background

There might be one or two of you who look at this website that truly want to know a little more about Wildebeest Bicycles, the entity, and how/why/where, et al. Perhaps you, in spite of everything you've been told, or seen herein over the last couple of minutes, are harboring thoughts of someday riding a Wildebeest; perhaps you saw someone else on one, and came here wondering What kind of ignorant fool built that thing?; or perhaps, in a desperate attempt to get out of this site you clicked the wrong thing and found this page instead. Regardless, you are here, so I will write a bit about Wildebeest as it exists today.

Like many framebuilders wielding torches out there today (and there are quite a few), I, the sole wildebeest, received my basic instruction in January of 2005, at United Bicycle Institute in Ashland, Oregon. I am old enough and smart enough to know that book-larnin' only gets you so far, but building a frame in their classroom allows one to encounter and get past a lot of rookie mistakes- and I feel confident that what I build is better for having gotten the schooling first. (You can be confident that there are not too many of my rookie mistakes sharing the roads and trails with you...)

The frames I build are made out of steel pipes and other ferrous parts that will take kindly to magnets, and I stick everything together by brazing as opposed to welding. Without getting too geeky, brazing is a lower-temperature, non-melting-the-parent-material procedure using a highly influential flame caused by oxygen and acetylene gases rushing together through a torch handle and rapidly oxidizing usefully. Welding is different. Both techniques can be used to make fabulous bicycle frames and forks- I prefer the older, less-expensive method of brazing. Think of it as amped-up soldering... I work with very little mechanized support, as in I do not have large milling machines and such. Part of that is choice, but mostly I simply have not needed machining. Should the workload demand more motors for productivity's sake, I will address the issue again.

Anyway- I am anticipating only ever building with steel, though there are other frame materials available. Aluminium appears in lots of bikes, maybe the majority of non-department-store frames now, but I do not have the desire, time, equipment, specific technical know-how or personal need to make beer cans into bike frames. Titanium, although I admire it as a frame material, is a weld-only metal, more difficult to work with and much more expensive to purchase. Stainless steel and magnesium are also used to construct frames, but similar (for my concerns, at any rate) to titanium in cost and workability. Carbon fibre (fiber), lastly, is today's wonderstuff, increasingly the material of choice for high-performance frames and components- which I will gladly leave to others more adventurous and daring, and less concerned about gloppy resin, than I. If you buy a Wildebeest, I will gladly hang carbon-fiber components, even a carbon fork, on it for you- but the frame will be steeeeel.

At one time, every bike out there had a steel frame and fork. There are rideable, discernable reasons why steel is still being used, and is the material of choice for the majority of small, wack custom framewrights. You just need to ride steel to know.