Chris Yeomans
As an avid cyclist with a history of working with metal, Chris, an artist blacksmith turned bespoke bike frame builder, brings 29 of years experience of manipulating metal to his bike frame building.
Chris’ life-long passion for cycling, as well as his blacksmithing knowledge, skill-set, and long-term relationship with steel helps to imbue each of his hand-crafted bike frames with a quality of workmanship which you can feel through the frame, and ride.
Smithy Frameworks
As Smithy Frameworks, Chris offers a bespoke fitting service, ensuring that each bike is perfectly tailored to the rider, as well as its intended use – whether that is a race-winning Enduro hardtail or a bike-packing frame capable of taking you wherever your adventure leads.
Frames are hand-crafted in his studio using a selection of the best British and Italian tubing available, creating frames that are a joy to ride.
how it all began
It all started back in 2005 with a frame-building article in dirt mountainbike magazine. At the time I just thought it would be a really cool thing to do and then carried on with what I was making but it was a dormant seed planted in my brain.
Fast forward 12 years and it started to grow...
After 29 years working as an artist blacksmith I was contemplating a change of direction with my metalwork and the article on Ed Hayhornthwaite’s ‘straightforward, high-quality frames’ proved to be the perfect inspiration for the change.
Welding together my knowledge of metal, my craft as a blacksmith, and my life-long passion for cycling seemed to me to make the perfect frame to build a new creative venture on.
My wife and I have always been keen cyclists – in my school days I’d cycle through London to school and back all year round. And from the moment our children could balance on two wheels we were planning off-road adventures. If we got the timing right, giving the children a pack of Chewits to munch through before we all set-off could be the difference between 10 and 20 miles worth of bike ride! ,I cringe now when I think what we were doing. As the children grew up, they all became keen cyclists too. Our son Dan started racing and won the Junior National Championships. Dan started to race Enduro, 4X and DH and soon enough I got bored of just watching him and bought my own DH bike, and spent a lot of time learning to fall off!
Soon after my decision to become a bespoke bike frame builder I took a course with The Bicycle Academy and in 2019 I was incredibly honoured to win a prize at Bespoked for my first Enduro bike. It also won on its first race outing with Dan, who took 1st place in the hardtail category of the Welsh Enduro Series Round 2.
low-impact adventures
My wife, Dawn, and I have spent many a weekend adventuring on bikes and wild camping. That is where our heart is. One year when the kids were younger we clocked up over 50 nights under canvas. I remember getting home one day and thinking it odd that the floor in the kitchen wasn’t grass! Loads of ideas for creating my Adventure, Bike Packing & Cargo frames come out of those journeys. As cliché as it sounds, it is the journey–over what happens when you reach your destination–that counts, and along the way we are camping and exploring with kit and equipment necessities.
These experiences have been my inspiration for creating the Pilgrim bike.
Our lifestyle has certainly influenced the direction of my bespoke bike frame building because I believe in building bikes I can genuinely test and refine.
It is also important to me that my work makes a difference. We aren’t particularly materialistic people and we strive to stay aligned with our ethos of being as kind as we can be to the natural environment. In this respect, I do believe that Cargo bikes have an important part to play in the future – a form of transport where everyone wins.