Soraya built a bike to break the spell that making is only for geniuses

Soraya didn't come to us to win races. She came to understand her own bike — so that when something broke a long way from home, she'd know how to fix it.

What happened

Soraya built a bamboo road bike with us at our Canning Town workshop in London, over about four and a half days across two visits. She started in the summer of 2019, then came back a few months later to finish, after a busy stretch tied up with an ocean-plastic expedition she was involved in.

Her reasons were practical and deliberate. She wanted to learn maintenance before heading off on long-distance bikepacking. She wanted expert help choosing components instead of store-bought compromises. And she wanted a lower-impact bike whose materials she could actually trace.

Before all this she'd been a teacher, then spent three years at the Marine Megafauna Foundation in Tofo, Mozambique, working with manta rays, whale sharks and turtles. The thread running through it is the same: pay attention to where things come from.

What we did

We guided Soraya through the whole build — mitring and wrapping the joints, setting the geometry, choosing parts — rather than handing her a finished machine. She named the bike Erica and added decals, including her website address, so people could follow her on the rides to come.

Why it matters

The honest story here isn't a spec sheet. It's the shift in what someone believes they're capable of. Soraya put it better than we could:

"We are so divorced from where everything comes from, we think that building things is a mythical thing that only geniuses can do. When broken down, every step was actually simple and achievable."

That's the whole idea. Broken into steps, building a bike stops being a mystery and becomes something an ordinary, determined person can do.

In Soraya's words

"I loved it. It's been a while since I did anything practical with my hands and my brain, rather than working at a laptop."

She called the long hours of sanding the joints "type 2 fun" — hard at the time, satisfying once it was done.

Build your own

• Frame build kits
• Frame-building workshops
• Soraya's own account: soraya.earth