Making Trouble

LONG LIVE

THE BICYCLE

EVERYTHING I KNOW I LEARNED FROM TWO WHEELS AND A FRAME.

By Saul Griffith

IREMEMBER THE VERY FIRST MOMENT

I rode a bicycle. I was at Uncle Dave’s place out “in the bush.” He wasn’t a real uncle, but rather one of those family friends who becomes a default uncle by giving freely of his time and lessons on life. He lived a two- or three-hour drive from Sydney in a small town, on a beautiful rustic property with a shed full of the things that delight a 6-year-old, and one of those things was a bicycle.

There were no luxurious training wheels, just two tireless men — my father and Uncle Dave — who would run behind me holding the underside of the saddle and keeping me upright as I teetered and tottered. It took an afternoon, a beautiful afternoon of giggling and grazed knees, but I was anointed a bicycle rider, and was then allowed to ride to the edge of the property and back. It was probably only a hundred yards, but the world suddenly seemed larger. The love affair would never end.

Soon after, I received a purple chopper, with a banana seat replete with metallic flake. (My sister’s banana seat had flowers on it, something I derided at the time, but now appreciate and even search for in old bicycle shops. To my mind, a chopper isn’t complete without one.) At age 7 or so, inspired by the sublime acting of Nicole Kidman — I kid you not — in BMX Bandits, I convinced my parents to upgrade it and fulfill my dream of owning a black and yellow Speedwell. (It had to be black and yellow.) Not long after that, E. T. came out at the movies, and my fantasies of flying bicycles powered by my own little alien were frequent.

What really came with bike ownership, though, was bicycle maintenance, my first taste of hands-on engineering. When I got my first mountain bike,

44 Make: Volume 11

a coral pink Apollo brand, I would tear it down and build it back up just for kicks. The bearings and their hardened steel balls fascinated and perplexed me as I cleaned, greased, and serviced them.

I learnt the difference between left- and right-handed threaded screws by cross-threading them. I learnt about galvanic corrosion by riding on the beach with steel pedals and aluminum cranks. I learnt about gears, chains, derailleurs, and broken teeth. (The broken teeth — the gears’ and my own — were the result of not correctly tensioning the chains. Fortunately, mine were baby teeth and my engineering prowess improved in time for the onset of adult teeth.)

For many of us, bicycles are the first taste of responsibility. As soon as you start modifying or repairing your own bike, you learn very tangibly the results of your work. If you do sloppy work, or make mistakes, the result is typically a bicycle crash — blood, broken bones, and all.

But bicycles taught me more than just basic building principles and simple mechanics; they even introduced me to the magic of materials science. After I tired of my bike’s pink color (the only one available), I decided that chrome would be far more “manly.” I saved enough money to strip the bike down and take it to a chrome plater.

I clearly remember going to the factory with my tolerant father and being fascinated with the electroplating baths, although the whim turned out to be disastrous. The process effectively annealed and weakened the frame, and the fork gave out soon after, bending slowly upward until it was unrideable. The experience was probably influential in my eventual university study of metallurgy — the fatigue and