Spending the afternoon at Kelly Bike®

Yesterday in sunny Nevada City California I spent a few hours with the master frame builder, Chris Kelly at Kelly Bike® HQ. We were shooting some video and some still images for his new website. The footage we shot was him adding the braze-on parts for a new frame build. A braze-on is any metal welded to a frame, like seat post clamps, water bottle cages, cable guides and panniers racks. Chris makes the process look easy.

I think a lot of people don’t see is the office work that goes into running your business. When you look into a shop like Chris’s it’s hard to tell that he also does his office work here too. He routinely works 14 hour days. Building frames, packing them up, shipping them off to customers and then there is buying supplies and doing the marketing going to shows and setting that all up. Kelly Bike Company is really just a One-Man Show.

There is more to being a craftsman than working in the shop with a torch in hand.