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Blacklab Bikes
After spending many years brazing together world championship winning speedway bikes for Hagon Motorcycles Dad moved the business and family out of London and set-up a company from home in the countryside. My earliest memory is the smell of cutting oil and castrol R. my childhood memories are heavy on machines, sparks, steel and fire. When I was 5 I sat on my Dad's knee and cut my teeth with the oxy-acetaline torch. The way he tells it I was able to weld by the time I was six. Over the next twenty years I worked in the family engineering firm when not studying, riding bikes or racing sailing boats.
As a small child I apparently got my first bicycle and immediately told my folks to remove the stabilisers. It turns out that riding two wheels is in the blood as I rode off round the yard. Mum recons walking and riding were learnt about the same time. I have no memory of not being able to ride and to this day prefer it to walking.
In terms of bicycle building, it snowed and I "needed" a snowbike. Runners welded to forks worked well for a day till the snow melted some, the blades bit through the snow to the road, gripped and bent. I still have the scars and i still love bikes.
The bug of pedalling my own creation had started to bite but a physics degree called and off to uni I went.
I was into juggling and uni-cycling and MTB at the time and MUni (mountain unicycle) was just becoming a thing. I thought it would be amusing to build an off-road unicycle and as a student, it was the only way I was going to be able to afford one. Jigs built, tube bent, torch-work and nickel plating left me with a great MUni. Within a week or so of posting to forums I had orders, within a week or two I was shipping batches to Germany and the USA. I still have prototype 1 that I rode in videos of the time and the 36 inch uni I rode for 24 hours at red bull.
So it was time to either commit to frame-building and building a brand or follow my other love, teaching. With the support of my amazing wife we packed everything up and moved up north where I trained as a teacher, swearing blind that I would carry building again soon.
Fast forward through many years of talking about it, many years of "soon" and I'm finally back at it. I have really missed the creative outlet and the feel of doing projects with a start and and ending. I'll never be where Richard Sachs is, with thousands of frames under my belt, but it'd be nice to make a few! There are other aspirations and dreams but I'm going to build things that interest me and we'll see where it goes.
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Originally Posted by Matthew Strongin
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