Fact Or Fiction: The "Spare-Parts" Bike
After keeping a bike shop open for a couple of years, builders filter through a high volume of parts. Customers often change their minds about parts when upgrading, and the old take-off parts start to stack up as well. That’s a lot of building material most builders can’t afford to waste, so when we write bike feature articles about “leftover parts lying around the shop,” they’re usually true. This is an example of one of many traits a talented bike builder needs—the ability to look at a pile of parts that were bought randomly, came off other bikes, or may have been sitting on a shelf for years and still turn them into an incredible machine. It takes artistic inner sight to see beauty in something most people would throw away. Builders often modify parts to work differently from their intended use—such as a taillight or carburetor from an old car or a faucet knob turned into a shifter—and the unexpected use of these items makes the rest of us appreciate their novelty that much more.
Readers often dispute this ability because completed spare-parts bikes tend to look so planned and well-thought-out when they’re finished. Keep in mind that necessity is the mother of invention, and in many cases creative thinking is the foundation of a successful shop. In order to keep a shop alive during hard times, builders have to be innovative all the time. When budgets are tight (with a customer or the builder), a leftover part might be all there is to work with, and he/she has to modify a part to make it fit or make it cool. With a few exceptions, most parts aren’t the simple “bolt-on” applications they claim to be. Anyone who has ever customized a part will tell you that the only way to make a part perfect is to make it fit. Many times, the part is a perfect fit for another model, and the manufacturer doesn’t make one for the bike a customer owns, so it has to be persuaded to fit. So a builder/mechanic/fabricator is constantly thinking up new ideas and ways to modify items even when a part is supposed to bolt-on.
Modifying a part takes more skill than it seems, and builders (such as Hank Young or Billy Lane) who are known for modifying parts make it look easier than it is. To do this correctly, it takes creativity, innovation, and technical knowledge of how a part works and how it interacts with the surrounding parts, not to mention an eye for the aesthetic overview of the entire bike and how the part will look (compared to the rest of the bike) after the part has been modified.
There are a couple of spare-parts bikes in this issue, so when you’re reading these articles, know that the stories are true. The reason the bikes look so good is that the builders are talented, and that talent is the reason why their bikes make it into magazines.