‘What happens if you turn it off? I don’t know. Bad things. I don’t even know what it’s plugged into any more. I used to know but I don’t any more. So don’t touch it.’
It’s hard to know whether Tom Warmerdam is being serious or not. The wispy smile that traced across his lips has been exchanged for a furrowed brow expressing genuine concern. The lines in his forehead only get deeper when I joke that the extension cable plug in question (on the back of which is written Just leave it!) is in fact plugged into itself.
‘Noooo, it’s not is it? I get a bit OCD about switches, so any plugs just don’t touch.’
By now he’s laughing, but there’s something about that fleeting glimpse of uneasiness that’s telling. There’s definitely an open, light-hearted side to Warmerdam, but when it comes to his craft he’s possessed by a deeply serious, almost solemn dedication to producing his Demon Frameworks bicycles. It’s a point not lost on Warmerdam, nor likely his framebuilding peers. In 2011 he won the Public Vote category at the Bespoked UK Handmade Bicycle Show, followed in 2012 with Best Track Bicycle at Bespoked and arguably the most coveted of prizes in the framebuilding world, Best Road Bike at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS). To a casual observer it might seem that things couldn’t get better for Demon, but 34-year-old Warmerdam gives the impression that the awards and recognition didn’t bring satisfaction – they only made the drive for perfection more fraught.
Dropouts and drop outs
As his surname might suggest, Warmerdam isn’t from England, ‘although I hate it when people describe me as “Dutch ex-pat Tom Warmerdam”. I’ve been here long enough and am essentially a Brit. I certainly sound like one.’ Born in the Netherlands to Dutch parents, the family moved to England when Warmerdam was four, then moved to Switzerland when he was seven. It was there where he developed his love of bikes, in particular the mountain variety. The Warmerdams moved back to England during his mid-teens and at 20 he began a mechanical engineering course at the University of Southampton. However, while such a degree might sound like the perfect bedrock for a career in framebuilding, the reality was anything but.
‘It was a four-year course, but I left after two and a half. I was like, “In all the time I’ve been here I’ve welded two bits of metal. That’s bollocks, I want to make stuff.” So I dropped out. I spent a while doing odd jobs, including glazing plates, but eventually I thought, “Tom, mate, it’s time to sort your life out.” I had some inheritance money from my grandfather who was a cabinet maker, and I thought it would be really nice to follow in his footsteps in terms of making stuff. I think if I wasn’t doing this I’d have gone in the woodworking direction.’
Warmerdam’s initial idea was to design frames then outsource the fabrication to existing companies, but a natural inquisitiveness meant he decided that if he was going to design frames he ought to know how to make them first.
‘I looked around for framebuilding courses. I tried people like Dave Yates but they had a year waiting list and I wanted to crack on, so I found this place locally, SETA: the Southampton Engineering Training Association. I told them what I wanted to do, and they said, “Well, we can’t teach you how to make bikes because we don’t know how to ourselves, but we can teach you all the separate elements.” And that’s how I did it. I learned brazing, welding and machining. Then, using my grandad’s money, I rented a workshop, got some tubes and lugs and started practising. I guess that was around 2007. I used to braze up a frame, chop it up, then braze it into a slightly smaller frame, then chop that up, and so on and so on. I’d end up with a very small frame, but there was no sense wasting materials. And I just fell in love with the whole process.’
By 2009 Warmerdam decided it was time to exhibit at the (now defunct) European Handmade Bike Expo, where he was greeted with such enthusiasm that he took the leap of spending £3,500 on a stand at the London Cycle Show later that year – incidentally the same amount as he now charges for one of his frames. The gamble paid off, and the Demon Frameworks order book began to fill up.
Time to be different
Early Demon bicycles were predominantly made from Reynolds steel using off-the-shelf lugs, and for most other framebuilders this tried and tested recipe is quite sufficient. But not for Warmerdam.
‘I did that investment cast, filing out thing for a while [modifying existing lugs], but I wanted more – a larger canvas to work with. When you look at a lugged bike when there’s no paint or decals on it, one looks near enough the same as any other. You can have your signature finishes, but to really make it stand out you have to have signature lugs. That’s what Hetchins did [famed for its trademark ‘curly lugs’] and that’s what I decided to do – make my own lugs from scratch.’
It’s this that makes Demon Frameworks bicycles unique. Warmerdam has two lug designs called Hermes, after the wing-footed messenger in Greek mythology, and Manhattan, inspired by the Art Deco aesthetic of the Chrysler Building. Both start lives as a set of short, mitred and fillet brazed tubes that are then painstakingly drilled out, hand-filed and polished to become sleeve joints for the rest of a frame’s tubes. The finished product is as striking to look at as it is time-consuming to produce.
‘A set of lugs probably takes around 50 hours to make,’ says Warmerdam, pointing towards a naked steel frame clamped in a vice. ‘So this bike here has got to have taken me around 150 hours so far. I pretty much make everything myself [he also machines his own dropouts] except for the tubes and small parts like bottle bosses.’
As a result Warmerdam is limited to making 15 frames per year, and while he admits that sometimes an extra pair of hands wouldn’t hurt, his approach to framebuilding is almost necessarily a one-man job. It’s not that he doesn’t get on with people, it’s just that his own expectations preclude anyone else’s input.
One man and his dog
Holed up in a draughty workshop on an industrial estate near Southampton railway station, one could be forgiven for thinking Warmerdam’s working life is a bit lonely. He has his dog, Margot, for company from time to time (‘but not like Margot in The Good Life, more like Margot Fonteyn the ballerina’), but other than that Warmerdam’s main companion is himself. But as is so often the case for the creatively minded, that’s exactly how he likes it, even if the reality has at times been tough.
‘Sometimes this can all be a bit isolating – and sometimes just to add to that I like to wear ear defenders all day to block out the noise from outside too. But working alone suits me. I think it’s because I have a standard in my head of how everything should be done, and finding someone on that wavelength is hard. Plus not that many people want to make bikes from scratch because it’s a stupid thing to do!’
it was certainly this do-it-all attitude that won him the NAHBS title in 2012, for a bike built with Hermes lugs.
‘Undoubtedly NAHBS helped get me out there and I now sell all over the world. I get lots of interest from Singapore, South Korea, Japan – they dig it. But while on one side winning that award was great, on the other it wasn’t. I wasn’t even happy with what I’d made, but I still won a prize for it. I didn’t feel I deserved it.
‘It coincided with some other stuff happening in my life, and I lost the love of framebuilding for a while. I was here [in the workshop] every day but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had one customer who gave me a really hard time, and I felt like “fuck this”, essentially. But more than that I had a slight fear of it, of messing something up. I hate criticism, and to get it from a customer is bad – really bad. I went down the rabbit hole, so to speak, but not in the fun, magic mushroom kind of way. My head just went pop.’
Yet now Warmerdam is busier than ever, with a waiting list of two years and the beginnings of a Demon Frameworks apparel line (look out for the jackets in the coming months). He’s also creating a new lug design – this time called ‘Titan’ – and is exploring potential collaborations with other framebuilders. So what prompted the turnaround in fortunes?
‘I used to say you have to suffer for your craft, and I did that for a while, but it wasn’t healthy. Now I’m married and we have a daughter, and when you have kids it’s a game-changer. When I’m home, I’m home and I leave this behind. Well, I try to as much as I can. Life feels better than ever and in the last year I was more productive than at any previous time.
‘This year I’ll be exhibiting at NAHBS again, and who knows, if there’s time I might even make my daughter a balance bike. I’d like to machine her some nice dropouts and maybe make a Columbus Max aero fork for it. That would be cool.’ Well, it wouldn’t really be a Demon Frameworks bike if Tom Warmerdam made things easy.