Meet The Maker: Custom Bicycle Frame Building Demo

We recently had the honor of hosting Paul Reardon from Blue Steel Fabrication in our new Milwaukee shop for a night of frame brazing and bike talk. Paul is based out of La Crosse, WI and makes handmade and custom bicycle frames and is one of the many reasons Wisconsin is a great cycling state. We invited Paul down to our new shop so he could demonstrate and educate and he brought his equipment, steel tubing and his knowledge of frame building and boy did he put on a show.  

Custom Blue Steel Bike built for Joel here at Fyxation

This was our first event at our new home here on Humboldt in Riverwest and is the first in our Meet the Maker series that we'll be hosting here at the shop.  Even though we had pretty short notice to put on the event and it was the middle of winter here in Milwaukee, we had about 60 people show up for the demonstration. Our neighbor and good friends from Colectivo Coffee provided a keg of their house brewed One Tun Pale Ale and food was provided as well.

Nick here at Fyxation made a quick introduction and after that Paul got to work. He brought a frameset he's working on and he showed us how to weld the frame and fork.  It's pretty amazing to see how much time and effort goes into building a bike and when you get to see an artist at work doing what he loves it's really a thing of beauty.  I could spend a ton of time going over the minor details of the presentation but I'll let the following pictures do the talking. Needless to say our first event at the shop was a huge success and we're glad that the local bike scene showed up in force to support Paul and his craft.