There are many classic bicycles displayed high on the walls while the floor of the large shop is devoted to modern bicycles.  There is also a substantial amount of workshop space that takes up most of the back of the building.

    I was told by a number of people that Dale is a friendly fellow and worth looking up.  As it turns out, that is a gross understatement.  He is an extremely friendly guy with a wealth of knowledge about bicycles.  He is also an accomplished frame builder himself who knows, and has known, many of the great American frame builders personally.

    Anyway, while we were talking and looking at different bicycles and frames, the name, McLean Fonvielle, kept coming up and Dale showed me three or four of his frames.  All this talk of McLean got my attention partly because I’d heard of him before and because I really liked the frames Dale showed me.  So when I got home, I did a little research on McLean and though I probably didn’t learn anything about McLean that Dale didn’t share with me, I was able to put it in better order since at Cycles de Oro we talked about so much that there was kind of a melding of bikes, builders, riders, and styles.

    The first and most obvious point of interest to me about McLean is that he was a bicycle frame builder who lived and built bicycles right here in the Tar Heel State.  Next, I found that he lived in a little town called, Silk Hope and that he and I were both born in 1953.  While reading an article written by Mike Dayton, the editor of American Randonneur and a very nice guy I’ve had the pleasure of riding two 200k populars with, I found that McLean was an informal vegetarian.  I was once called a practical vegetarian because I was too poor and cheap to buy meat and later decided to formally forgo meat, pork, and poultry all together, but I eat seafood and some dairy and eggs.  It looks like McLean was also loose with his interpretation of what a vegetarian is.

    McLean had a small shop.  I remember seeing a picture of it on the Web a couple of years ago, but I don’t know where and can’t seem to find it again.  He eschewed mills and lathes and cut his miters with files feeling that a handmade bicycle should be hand made.  He also figured, rightly I think, that it is just as fast to file a miter as it is to set up a mill or lathe to do it.  While I haven’t done miters with a mill or a lathe, I have seen them done that way, and I don’t think there would be a time savings with the machines if you are building one frame at a time.    

    It is the bikes that impress me most about McLean, though.  They are straight forward with nothing very frilly about them.  I saw a picture of a Pinarello Prince Carbon 50HM1K in a magazine yesterday.  It seems to be saying, “Ha, this is what you can do with carbon.”  My thought is why would you want to.  As Thomas Colvin says, “Just because something is possibly possible doesn’t mean it is necessarily necessary.”  I think Mclean and Tom would have seen eye to eye on aesthetics.  

    It is clear that McLean built his frames the way he did because that’s the way he thinks a bicycle should look.  He clearly struggled with the issue because on some of his frames he only adorned them with a head tube decal while on others there was only a down tube decal.  He does seem to have thought a lot about how to braze seat stays to the seat tube lug because I saw a different treatments there.  One of them I really like; his craftsmanship is impeccable.

    Living simply and working hard, I am convinced that McLean’s bikes must have been real treasures to those he built for.  I would love to ride one my size, but my guess is that McLean’s custom frames were so carefully tailored to the customer that their full potential probably can’t be fully enjoyed by the rest of us.  That’s the real joy of a hand built bicycle.  When the rider has a sense of what he wants and a builder with well tuned skills can grasp it and fashion a bicycle with the right tubes, geometry, and aesthetic then something truly special can be the result.

    Unbeknown to anyone, McLean had a problem in his heart and while on an exercise bike, he collapsed and died not long before his thirtieth birthday.