike I'm donating to the team (and will likely be maintaining myself anyway), it's fine. Had it been for a paying customer, I'd have been starting all over again.
I've trimmed a tube too short when I didn't compensate for the offset of the tape measure on the other end, I've mitered tubes too deep using the bench grinder a little too aggressively, and I've mis-aligned the braze-on bits.
Richard Sachs has a great phrase -- "imperfection is perfection". It alludes to the fact that a hand-made frame is made by HUMAN hands, and they aren't perfect. It doesn't mean that we don't always strive for perfection, but there comes a time when chasing that last .0001mm of twist in a tube is counterproductive. It'll ride just fine, and unless the customer is examining the frame with a scanning electron microscope, it'll go unnoticed. But the builder knows it's there. and learns.
This openness hopefully doesn't become a bludgeon used to beat my framebuilding to a pulp in the industry. I'd like to keep building for a long time, even if I am just really starting out.
As long as I can laugh at myself, and learn something along the way.
