This is the steel fat tire mountain frame, frame #2. It’s sitting on a picnic table outside UBI, in Ashland, OR. I took the welded steel bike frame class in March, 2021 and learned a ton. I thought I was brilliant, since I had already built a bike frame last Fall and would breeze through the class. A fat tire frame is not standard, for schools anyway, so there’s a lot of thought that needs to be thought on tubing, wheel size, geometry of the frame and more.
We bike people think we are the bees knees (whatever that really means) when we grasp some of the basics about frame dimensions and geometry, but it’s way more complex than we think. I wonder if anyone really has a grasp on all of the relationships between an individual body and a bicycle frame.
Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing wrote a thick, well researched and really well illustrated book–Bicycle Design, and Illustrated History. This is a fantastic resource for researching the development of the bicycle over the last 150+ years. It constantly reminds me that there is nothing new under the sun, as it seems like some variation of everything I see proclaimed as newest and greatest has been tried before.