(written by and about the owner, Joe Roggenbuck)
In 2009 I discovered custom bicycle framebuilding, and I fell in love. Framebuilding takes the bicycle and turns it into a canvas for artistic expression as well as a machine that can be refined for performance. There is such a rich history of framebuilding that goes back over a hundred years, and in the past twenty years there has been a renaissance.
In 2010, when I was 20 years old and half-way through college, I took a two-week framebuilding class with Doug Fattic and Herbie Helm in Niles, Michigan, on lugged bike frame design and construction. I was pretty new to cycling and very new to fabrication. I didn’t know what a Bridgeport milling machine was or what made a TIG welder different than the MIG welders I’d used a couple of times in my dad’s farm workshop back home.
Me and the bike I built in my 2010 framebuilding class with Doug Fattic. A fixie with Deep-V rims, obviously.
By the end of the two weeks, I had a decent sense of how to put together a lugged bicycle frame—how to use hacksaws, handfiles, o/a torch and a bench vise to make a bike. I was so excited.
Over the next couple years I spent a lot of time practicing fitting tubes together with hand tools and brazing them. It wasn’t until 2013 that I finished my first bike in my own shop with all my own tools. Over the next couple years I kept building bikes for myself and my friends. After the first six bikes, I bought a TIG welder and started welding them instead of brazing.
I kept struggling because I didn’t have the tools I needed to build frames in a professional manner. There was always a way to get it done, but I wanted to make bikes in “workman-like fashion.” Instead, I felt like I was cobbling everything together with duct tape and crossing my fingers that my tools wouldn’t fall apart mid-weld, that the frames came out straight, and that the tubing wouldn’t get marred from poor workholding.
Not only was my lack of adequate tooling frustrating, it was keeping me slow. When all you have is nights and weekends as a hobby builder, your time is very limited, so it’s frustrating when projects only inch along.
Me, my bike ‘Deep Gravy’ and my 1967 Bridgeport J-head mill. Summer 2015. Photo by Joe Librandi-Cowan.
In 2015 I bought my first real machine tools—a Bridgeport vertical mill and a Clausing manual lathe. With these machines I started to make tools for myself. Some were tools I could and should have just bought, and others were custom to my own process and needs that weren’t available for sale.
Over time, I found I liked making the tools even more than making bikes! That put me in a weird spot. I’d feel guilty spending my time in the shop making tools, because I barely had time to make the frames themselves. Making custom tools seemed like a challenging and fun distraction from my real task of trying to become a professional framebuilder. But every time I’d start making a frame again, I’d wish I had better tools to get the job done.
In 2017 I started a full-time job at a CNC machine shop, learned what I could there for nine months, then left. I took a week of CNC machining classes at Saunders Machine Works in Ohio, and bought a used CNC milling machine. At first I thought the machine would just be for hobby use, to play with after hours while I worked a day job—but pretty quickly I was making quality parts on the machine.
I decided to put all my eggs in the basket of making Cobra Framebuilding Tooling, and I’ve been working full-time on this project since March 2018. Thanks to all the great customers I’ve had, I don’t intend to stop any time soon.
At this point, I’m all-in on making tools for bicycle framebuilders. I’m not taking orders for bike frames right now, despite occasionally making them when I can squeeze them in.
Going forward, I hope to provide a wider and wider product offering for the small-scale framebuilder, keep as much of the tooling in stock and ready to ship as possible, and keep customer wait times to a minimum. I’ve also started producing more content for framebuilders, via my Youtube channel and podcast.
I welcome questions and user feedback, and I look forward to serving the bike-building community for years to come!
WANT TO HEAR EVEN MORE?
I told my own story on my framebuilding podcast.
I also was a guest on the Within Tolerance podcast.