Bicycle Anatomy : The Basic Frame

Growing up I had taken the anatomy of a bicycle for granted. As long as my tires had air and the brakes sort of worked I was happy to speed off on a bit of an "adventure". As I am learning in a trial by fire method - basically disemmbling and trying to reassemble from pictures, scraps of rusty greasy notes i am leaving myself like a scene from a bicycle mechanic "memento" movie, hours and hours of reading forums, asking questions and deep diving on all aspects I have come to appreciate that the bike is a complicated creature. 

Like all machines which are not standard, there are thousands of differences between bicycles and you will never know them all... ever. Metric sizes, US sizes, Japanese sizes etc etc. Now there are many things which are the same on a standard two wheeler. 2 wheels, a seat, seat post, fork, handlebars...etc etc. The basics.

I had an electrical engineering professor in college, Prof Hunt. He was the creator of a series of steps called the 6 step method that could be used to solve ANY electrical circuit problem. Do I remember it, no... but I do remember that he said for you to really learn something, by attempting to teach it to another person it helps ingrain that knowledge in yourself. Obviously I never had to teach anyone about the 6 step method =). My point is that I am going to start a series of blogs where we review the different components of the bicycle so that I share the knowledge and in turn will become a vintage bike guru.

All of my tutorials unless otherwise designated will be on the single speed [ to start ] bicycle. I will cover drum breaks and possibly cantilevel breaks down the road. [ way down the road ]

  

I've Been Framed

All of the bicycle components are important, but you cant call a bicycle a bicycle with out a frame. Otherwise it is just a bucket of parts.

Let's review the components of the frame:

• Head tube + bearings
• Top tube
• Down tube
• Seat tube
• Seat stay
• Chain stay

There are a few more items that could be thought of as a piece of the frame such as the seat post, fork and rear dropouts. Typically these are all not considered part of the frame, but the fork + frame is usually called the "frameset". To complicate things even further sometimes the seat post and headset will also be referred to as the frameset. Other  components you could have an argument about including or not are the rear dropouts which are actually welded onto the frame or forged as a part of it in some cases.