Brit Brands Commit to Domestic Manufacturing

One difficulty in handbuilding bikes domestically is finding highly skilled craftsmen to delicately braze frames. What was once a common skill in the 1970s and ’80s is now rare, said Shaun Moulton, who runs his uncle Dr. Alex Moulton’s revered folding bike brand. “We don’t make things in this country anymore. We don’t have those skills anymore; we don’t teach those skills,” Moulton said. Pashley builds Moulton’s entry-level TSR range, but the high-end frames are made at Moulton’s headquarters at an old English manor in the quaint village of Bradford-on-Avon. There, brazers spend 70 hours on one frame, sometimes working with tubes as thin as a half-millimeter in diameter.