The Joy of Permanence
It’s Monday and all I can think about is Wednesday. Not because of its traditional role as Hump Day™, but because I’ve got a day of framebuilding work again. And I cannot tell you how damn excited I am about that.
Class is going extremely well. I am getting more and more comfortable with the fillet brazing process, and have started to dabble in silver brazing of lugs, too. I find myself daydreaming up all sorts of nifty ideas from both an engineering standpoint and a creative standpoint.
The best part about this is the permanence of the things I am building.
You see, since 1994, a majority of my creative energies have been directed toward building castles out of electrons and pushing ideas through the Internet. Whether that’s fonts or web design, what I have been building lacks a material instance.
What I’m doing now, with constructing bicycle frames, has sparked a level of passion for my work that I haven’t experienced in the fifteen years I’ve been putting stuff on the web. And I think that that is due in large part to the fact that the things that I create, provided that the owner treats them with some modicum of care and provides a certain level of care, will still be around in 50 years.
I like that idea. I like the idea that someday something I build will be a family heirloom, or that it will be picked up at a flea market by a kid who wants to break into racing but doesn’t have the budget. I like knowing that my future kids might well inherit bikes I built and raced on.
Do I think that every bike will pass down through the ages? Hell no. If you’ve worked in a bike shop as long as I have (10 seasons), you’ve seen countless bikes that end up in dumpsters, or that have been destroyed by the ravages of time and use. But, for every one of those, I see ten come through that have been re-purposed and are finding new life, and that gives me hope that I might build something that outlasts me.
That’s something that a loose assemblage of electrons will never do.
(Next topic: the joy of creating for “someone” rather than for “everyone”…)
You should check out ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft’. Akin to the ideas behind the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance.
@DrA
Actually, that was on my Amazon wishlist for awhile. After reading reviews, though, I’m not 100% certain I’ll buy it. The summary that manual labor is more rewarding than cube farm work seems completely intuitive to me, though.
Might be why I liked Cory Doctorow’s Makers so much. The concept of a corporation as an incubator for Doing Stuff™ with the Fail-Quickly-and-Often mindset was really appealing to me.
I wouldn’t buy it but it is a good read. I’m almost through with it and I think the ideas are great but the writing is a little stiff; I want to be able to really immerse myself in the book but the presentation isn’t that inviting.
@DrA
I’ll see if it’s at the library. I need to make another run sometime in the near future.