Our European correspondent Petor Georgallou recently visited four North American framebuilders who have been awarded SRAM’s Inclusivity Scholarship to attend Bespoked in Dresden, Germany, on October 18–20. In the fourth chapter of this series, Petor joins Li King of Berkeley, Ca of King Fabrications. Petor chats with Li about their lifetime dream to become a welder and NorCal’s specific style as they prepare to head to Germany.
Foolishly we had left the west coast to last, with a smattering of friends and builders left to visit in just two days. To make things worse a cramped, delayed flight had deposited us at San Francisco airport disheveled and disorganized, where we made our way to the rental car counter.
There had been some kind of problem with our booking that left Bennet tensely pacing the halls, exchanging a few softly spoken words in German with his credit card issuer before a series of long and sporadic holds. We went from rental counter to rental counter and clerk to clerk trying to rent a car. Any car.
Eventually at at some ungodly hour, known only to bakers and bartenders through some dumb luck and epic deposits, we were ushered out to the back door of the Hertz office and handed the keys to a black Shelby GT 500-H. It was a surprising turn that did a lot to lift morale.
We loaded our cases into the boot, threw the remainder onto the back “seats”, put the top down, and tore off down the highway towards Oakland where we were staying for the morning. We were at least half a dozen hours late, and there had been some mix up about the days, but mikey had left a hidden key for us so while we did our best to quietly sneak in, without waking him, subtle is not a language that a 580 hp supercharged v8 speaks, so after some dillydallying about parking, Mikey came out to greet us in his dressing gown to prevent us from waking the rest of his neighbors.
We slept a few hours before heading up the east bay towards Richmond to meet Li King, owner and head fabricator at King Fabrications. Rumbling gently down residential suburban streets we recognised the spot from the car outside – an old VW van stickered with bike stuff, which was unmistakably a framebuilders vehicle. We walked through some gates and down a side alley towards a small garage space, framed by a little rusting heap of bikes on each side.
It was refreshingly real. Playing with broken bikes feels like the most genuine avenue to frame building. Learning to think in the process and what the limitations of design, materials, and fabrication are by poking around at their extremes, without the pressure of commercial feasibility of the limitations of seriousness. It’s play in the spectrum of art, that should be celebrated as part of a healthy working practice, and I’m convinced it makes you live longer, like laughing.
Okay. This is my favorite bike already!
I pulled out a tall bike, made with a 12” wheeled kids bike at the bottom, to have the smallest wheelbase I think I’ve ever seen
“Yeah? The Talley smalls?”
You’re a genius. I mean, aside from the headset issue…. I wobbled the loose headset
“It’s actually not a headset issue. It’s a linkage. There just has to be some play for it to work well.”
What’s going on here? Have you been going to Bike Kill?
“No. I haven’t. Well, I really wanna start bike kill over here, but I feel like I need more people to build stupid bikes. Yeah. I just really enjoy building stupid stupid bikes. This one’s fun too. you gotta have a swing bike with…. I don’t know what you would call this. Elk horns. They’re normally like cow horns. But these are just, like, dumber.”
What are you building at the moment?
“This is for the show bike. It’s gonna be, kind of like an exploration bike like a flat bar gravel bike, I’m going to Try to fit 700x55c in there, but probably ride 45s mostly, but with the option to do 55c if I want, built for having fun, with a big dropper post so that you can descend. it’s almost like a mountain bike and does a lot more on technical stuff than people would normally do on a gravel bike. It’s gonna have the new SRAM 13 Speed Explr system but with flat bars instead of the drop bars.”
How many speeds do you normally ride?
“I normally ride 11 speeds. There are 2 more. 13 is kind of a fun number. It has a weird following and, like, superstitions around it.”
Are you superstitious?
“Oh, not at all. But it makes me laugh that people have weird superstitions about it.”
It’s cool that SRAM is supporting the build. Why did you apply for the SRAM scholarship?
“I think that trans visibility and queer people really need to be in the spotlight right now is really important. I think that showing queer people doing their thing is really important. To show that we’re just normal people that we belong here, and we’re not trying to hurt anybody. We don’t have some crazy agenda. We’re just trying to exist. I feel like there kind of is a trans frame building community. I think that it’s definitely come to light more because of the SRAM scholarship, And I think that’s really awesome.”
Do you race a lot?
“Yeah. I do a lot of bike racing.”
What race do you race?
“I started racing on the velodrome. That was my main thing for a while, but now I mainly do cyclocross and gravel racing, But, I still love riding the fixie. I probably ride the fixie more than anything I guess around town. I think that my favorite kind of racing nowadays is grassroots racing in the park. You know, not sanctioned, not governed, that doesn’t have strict rules. Whereas at the track, there are very defined categories and, you know, requirements for just participating. As somebody who doesn’t quite fit into a box easily, it’s kind of shitty to put myself into a weird box.”
And you won the SSCS world champs?
“Yep. This year! This is the frame that I won from Paul Sadoff. They wheeled out a gold Rock Lobster tracklocross bike with disc brakes and an intricate number 1 head tube badge…”
Is that a Jen Green head tube badge as well?
“Oh, I don’t know. It looks pretty Jen Green? He was like, I’ll make you any bike as long as it has the number one plate and it is gold. I was like, sick. It’s so funny that another frame builder won this thing too, but I love it. It’s so sick. Like, he just builds bikes that work. I love it. I really enjoy builders like Mars Cycles and Paul Sadoff from Rock Lobster. Just building really simple, no-frills work machines, you know, like race bikes without any fancy gizmos that just work.”
The tiny shop, past the piles of rusting frames and projects in various states of decay, is filled with sensible frames, centered around functionality, ride quality, and good geometry. King Fabrications is a performance brand catering to a young, fun, grassroots racing community, so for the most part their frames are sensible and minimal with a few signature design choices like their use of segmented steel forks with round blades. But it was impossible not to get excited by a huffy klunker side quest hanging by the door, in limbo between the nice bikes and the weird pile outside. Still half painted but with big filets holding everything together rather than the neat TIG welds that Li uses for their proper frames.
You stuck with the original bottom bracket standard?
“Yeah. I didn’t feel like cutting out the bottom bracket itself. I mostly do TIG, but this Huffy was originally fillet brazed together, so I wanted to reinforce all the joints. I’ve never fully fillet brazed a frame. There’s a silly clunker race that happens every year. It’s next weekend, So I wanted to get this thing ready for it.”
The worst part of our schedule on this trip is that everywhere we go, people are like, “Yeah. We’re doing this cool, fun thing.” And we just have to say no. We’re leaving. That’s nice for you. Okay. Bye! Even yesterday, we could have gotten a reservation at Casa Bonita for the next day, but we just had to leave.
Have you been to Casa Bonita?
“I have not.”
Do you know about Casa Bonita?
“I do not.”
Well, I only know about it because of South Park, but it’s a theme park sized Mexican restaurant in a sleazy seventies strip mall, and Where they have out of shape, hairy Mexican divers diving off fiberglass rocks into a fiberglass pool as entertainment.
“I love this.”
I know right?! I’m So sad we couldn’t go. They made a South Park episode about it and then Trey Parker and Matt Stone bought it.
“That’s fantastic.”
I grew up watching South Park. So then being in Colorado was basically like being in South Park. I had no idea South Park was pretty much a documentary.
How long have you been here?
“This is my childhood home. I turned it into a welding shop in 2020 during COVID. I was going to welding school, and then we all got locked down, so it was pretty hard to keep learning how to weld when you’re at home. So I did this. It’s pretty good. Yeah. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s pretty sick. When I was growing up, I always knew I wanted to be a welder. I liked building stuff. And once I learned what welding was, I kind of figured that was what I wanted to do. But, I was also an avid cyclist when I was going to school. So it just kind of made sense to marry the two things. I’ve been building bikes for about 6 years now. I started out building Mostly track bikes and fixed gear bikes. The Bay Area has a super thriving fixed gear scene, and that’s mostly what I ride nowadays still. Building bikes for friends and for my community, but also just that’s the kind of riding that I like to do the most. So it makes sense to build those bikes the most.”
And you have a gigantic Bridgeport?
“Yeah, It’s massive. It scraped the door the whole way in. Like, barely fit. It Had 6 people all around it, on a pallet jack. Trying to not have it fall, you know? It was terrifying.”
The workshop was loud, and not because of anything Li was doing, the neighbors were building something, with seemingly only hammers, interrupted by only the occasional brrrrrrrrrrap of an impact driver, so we made a plan to get out and ride while they worked and return later to shoot the shop.
Do you guys have bikes of your own here?
“We don’t have bikes of our own.”
So, if you’ve got some oil, I could ride that one. I gestured over to the tiny tall bike.
Smally talls? Tally smalls? That’s pretty sensible. Is that unfeasible? Or I could ride a different bike, but it would be good to ride that just a little bit because otherwise my soul would hurt. If I didn’t ride it just a little bit.
“Yeah. We definitely gotta take this one out.”
Li pumped up some tyres and set us up on their Tracklocross world champs prize Rock Lobster, and another bike. We waited in the street for a little, before they peddled slowly and franticly round the corner towards us on the tally smalls. We took it in turns, giggled a bit, and then rode to the park on regular bikes.
The park was scrappy and dry, with a view of the bridge across the bay. It was adorned with all kinds of detritus left by gangs of roving hippies. Crystals, dream catchers, wishes written on scraps of paper and attached to a post, a sketchy-looking tire swing, and bits of broken bikes hung up in the trees like crusty post-apocalyptic Xmas decorations. As if the set from Mad Max had been gentrified, or maybe as an alternative narrative premise to Mad Max, where Max’s parents were San Franciscan crystal sellers or tarot readers, or wellness industry workers commuting in and out of the city across the bay bridge to peddle their wares to wealthy tourists in the mission. It was cute, and novel that personal agency over public space was tolerated.
What is this place?
“This is the Albany Bulb. I grew up coming out here and playing around on my bike, but now I come out here and dig trails and do a lot of sunset rides here. It was a hill they decided to blow up and build a horse track where the hill was. And they pushed all the dirt into the water here and then they turned it into a construction dump. That’s why there’s all the concrete and rebar and stuff sticking out of the ground.”
Li showed us around the park, we rode a few of the trails they’d dug and eventually, we stopped at “Mad Mark’s Castle”
Yeah. When I said “What is this place?”, I meant, like, this completely legit structure.
“Oh, this is Mad Mark’s Castle. There used to be a bunch of structures like this out here, but, this is the last one standing.”
Who’s Mad Mark?
“I don’t know. Some dude that used to live out here in his castle. I think he was probably the most soundly built, surprisingly. The roof has caved in, I do really enjoy the new deck that these people built, though. It’s very cute. there’s a pretty big group of, like, advocates for keeping the bulb open and doing a lot of restorative work.”
Soooooooooo, Why do you think everyone who works in the cycling industry is a 35-year-old cisgender white guy who comes from a middle-class background?
“That’s a really good question. I mean, I think that it kinda perpetuates itself. A lot of, non cis, non white people don’t wanna work with older cis white dudes. And so if you’re trying to join into the industry, it’s like, do you wanna work with a bunch of cis white dudes that are in their thirties? Not particularly.”
Why not?
“It’s just, you know, not a great time.”
Has that been, like, a real barrier to you?
“Yeah. I mean, welding is kind of a funny thing. It’s also a very male-dominated field.”
“Luckily, the school that I went to actually, the person that worked in the tool room was very queer, and we had a pretty strong queer scene just in the welding shop itself. So I think that really helped me fall in love with welding as much as I did. I’m really looking forward to [bespoked] Germany, I really wanna meet all the other frame builders. I think that’ll be really cool.”
Do you think there’s a difference between, North American builders and European builders in, like, their approach?
“I think it’ll be curious to see if I find that to be the case. I think that NorCal definitely has a style, and I think that seeing the European bikes in person will be really interesting.”
What’s the NorCal style?
“Like, slack. You know, especially thinking about, like, the cyclocross bikes here, like, a lot of wide bars, pretty slack, almost like mini mountain bike-esque stuff, you know? Because a lot of the gravel riding we do here is really gnarly, and there isn’t a ton of, like, flat open roads to ride around on. So it’s really like mountain biking. So you kinda have to build bikes around that. There’s a weird stigma around mountain bikes. I don’t know. I think, especially road bikers are scared to buy a mountain bike, so they’d rather buy a super slack gravel bike.”
Li was a great person to be around, they had an air of being super relaxed and completely themselves. A calmness and focus that just makes them super nice to hang out with. Although we didn’t feel late, we started late and were becoming further indoctrinated into that way of being. We rode around a bit more and took some pictures, stopped at a gas station for sustenance, picked up the car, and drove into town for Li’s favorite taco truck.
Mexican food doesn’t really exist properly in the UK, and certainly does not exist in Germany so the novelty and cost of taco trucks found us there often during the west coast leg of the tour. We were somewhat exhausted. Burned out on good things but we’d Fixed to go see Paul Sadoff from Rocklobster, and Brendan from Oinko Rinkus that afternoon. So we invited Li and an associate from the Prandus Corporation to join, not taking into account the actual useful space in the back of the Mustang, because it was the only way to see everyone in the time available.
We dropped Li off at home and went back to where we were staying to freshen up and prepare for the drive to Santa Cruz.