Old framebuilder books
 

I'm looking for an old, vintage books about frame building. the older the better.

(is there any online course- apart from those few youtube videos- about frame brazing etc? I know that there is nothing better than actual course and practise but closest to me is in UK... nothing in Ireland...)

I have a small library of building books, most are decades old. (With the advent of the interweb why would someone print a niche audience book any more?) The only reasons I go to them is pretty much for terms of style and not actual building instruction. But I'm very happy to have them just the same. Andy

The Proteus Manual was my first "book" (and the one, with permission, I scanned and posted on line many years later). The Paterek Manual and Talbot's Designing and Building Your Own Frameset are the other two that stand out as early US available books with widely known availability.

The only "book" that I keep on my desk is the notes I took from the Eisentraut class I attended back in 1979. Mostly because it's back pages is where I started to document the frame's I've done and continued to do so. Andy

https://archive.org/details/proteusframebuilding

Google Books had or still has frame building books from the early 1900s, I'll have to take a look and see if I can find the links.

You can learn a ton from Hirose. He uses a lot of heat in some people's opinion, however, Mr. Hirose has built a lot more frames than those people, so I know who I trust.
https://www.youtube.com/user/hiroseMuseum

Tim Paterek has an early edition of his book on line as a pdf download:

http://www.timpaterek.com/paterek.pdf

Thank you. I hope I'll manage to learn frame building on my own (at least build ridable bike that will survive a bit more than two blocks ).

I build my first computer on my own from scrap parts - now I'm working in computer service, I built my first bike from scrap parts - now I'm fixing and restoring bicycles... all on my own with no proper education (and no internet!) so maybe brazing is not that hard to learn either... I have a plan to start with materials and technics used way back in the beginning and gradually moved to more modern tubes.

Very little has changed about building a steel frame in the 40 years I have been building bike frames. And really, there is not much different between those frames and the oldest ones that I have seen. Sure, there are better tubes now and you can't cold set a lot of them. So mitering and construction has to be done more carefully. That's not much of a change.

Bike tubes are cheaper than any other kind of tubing that would work for a bicycle frame. So you might as well start with the cheapest bike tubes you can find.