The building is up for sale.

The Welsh Mill has been put up for sale!
TLDR: I moved the workshop. It was an ordeal. Nobody died.

Burf and Tam moved BTR Fabrications from a shed in Worthing, West Sussex to the Welsh Mill in Frome, Somerset, back in 2012. I, Burf, was offered a job at The Bicycle Academy teaching the frame-building courses they offered. At that time in BTR’s history, I was working a full-time job and smashing out BTR stuff in the evenings and weekends. Before we moved the workshop, I was travelling between the two locations. I’d leave Frome on a Friday night after completing the frame build course. Tam and I were working on the Pinner prototypes at this stage, so I’d smash out a bunch of work on them over the weekend before driving back to Frome to start the frame building courses on Monday. I think it was around September 2012 when we finally moved the workshop over to Frome, and I’ve been there ever since.

As you well know, Tam left in 2019 and I’ve in charge of the ship since.

Now, though, the building my workshop is in has been put on the market, and a sale has been agreed. There was an opportunity to secure a three-year lease at the current rent prices. But the future in the building looked uncertain, for sure.

There is this other spot, though. A friend of mine’s Father owns the property, and around 10 years ago he built himself a pizza oven. This pizza oven needed a pizza party. It was at this party that I first laid eyes on what could be described at the dream workshop. I asked the man, Roger, what the deal was with getting into one of the workshops he had out for rent. He told me “the waiting list is too long, I probably won’t take your details to be honest.”

Fast forward to recent times. My very good friend and Rat Bikes investor, Jimmy The Glue, leveraged his family connections to get himself into one of these dream workshops. The sneaky bugger. Jimmy and two of my other mates rented the workshop out as a shared space for them to work on their project cars and motorbikes. Jimmy works offshore, and so was not around for a lot of the year. When he was, we’d head to the workshop for beers and BBQ.

Turns out that was the majority of what the workshop was used for, getting pissed up every few months upon Jimmy’s return to the UK. The man is actually Swedish and married a British lass. The pair have recently purchased a house in Sweden. An absolute mansion of a place with loads of land for roughly the same price I paid for my tiny house in England. I am absolutely green with envy. The bright side, though, I could take his place in the Dream Workshop.

Moving all of my stuff, 13 years of collecting “I’ll use that one day” type stuff, is not something I was looking forward to. It would be a massive amount of work, and I do not have the cash flow or reserves to afford the downtime or the cost of moving the big equipment. But, sometimes, you just gotta do what you gotta do. It’ll all be worth it when the new spot is sorted. The new spot is a fair bit smaller than the old one, so I would have to get rid of a few things. The biggest disposal would be Cindy – painful as it is, gotta do what you gotta do. It’s a decision that has weighed on my mind for ages and even once I had decided I would be getting rid of the old girl, I would still try and think of ways to save her.

Cindy was one of the last pieces to get removed from the workshop. I started by removing the sheet metal covering, and once it was removed, it almost looked like I could find a place to stash her. But I had to cut the cord. It wouldn’t have actually cost me too much to get her repaired, but it would have been the third or fourth time this same fault had occurred, and I just had to call it quits. Onwards and upwards, or something like that. A friend helped me move her out of the workshop; he had some machine rollers, you see. We were both a little concerned about getting her down the ramp outside the workshop. But using a munter hitch friction knot to let her down slowly worked an absolute treat.

The first job for the new workshop would be a metal rack. Something that was severely lacking in the old one. There was no dedicated spot, and walking over the metal on the floor or trying to find metal that was stacked against the wall got annoying really fast. Doesn’t seem like I managed take a photo of the rack I built. Unluck.

Next up would be making a mezzanine. Desperately needed because there was no way I was going to be able to get all of the junk I had accumulated into the new, smaller workshop.

Built that mezzanine all on my own. Probably very silly considering I was up the ladder on my own, holding really heavy bits of steel, but I got away with it this time.
Once the mezzanine was built, it was time to start getting the big stuff like the Bridgeport mill, lathe, and whatnot moved. I had been moving all the smaller bits in small runs here and there.

I roped a friend of mine into moving the big bits. Getting the Bridgeport mill off the ground and onto a pallet was more than a little scary. I had to lift it slowly and add a packer after each lift. Going from one corner to the next. Until it was high enough for me to get a bar under her that was wide enough for a pallet to get under. The thing weighs a fair old bit, so any wrong step could have spelt disaster.
My friend had a car trailer that we utilised for moving the heavy stuff. Getting the machines from the shop floor onto the trailer was another scary experience. We only managed to drop one or two things, and, luckily, I managed to get away without too much damage to the machines and no damage to any people – massive win!

By this stage, I have removed everything from the old workshop and handed back the keys. The new workshop is a complete bombsite. Nothing is in its final resting place, and it’s all on top of each other. I also promised to have a job or two finished before I moved workshops, and I didn’t manage to hold that promise. So I had to get them done while the workshop is a bombsite. Not the easiest of things to do, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
As mentioned above, I did not have the time or money to make this move happen, and yet it has happened. What this ultimately means is – I’ve put myself into a rather large hole. Because of this, I have taken on a part-time job in a welding and fabrication job shop about a 30-minute drive from home, working three days a week. It has been rather nice to just get on with welding and not have to worry about all the other stuff that goes along with running a business. I hadn’t quite realised just how stressed I had become.

I am extremely satisfied with the decision to move the workshop to this new spot. Even if it has driven me to the brink of destruction, once again. As you can see from the pics above, it is a rather spectacular location. I could throw a stone into that pond from the roller shutter door, and I can also see my favourite tree – the weeping willow. I found a newt when moving some bits of wood I had stashed during the move; there is a field full of wildflowers, and I spotted a barn owl in the trees just there, too. To top it all off, it’s still within bike-riding distance of home. So many wins, I’m rather stoked.
Things may have slowed down on the frame building front for the time being, but I’m still chipping away at the dream.

This time next year, Rodney…

Till then, Keep ‘er Sideways.

Burf.