UBI vs. Hottubes
 

Hello,

I'm aspiring to build my own custom frame and bring home enough knowledge from this to hopefully be able to produce a small run of frames for my closet friends. Now it comes to schools. UBI or Hottubes? UBI seems to be the industry veteran but west coast. Hottubes is eastcoast but I've heard very little about this course. Any information would be great.

UBI, I think has many students in one class. Check out their class pictures. Like 10 students per instructor. Not that this is a bad thing, but just don't expect the personal attention you'd get from one instructor.

Hot Tubes. Toby Stanton is an awesome framebuilder. Very well-known and accomplished as a builder and painter. His course isn't as well known as UBI's. Personal one-on-one instruction, but the course is only 1 week compared to almost 2 for UBI.

Pros and cons to each. You can't go wrong with either. Since UBI is more well-known, expect to see more UBI commercials on here. Also, don't forget there is the framebuilder's listserve you can sign up for and many amateur builders on there are actually self-taught, even the founder of the listserve.


Some other nice links to self-taught amateurs:
http://www.phred.org/~josh/bike/bike.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ma4/racine/framebuilding.html
http://www.geocities.com/smonfrey/
http://www.littlefishbicycles.com/frame/
http://www.bikelist.org/ - click on framebuilders link and sign up.

Thanks. I'm about to pull the gun, and was set on UBI until I saw hottubes a in a previous post. I really like the idea of one on one instruction. It would let you focus more on your strengths and weakness and at your pace, not the pace of a classs. Really cool. Just asked hot tubes for a little more information. I want to make sure it's a course designed for learning frame building, not just building one frame.