The Frame In The Corner Belonged To A Man Who Died

What the workshop smells like

There are two smells in my life and I have never wanted a third.

The first is frame paint. Not the stuff in a rattle can from the hardware shop on Sarnia Road, the real thing, sprayed thin and warm in a booth I built myself out of chipboard and an extractor fan I rewired twice. It gets into your sinuses and stays there for a day. My wife says she can tell what colour I have been spraying by how I sleep.

The second is flux. That sharp, almost sweet bite when the brass goes liquid and pulls itself into the lug by capillary action, which is the closest thing to magic I have ever personally witnessed. You do not force brass anywhere. You heat the metal correctly and the brass goes where it wants to go, which is exactly where it is supposed to be. Fifty-one years old and that still gets me.

My workshop is behind my house in Sherwood. Corrugated roof, so when the Durban rain comes in February it sounds like the end of the world and I stop working and just sit there. The humidity is a genuine enemy. Bare steel will bloom orange overnight if you leave it uncoated, so I keep the frames hanging from the ceiling on hooks like meat, and I wipe them down like a man grooming horses.

I restore old steel road frames. Nineteen seventies and eighties racers, mostly. Reynolds 531, Columbus SL, the occasional Italian thing that somebody's uncle brought back from a race in Europe in 1979 and then left in a garage in Westville for forty years.

Where I learned it

I learned from a man called Emilio, who had a shop off Umgeni Road and who never once told me I was doing well.

He was a frame builder from Brescia who came out here in the sixties for reasons he never explained properly and which I suspect involved a woman and possibly a debt. He was already old when I met him and I was twenty-two and useless. He would take a file out of my hands, do the thing I had spent an hour failing at, put the file back in my hands, and walk away. That was the teaching. Seven years of that.

The one thing he did say, and he said it often, was that the work speaks for itself. He would tap a lug with his fingernail. Parla da sé. It speaks by itself.

I believed him completely. I still mostly do. That belief is the reason for everything that follows, including the embarrassing parts.

The 1978

In the corner, on the stand, is a 1978 frame. I will not give the marque because the family would recognise it and this is not their story to be told in.

It belonged to a man named Douglas who rode it up and down the North Coast for thirty years and who died in 2023 of something slow. His son Warren brought it to me in a bakkie. The frame had been in a shed in Ballito and the salt air had got at it badly. The chainstays were pitted. The seat tube had a dent where something heavy had leaned on it for a decade. The original paint, a metallic green that nobody makes anymore, was mostly a memory.

Warren said, I do not want it looking new. I want it looking like my dad's.

That is the hardest brief you can be given. New is easy. New is just money and patience. What he wanted was for the bicycle to be repaired and still be the same object, which is a philosophical problem before it is a technical one.

So I have been going slowly. I stripped it. I cut out the worst of the pitting and let in new tube where I had to, brazing at the join, and every time I lit the torch I thought about a man I never met riding towards Umhlanga in the wet.

I matched that green off a patch I found under the bottom bracket shell, where forty-five years of grime had preserved it like a fossil. Took me four attempts and about two thousand Rand in paint I threw away. Nobody would ever have known if I had got it slightly wrong. That is not the point.

What Priya said

My daughter Priya is twenty-four and works in Umhlanga in an office with glass everywhere and she does not lie to me, which I have decided is love.

She came into the workshop in about March. She stood there looking at the 1978, and then she said, Dad, how did Warren find you?

I said, his father knew me.

She said, right. And how does the next Warren find you?

I did not have an answer, so I gave her a lecture instead. I said the work speaks for itself. I said that in this trade the people who need me know where I am, that it has always been that way, that Emilio never advertised a day in his life and had a queue out the door.

Priya let me finish. Then she said, Emilio's queue was made of people who were alive.

She was not being cruel. She was being accurate, which is worse.

Because here is the thing I had been not-looking-at for about three years. My customers were men in their sixties and seventies. Collectors. Guys who had raced in the eighties and had money in their fifties and got sentimental. They referred each other. That was my whole business, a chain of ageing men passing my name along like a bottle. And then they got older, and some of them stopped riding, and some of them moved to the Cape to be near grandchildren, and three of them died. I went to two of the funerals. I did not connect the funerals to the phone not ringing. I thought I was just having a quiet stretch.

A quiet stretch that lasted from 2022 to the middle of last year.

The sentence that took the skin off

In August a young guy came to the workshop. Maybe thirty. He had a Peugeot he wanted looked at and he had got my number from his landlord's brother, which tells you everything about my marketing strategy.

He stood in the doorway and looked around at the hanging frames and the torch and the alignment table Emilio left me, and he said, in a completely friendly way, with no idea what he was doing:

Ag, I actually thought you'd closed down.

I said something like no, still here. I made him tea. He was very nice. He paid his money and left happy.

Then I sat on an upturned crate in my own workshop for about forty minutes without moving.

Closed down. Not, I had never heard of you. Not, you are too expensive. He had heard of me, decided I no longer existed, and been surprised to find me breathing. That is a specific kind of humiliation and I do not think I had ever felt it before. I have been broke. I have been wrong. I had never been assumed dead.

Searching for myself

That night I did the stupid thing. I took Priya's laptop and I typed in the trade. Vintage bicycle restoration Durban. Steel frame respray. Frame builder KwaZulu-Natal.

I went through pages of it. There were bike shops that sell e-bikes. There was a man in Gauteng. There was a Facebook group with two hundred members, half of them in Australia. There were forum posts from 2011.

I was not there. Not on page one, not on page four, nowhere. Twenty-nine years of work and the internet had simply never been told.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because I think I expected to feel angry at the internet, and instead I felt something much smaller and much worse. I felt like a man who has been shouting in a room he thought was full.

The work speaks for itself. Sure. But it was speaking in an empty workshop in Sherwood behind a house with a locked gate, and everybody had gone home.

The unglamorous part

I did not have a conversion experience. I want to be clear about that, because the temptation when you tell this kind of story is to arrive at a bit where the light comes in.

What happened is that Priya made me sit down with a laptop and a cup of tea and we looked at some people. She had a colleague who had used a digital marketing agency in Durban and she made a list of three or four of them and we went through the list the way you go through mechanics, which is to say with suspicion.

I found the whole exercise faintly humiliating in a way I still cannot fully justify. The vocabulary offends me. And every one of these outfits looks the same from the outside. Every website has a photograph of people pointing at a screen. I noticed the phrase Google Premier Partner on one of them and I remember thinking, I do not know what that means and I am not going to find out, in roughly the way I do not know what the badges on a plumber's van mean.

In the end I spoke to one of them, an seo agency type of setup, and the conversation was much duller than I feared. They asked what I did. I told them, at length, probably too much length, about lugs and about Emilio and about the difference between a bicycle and a frame. The person on the other end listened and asked what people would type if they wanted me. Which, I realised while sitting there, was a question I had never asked in twenty-nine years.

I do not have a triumphant ending. It costs money I did not really want to spend. I still think most of it is nonsense and I told them so. There is no moment where I became a believer.

But two weeks ago a man phoned from Hillcrest about his father's Colnago and when I asked how he found me he said, I looked it up.

Four words. I looked it up. I put the phone down and stood in the workshop with the flux still in the air and I laughed at myself, properly, out loud, for a good while.

The 1978, finished

It went back to Warren in October.

The green came out right. There is a small mark on the top tube, a scar in the original paint that I masked around and left alone, because he asked me to, because his father put it there. I built it up with the original Campagnolo, cleaned but not polished. It looks like a bicycle a man rode. It does not look new.

Warren stood in my yard and did not say anything for a while, and then he said thank you, and his voice went, and he put it in the bakkie and drove off towards the N2.

That is the work. That is the whole thing. It does speak for itself. Emilio was not wrong about that.

He just never mentioned that first, somebody has to walk in the door.