We built a BMX, my son Callum and I, and there is a picture attached here. You’ll need to view the blog on the web to see it.
It took ages.
It cost way too much.
It would have been much, much cheaper to buy a really cool BMX from Crucial BMX (those guys are absolutely fantastic) but it wasn’t really about buying the bike, it was about building the bike together.
I would really like to be a bike mechanic but I’ve never invested enough time to get good at it. I am slowly learning the further I go on to get a little bit better with my bikes so I wanted the opportunity to take something from scratch and to understand it a little bit better and a BMX is one of the simplest of bikes.
Callum wanted a BMX and he got the chance to choose every little bit. It has taken us months though to fit it in around things, to order the parts, to get the wrong parts and realise we’d done it, to look at YouTube videos to see how to fit things, to enlist the help of my friend, coach and bike mechanic Simon McCarthy to help us put on a bottom bracket.
We made a few mistakes along the way, although there aren’t too many extra parts that we ordered that we didn’t use, but notable mistakes are as follows:
- The bottom bracket is on the wrong way round!! That means that the chain clicks as it goes around until it stretches a bit further. It’s not a huge drama but it’s quite a big error. I don’t think we can take it back out now.
- We bought the wrong frame. Old fashioned and dead cheap from eBay but it was cheap for a reason.
- We bought an out of date handlebar set so it took a while and a bit of money to source a stem to attach the handlebars to the front end of the bike.
That said, the maiden voyage of the bike was yesterday and it was epic moment, although we haven’t had the final part for the brakes so we had no brakes!! Callum rode up the side of the tramline, proud as anything on his new bike that he really loves… and then the pedal fell off! DOH! I have forgotten to tighten the pedals properly. Never mind, back to the house to tighten the pedal, tighten the back wheel a bit better because it was rubbing and back on the tramline – heart in my mouth as he raced away on a bike with no brakes where anything might fall off any minute. Nothing else fell off, it was great. Just waiting for the last piece of the brakes to finish the bike overall.
The moral of the story though… learn something new and spend some great time together doing it. We built something that we love much more than a thing we would have just bought from the shops but we both learned again that it is alright to make a mess of things – to learn, to ask advice from people that know better and to carry on.
The next one we build will be much better because we understand it much more. We made some friends at Crucial BMX in Bristol who were so helpful every time we needed something and we also have a really, really cool looking BMX. It’s funny how it works though.
Take on something new, try it, get it wrong, find somebody that knows what they’re doing, ask advice, try again, get it right and eventually you have something worth looking at.
Blog Post Number – 1198
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