Foffa Bikes

The beauty of outsourcing is that the Chinese have all the engineering and manufacturing skills down, all you have to do is send them a sketch and they'll send back a price for something which will meet relevant standards. Bike design at this level is not something which needs much more than sticking reasonably close to established formulae anyway, tube diameters and wall thickness are well established, if you keep the geometry within a hand's width of what has gone before you'll end up with something which works, even if it's not actually lovely.

Cool. Although if someone has expertise in this area then it wouldn't hurt them to help inform this process, before the rough sketches get to the Chinese for costing up. For example, I've been writing for donkey's years and if someone asked for some constructive criticism on something they'd written I'd be happy to take 10 minutes out to offer some. It's just about being nice instead of being deliberately unhelpful and a bit shitty.

Without wishing to sound like Mother Theresa's nephew once a month (or when time allows) I go along to an advertising college to crit student's work and offer advice for a day. I don't get paid for this but I do get a great sense of professional satisfaction. It's just a community/industry thing, which is one of the things I always liked about this place - the sense of community.

It just irritates me (mildly) when someone makes an effort and asks for feedback and the best some forum members can come up with is stuff like 'what a load of wank' or the slightly more eloquent 'that's shit'.