1940’s Andy Hamel

1940’s Andy Hamel

1940’s Flying Gate by Andy Hamel

Andy Hamel

Andy Hamel, a well known bike racer and craftsman from Long Island, built this unique bike.

The crazy design is based on the 1936 Baines ” Whirlwind”, sometimes called the “Gate”, and made popular more recently by British builder Trevor Jarvis as “The Flying Gate”.

The ideas surrounding this design is that if you interupt the seat tube you can make the wheelbase extremely short, speeding up the handling.  Also, if you can create a bicycle that makes people ask “Hey, what kind of bike is that?” every time it is wheeled out into public, you can sell more bikes.

Since all of the tubing sizes, angles, and junctions are each a little unique, Andy brazed the tubes together without using custom lugs, as Trevor Jarvis would later utilize on his more ornate Flying Gates.

St. Christopher Medal, Hamel head tube badge

Funky severed seat tube design

Seat stays, tubes, beams, struts

Someone went crazy on his saddle with a drill

Custom dropouts to manage all those tubes

Check out the saddle on this bike.  The owner went a little crazy with a drill, customizing the seat to make it lighter (or more flexible and comfortable, not sure the actual motivation).

Andy Hamel built this bike in his Glendale, Long Island workshop sometime in the late 1940’s.