Happy New Year and Welcome!

My New Year's resolution ... get my Blog going!

welcome to my blog. In Summer 2007 I set out to build a bicycle frame. My goal was to have it started by the end of the year and instead I'm now almost finished my first frame. The first bike is going to be a steel track bike for the road.
Framebuilding has turned out to be everything I expected and more. I have always been interested in mechanical engineering and learned draughtsmanship after leaving school. I quit unfortunately and took up a job digitizing maps which got me into geoinformatics and IT which is what I do now at GFZ.
I've loved bikes since I got my first one at the age of five but my interest has ebbed during certains stages of my life. Since I started commuting to Potsdam over 2 years ago I must admit I've become addicted to cycling and everything surrounding it.
I was inspired to the idea of framebuilding by two frames I bought in 2006. The first, a Peugeot from the late eighties is made from Reynolds 753r tubing and had the words "Hand Brazed" on the crossbar.

It seems strange now but until then I'd never asked myself how frames are made.
A real inspiration was Suzy Jackson's Tutorial on "Bicycle frame building for the rest of us".
I'd like to encourage anybody who's thinking of building a bicycle frame to just go for it.
The idea of this blog collect and present the resources and constraints relevant to building bicycle frames in Germany. I am in no manner an expert in this field but the information about framebuilding in Germany is spread across a dozen of forum threads. My goal is to digest it and spew it up here for your degustation.