In defence of the queue

The first thing people ask after the price is the wait. Twenty-two weeks, we say, and watch the face fall. So let us take the wait seriously for five hundred words, because it is not a bug of how we work. It is the shape of it.

What the weeks are for

Roughly speaking: four weeks before your tube is cut, because the queue ahead of you is real work, not padding. Two weeks of cutting and mitring. A week of brazing, with cool-downs that cannot be bribed. Two weeks of alignment and filing. Six to eight of paint, primer to clear, with cure times in between. The rest is logistics, decals and the test rides we insist on. That is the whole twenty-two. There is no slot in it we could sell to someone else's impatience.

The comfortable lie

The industry solved waiting by moving it to you. Mass-produced frames sit in warehouses as finished inventory, and the delivery date you are quoted is a shipping date. It works. It also means the frame was designed for a rider-shaped average, painted in a colour that tested well in a focus group, and built by a process nobody in the shop where you buy it can explain. You traded twenty-two weeks for somebody else's geometry, forever.

What waiting buys

Here is the honest list. Your fitting happens in month one, so your frame is drawn to your body, not adjusted toward it. Your paint is discussed, sprayed out, and argued with. Every joint on your frame was made by a person who knows your name, which sounds sentimental until the day the frame develops a tick, and you call, and the person who brazed it remembers the tube batch. Waiting is the price of a thing made once, on purpose, by someone you can ring.

The queue is a promise

We publish the wait because we keep it. In seventeen years we have missed a promised date four times, and each of those riders got a letter, an explanation and a discount they did not ask for. A queue you can trust is the whole trick. Start yours with a fitting any Saturday.

• Lead times by model are listed on each page of the model book.
• Deposits are a third, refundable until the tube is cut.
• We hold two slots a year for urgent builds: new parents, recovery years, once-in-a-lifetime trips. Ask honestly and we will listen.