How Bike Touring Introduced Me to Making

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How Bike Touring Introduced Me to Making

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Many makers can pinpoint their origin story. Though I’m a novice, I can see mine well enough. I decided to go on a bike tour — a big, long one, across Africa. Like many people, learning to ride was part of my childhood. I was comfortable on them, familiar with them, but what did I really know about them? Not that much. Most crucially, bike repair was a mystery to me.

Bike touring has one particular characteristic in common with making: Self reliance. You can’t carry all the tools and parts you need to fix a bike, and chances are good you’ll be far from the nearest shop. And you will break down, so you better be prepared.

With that in mind, I figured the simplest way to prepare was to build one myself. With a $40 frame from Craigslist, I hung around a local bike shop until they took pity on me and started giving me pointers. (It helped that I bought most of my parts, including wheels, from them.)

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A bicycle is a remarkable machine in its simplicity. You can figure out how most of it works, if you examine it closely. And for tougher problems, a guide like Howard Zinn’s helps a lot.

A touring bicycle is a bit different, and can be customized any number of ways. Typically, they’re built for comfort and durability over speed. But that’s getting away from the point at hand: Putting it together yourself.

There are plenty of bikes designed specifically for touring. Many of them are very good. But when you build one, it’s yours, you know it with an intimacy you wouldn’t get from a store-bought bike. And that intimacy only grows as you ride it, discover its quirks and failings and deal with them.

But that’s just the bike — the tour had just as much to do with making. More than anything, it evoked a change in mindset. I watched my riding partners make flip flops out of scavenged retread and cargo webbing. We used sticks, cut to the perfect length and shaped to hold our bikes, because no kickstand could handle their weight. I was forever sewing old inner tubes and other add-ons to my bags so I could carry more water.

Years later, this outlook carries on. When I want to do something around the house, I look for what I can rig up using the things I have. When I see a lonely, unused piece of sporting equipment, I want to buy it, fix it up, turn it into something new, and (of course) use it.

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It is high summer, and this week we are celebrating with five days of outdoor sports-themed articles, pictures, videos, reviews and projects. We’ll be here all week, so check back often and get out there.

Our next theme week will be wearable electronics. Send us your tips or contributions before it gets here by dropping a line to editor@makezine.com.

4 thoughts on “How Bike Touring Introduced Me to Making

  1. greggawatt says:

    “Howard Zinn” you mean Lennard Zinn :D

  2. Jeremy Cook says:

    Nice. Although probably not the first thing I made/modified, riding a mountain bike really taught me how to work on something like that. I broke enough stuff on it (including a frame) that it just got too expensive to have the bike shop repair it. Years later, I stripped down a bike and turned it into a single speed, which was a fun project.

    Now it’s the bike I ride most often.

  3. cknich5 says:

    Reblogged this on NoCo Mini Maker Faire and commented:
    Colorado has many bike makers! Would you like to see more of them at the NoCo Mini Maker Faire?

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Nathan Hurst is an editor at Make. He loves anything having to do with science or bicycling. He tweets as @nathanbhurst.

View more articles by Nathan Hurst

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