Aberfeldy Community Bike Workshop upcycles Hunterian drawers for workbenches

What led you to Glasgow Wood, and why did you set up Draft & Flow?

Nick Kelly, Draft & Flow founder:

I found Glasgow Wood, originally whilst trying to save money on building materials. I knew that the workbenches would need lots of storage but building a huge quantity of drawers would have been too time consuming.

I came across your listing for the Hunterian Museum drawers and knew that it was going to save us time and money and reduce waste at the same time. I’m very keen on reusing old wood whenever I can!

We set up Draft and Flow as a CIC because we all care deeply about creating a sustainable community resource that can live on, even as directors move on to other projects (like me!). We all knew that Aberfeldy desperately needed a bike shop. The closest other shops are in Dunkeld and Pitlochry, and if your bike’s broken and it’s your main form of transport… that just isn’t going to work.

Can you tell us about the ethos of Draft & Flow?

Calum Maclean, director of Draft & Flow:

One of our key aims at Draft & Flow is to re-use things where we can: from giving bikes new life, to using an old inner tube as a cable to hang helmets! We are a community bike workshop, who fix and give new life to bikes, and we were delighted to give new life to these drawers. Having previously been inside the Hunterian Museum, we feel this gives them a sense of history too, and we take pride in that.

Can you tell us about the requirements for the workshop?

CM: Working with bikes often means grime, and lots of ‘bits and pieces’ – there are a multitude of very specific tools! We needed solid, long worktops both for our community tools area, and the mechanic workshop.

In addition, we needed a large amount of storage for tools, spare parts and accessories. This space now allows for a variety of work and tinkering on bike parts to take place. We also use the space to facilitate workshops where we teach people the skills to fix their own bikes. The work benches solid, secure and give us the confidence needed to take on most bike tasks.

NK: Our space is relatively small, but from the beginning Brett imagined that we would have two main workstations. One would be the professional bench and the other would be the community bench. These would act as the physical space to do the hands-on work of fixing and building bikes.

USING RECLAIMED WOOD

NK: The benches turned out spectacularly, they really suit ours and the communities needs. And in addition to the benches we had quite a lot of wood leftover that went into creating supports for bike racks, tool storage pegboard, and more. 

If you go into these projects with an open, creative mind then using reclaimed wood rather than new wood doesn’t really change much about the project.

The most memorable part of the process?

NK: The most memorable bit was realising that I designed the benches for walls that were square to one another without actually checking… Don’t ever assume that old building have square walls!

What did you most enjoy about the process?

CM: One thing we love about that connected us with the history of the drawers, was small notes left on some them, describing what they’d once stored.

For example, “Carboniferous crustacea” led us to imagine an important fossil collection once sitting where our collection of spare pedals are. Although some riders might now consider older recycled pedal designs to be fossils themselves..!

What really brought us joy was the input from so many in our community to get our workshop open. From stripping and cleaning the shop, to transforming the space into our workshop. We are completely volunteer-run so rely on the input of our community in Aberfeldy to keep going.