Instant Personality
by Dan Joyce

The best things in bikes are free. Big bags of cash might grease the wheels of innovation in the bike industry, but for the everyday cyclist the reverse is true. The less money you've got to spend on a bike you're building up, the harder you'll have to think about it, and consequently the more creative your solutions will be. That's what makes hack bikes so satisfying and unique.

Best bikes are built up with kid gloves, conservatism and cash. Hack bikes are built up with hacksaws and a Heath Robinson determination to get something workable and half-decent out of that pile of bargains and bikeshed flotsam. Solutions you'd never consider for your best bike -- drilling here, bodging there -- are the essence of hack bikes.

The expensive bike is nearly always going to be better, of course. On the other hand, there's something gratifying about a cheap hack that rides well. You can congratulate yourself on your thrift and your workshop bodging ability, for a start. But more than that, the £100 hack has instant personality.

Shades of that Flann O'Brien? Maybe, but all bikes take on their own personality. It is the sum of your thoughts, feelings and memories about the bike. Flash new bikes have to earn their personality; they begin as a blank slate. Hack bikes have personality built into them, from the reused bearings up. They're instantly uniquely yours.

How you build your hack will depend on what you want from it, and what you can get hold of. Luck and persistence both play parts here. So it's hard to generalise and say 'the best components for a hack bike are x,y,z'. You make the rules. If that cutup Chopper handlebar and some washing machine bearings will make your homemade racer ride faster, go for it. Obree did. If you reckon you can get a better cheap mudguard by bending a secondhand 700C-wheeled 'guard over your 26in wheel and pop-riveting a bit of ice cream tub lid on the end, heck, have a go. It's not going to break the bank and you can always chuck it in the bin.

The raw material for hack bikes is everywhere. All those components and rusting frames sitting in your shed, or in the second-handshop, or at the tip. Those zip ties, bits of plastic, jars of nuts and bolts and bearings... they're parts of bikes as yet unborn.

Sculptors sometimes say that they can see the finished form inside the original stone block. It's there, you just can't see it yet. In the same way, thousands upon thousands of cheap, quality hack bikes are out there right now; they're just spread out a bit at the moment. Your next hack bike is out there, waiting. Break out the hacksaw, upend the bits box and go find it.