Thoughts and Updates

Made PDX happened toward the end of August. It was the first bike show I’d been to — most of us had been to — in a lot of years. By everyone’s reckoning, it was a success. I heard some bike news that this was the most attended handmade bike show in North America — ever! True or not, more than 5,000 attendees came through and the place was a-buzz with enthusiasm.

Another event:

This year marks my twenty-year anniversary of making bicycle frames. I tried to pretend that Made PDX was partially a celebration of this, a giant gathering of new and old friends to acknowledge two decades of my practicing the craft of bike making.

Twenty years!

I think this almost qualifies me for being considered one of the old-timers. How did I even get here? So many bespoke frame makers have come and gone over the years, and at some point it comes down to who’s left standing. As my old shopmate liked to say, “Not dead yet!”

I’m not saying I’m better than anyone. I honestly don’t know if it’s a virtue of persistence that keeps me doing this, or if I have some sort of barrier to higher thinking, like a chronic mental deficiency. None of the is job easy, the struggles are real. Do it long enough and the struggles will change, but they never go away. One quality, perhaps more than all the others, that one must have to survive as a frame builder is mulishness. Being like a mule. Undying determination. Not considered the smartest creature, but tenacious to the end. Is that me, the ass?

Each person who made bikes and then stopped making bikes had their reasons.

Igleheart retired after like forty years of doing it, and moved with his wife to France.

Mitch lost all his equipment, not to mention his home, in the Paradise fire.

Bruce died.

Tim did well for himself for a number of years, but being a school teacher and receiving a steady paycheck, health insurance, and a decent retirement package was a much wiser choice, really a no-brainer.

Natalie became a mother of two, which is more than enough work to keep one busy.

Aaron realized he could make more money if he went back to being a graphic designer.

Sean needed to focus on being a dad and to free up space in his garage. And besides I don’t think he really liked dealing with customers.

Sacha’s mustache got in the way. The last anyone heard he used it to paddle out to sea and never came back.

Making things to make a living is hard work

Matt got into grad school and his partner Nate didn’t want to keep doing it solo.

Other people I’ve known started out just wanting to make some frames and were never really keen on the business side of things. And who can blame them? If you’ve got another job or another source of income, sure, OK, make bike frames as a hobby.

As one’s sole employment, though, it almost doesn’t make sense. The numbers hardly pencil out unless you arrange your whole life around it, and not everyone is willing to do that. I did it, I’ve done it, but I again refer you back to what I was saying earlier about the mule and dysfunction of the brain.

Classic 650b frame for sale

Classic fillet brazed frame, fork, rack, and select parts for sale, $4800. Includes Herse canti brakes; Nitto seat post, handlebar, stem, and bottle cages; Brooks leather saddle; Tange headset. Full parts kit available on request. Check the listing for details on sizing and specs. Feel free to send a message if you have any questions.

Classic 650b frame for sale

Just to acknowledge it, though: After twenty years I can still honestly say that I enjoy making bikes. I really do. I like designing something cool, letting my hands do what they know how to do. I like problem-solving and using a torch and files to construct something that I know is going to be good, functionally and aesthetically. I like working for myself, answering to no one except for my customers. I like taking an idea, building it into steel and then passing it along to its new owner. In a way it feels like I get to open a door for someone, invite them to come inside and join a banquet. Not in my honor, but in theirs. Of course I have to get paid, but in some ways it still feels like I’m giving a gift.

A new bicycle is like a promise. It goes out into the world, hopefully to be ridden a lot, to make new stories on the road — of travel, of speed, of fun and engagement. I get to make something that contributes to a person’s health and happiness, that’s kind to the environment. These are the things that fuel me, gratify me, and make me feel stoked. All this is its own sort of capital, impossible to measure in linear terms.

Anyway, off the soapbox, there are a couple of other things to note…

One, I wrote a book! Not that this is a recent development — I’ve been working on this thing for ages. But earlier this year I was accepted into a program to have high-caliber writers read what I’ve written and do a full manuscript review. It’s the next big step towards crafting something that will (hopefully, eventually) be put out into the world. You’ll hear more about this in the coming months.

Next thing: There’ll be t-shirts for sale on the Ahearne website soon. Commemorative and possibly historic designs, etc. Colors, sizes, options. I sold some at the show, they’re nice, you’ll like them. Thanks Brian, Maggie, and Mary Lou for pushing to make this happen!

And lastly (for now): If you hadn’t heard, Page Street Cycles is still a thing. It’s going through a transformation, and there is a website being flushed out as I write this.

At Made PDX I introduced the newest Page Street model, a mini velo travel bike called the Viajero (Spanish for “the traveler”). Prototypes have been up and running for a few months, the design is getting dialed in, costs determined. You can read a bit about it in The Radavist (scroll down through the other cool bikes to see it).

I’ll admit, the Viajero is one fun bicycle. The way it breaks down it will be an amazing bike for taking with you when you head off to far-away places. It’s not a folding bike for instant break-down. The goal is to have something that rides, handles, and feels like a “normal” bike and that easily packs down into a suitcase within airline regulations, or to fit in the trunk of a car. I picture it being for people who travel, a few days here, a week there, and want to take a bike with them that’s easy to manage. I’m building it so it’ll be stable enough to bike tour on if you wanted. Like, I could see doing a mixed train-and-trail tour across Europe on this bike. That’d be a riot.

I won’t go into it further just now. Suffice it to say I’m excited about this bike. I’ve been riding one for the past couple of months and it’s been a real treat. It’s zippy and quick handling, intuitive, and just a blast to ride. I love atypical bikes that serve a specific purpose and do it well. And these bikes rip. I’ve gotten quite a bit of interest already, and plan to start taking pre-orders as soon as the details are figured out.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the Viajero and staying in the loop as things progress you can email pagestreetcycles@gmail.com and ask to receive notifications. I’ll have a sign-up list soon, but for now this will get you started. I promise I won’t share your email with anyone, and I will only message you when there’s real news about the bike.

That’s it for the moment. Thank you for reading this, and cheers to everyone who made it to the Made PDX bike show. Especially Billy Souphorse — seeing the need and taking it on. Seriously, give you and your crew a pat on the back.

And, most importantly, thanks to everyone who’s supported me in what I do, and have done, for the past twenty years. What a ride!

Or, as some hippy once said:

What a loooooong strange trip it’s been.

Getting Into 2023

January 10, 2023Joseph Ahearne11 Comments

Over the years people have periodically asked me how I started building bicycle frames. Like with any story, there’s a short version and there’s a long version. The short version is, I took a class, bought some tools, practiced and practiced and practiced, got better at it, got a few lucky breaks, kept doing it and lo and behold, twenty years have passed and here I am. This version of the story leaves out most of the interesting stuff, though. So if you’d like to hear the beginning of the longer version, please keep reading.

When I was a kid I wanted to fly airplanes. The fast kind, not so much passenger planes. My dad was a pilot, he was licensed to fly single-engine prop planes and sometimes he would take my mom and I out. This was back in the early 1970s when you could rent a Cessna for like $30 a day, and fuel cost next to nothing.

We lived in Kansas City, Missouri, and story has it that one time we flew down to the Bahamas. I don’t remember the Bahamas, but apparently while there I got a sunburn. This sounds plausible, my hair was coppery red (it’s since gone brownish-gray), my skin fair and readily sun-burnable. Another time we went to Tucson to visit some relatives, where it’s likely I again got a sunburn. I’m sure there were other flights, less goal oriented, just for the sake of being up there. I was so young I don’t know where the memories overlap with photos and stories I’ve heard. And I guess it doesn’t matter — something got into my blood and the desire to fly stayed with me.

Maybe a decade later, I’d mostly forgotten about being a pilot. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be, but there were a lot of things I was sure I didn’t want to be, most of which had to do with being average. I was a teenager in the midwest, I wanted to break the mold and be somebody totally unique, do something amazing. I wanted to become something that the world had never yet beheld, anything but being your average Joe.

People still asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, especially as I got closer to college age, but I had no idea. Just to have something to say I said I wanted to be a writer. I mean, I wrote, I liked writing, it was about the only constructive thing I could figure out to do with all my confusion. And as a byproduct of practicing it I discovered that in its best moments writing was kind of like flying. But that came later.

At the time most of what I wrote was so bad it gave me physical pain, both to write it, and then to read it. Seriously, woe was me. Most of what I knew about expressing myself in writing came through punk and metal song lyrics and the poetry of Charles Bukowski. The thing about writing is you can’t hide how phony you are on the page. The only way I could think of to hide that was to hide my writing.

And so I did. I vowed to never show anyone what I’d written. I was going to be one of those secret writers who disappeared inside of black clothes and only ever got discovered by accident. Usually only after they’re dead. I thought by then it might be OK to let people read my work. I’d give it time. If somehow I accidentally got old (whoops! crap!) and if I still totally sucked I could always burn everything I’d written before dying, thereby immortalizing myself as a Secret Writer Forever.

Anyway, I was not a natural-born writer. I was so young, I had so little living under my belt. I needed experiences to write about. I picked away at college, but my heart wasn’t into it. Too expensive, and what was college for except to get a job? I didn’t want a job. I wanted a life, on my own terms. Remember, whatever I was going to do, it was going to be amazing. It took a couple of false starts and 3 colleges over a handful of years to come to terms with what I thought freedom was and how I wanted to pursue it.

That was when, like a ghost of Jack Kerouac, I went on the road. It was late 80s into the 90s. Punk rock was the thing, then grunge. I kept to the margins of the margins, a full time imposter, kind of a tentative, poorly designed punk. I didn’t know how to fit with the cool kids but I liked the music. I wore the uniform of my brethren — tattered clothes that were, once upon a time, all black, but with continual wear went kind of greenish brown. I smelled bad and became immune to it. I mean, I was on the road.

I went from place to place, didn’t stay in anywhere for long, from menial job to seasonal job, to whatever job, to no job, always just barely getting by. I had a bike sometimes, and sometimes I didn’t. I worked on the salmon boats in Alaska, traveled for months down in Mexico and Central America. Was a bike messenger in Portland; worked at an animal shelter in Lawrence, Kansas, just down the road from where William Burroughs lived. I saw punk bands play: Gwar in New Orleans; the Quincy Punx in LA; 2000 DS at CBGB in New York; Primus in Denver; No Means No in Padova, Italy.

Money was always very thin. Instead of coins I collected stories. They were my currency. I rode my bike cross country, moved a rich lady’s furniture from Aspen to Little Rock, met her father, whom, as a fully adult woman she still called, “daddy.” He was on oxygen and smoked cigarettes and sat there in this little cart glaring at me and another guy who loaded an unbelievable amount of furniture onto a truck. I traveled back to Alaska to fish, nearly sank the boat; went back to Mexico, back to Portland, back across the country. I worked at an independent bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut, and got a job shelving books at Sterling Memorial Library on the Yale University campus, a school I knew I would never attend. I lived in a squat in the East Village in Manhattan; lived in my tent and worked for a couple of months on Martha’s Vineyard; lived in a car here and there, until it ran out of gas and got towed. Went to Ireland for almost a year, Doolin and Galway, not really searching for my Irish roots, but practicing the old ways nonetheless — surviving on a few potatoes and casks of Guinness. Northern Spain for a few months; then to Italy for a couple of years teaching English, where I rode my bike over most of the northern half of the country, touring through parts of Croatia and Slovenia.

This went on for nearly a dozen years. But then I got older. At thirty, thirty-one, the stories that had put me on the road had changed, were no longer serving me. The way things were going I was never going to become that amazing creature I’d vaguely imagined. I was just going to wander until I was totally worn out and then lay down and die. The problem revealed itself: I always bought one-way tickets, I had nowhere to be.

Over a handful of years in the mid and late 1990s I’d been in and out of Portland, Oregon, staying sometimes weeks, sometimes months at a time. I was always planning my departure, but I liked being here. Its size, its trees, how unbelievably green it was, the flowers, the proximity to mountains, forest, and ocean. And the vibe here at the time was creative, DIY, it felt like you could craft your own way, try new things, and be around smart young people who were doing so for themselves. The point of connection for a certain crowd of us were bicycles. The infrastructure wasn’t here yet, but the layout of the city was good for getting around by bike.

Looking back, my bicycle was one of my few reliable sources of happiness. I was so constrained by my system of beliefs (militant proto-punk ethos), but riding a bike got me out of my head, was good for quieting the internal chatter. Portland gave me plenty to explore, and whenever I went out wandering through the neighborhoods or up into Forest Park I felt better, felt alive. I mentally mapped larger and larger swaths of the city, and then beyond it. I didn’t care if it rained, I liked the rain. I just wanted to be out moving, always moving. But then at the end of the day to be able to return to my room, to whatever space I called home. This was important.

In the fall of 2002 I returned to Portland, this time ready to stay a while. That next spring I met a man named Tim P. who lived across the river in Washington. He held classes in his garage teaching people how to construct bicycle frames. He was a school teacher, had raced bikes in the 70s, built bikes through the 80s. He wrote The Paterek Manual for Bicycle Frame Builders, considered the Bible for would-be bike makers.

I worked two jobs (restaurant, bike shop), saved my pennies and took his class. While steering me through a build Tim told me he was retiring and wanted to clear out his garage. He offered to sell me his equipment at a good price, everything I would need to continue building bike frames on my own. For me, a case of being in the right place at the right time.

One of the biggest barriers to entry into making bike frames is gathering all the tools. Where do you even start? If you don’t have a certain number of set pieces you pretty much can’t do anything at all. And buying or making those pieces requires money, time, and know-how. At the bare minimum one needs a torch and regulators, some files, a hacksaw, a vice, tube blocks, jigs to hold things straight and in a plane, dummy axles, a few other things. Basic stuff, and this does not account for the time and practice required to bring your skills up. Especially if you’re like I was then — I hadn’t used many of these tools. Not ever. But it was a time in my life where I was desperate to do something that I found meaningful.

I had no plan to become a bike builder when I started. I just wanted to make things, to cut and burn metal and turn it into something cool and useful. Mainly to have fun. And it was fun, but it was work, also. And up to this point in my life work and fun had never been in the same room together unless I was doing something stupid or unethical. This meant that whenever I sold a bike or a rack it felt like I was getting away with something. A very weird feeling, totally novel, making something with my hands that someone is willing to pay for. It was kind of addictive. It took a few years to realize what I had going on and the potential for it. I had no background with business. My only business plan was the same one I’d always had — to survive from one meal to the next.

It’s hard to believe that was twenty years ago. And it’s kind of mind-blowing to think how sometimes things come to us when we really really need them. What a blessing, eh? It’s not just a neat, pithy summation to say that bicycles saved my life. I can be a very slow learner, and in some ways have a lot of resistance to new things; to change. Even when it’s good for me, or maybe especially when. This is something I’m working directly with in the New Year, in 2023 — my resistance. Recognizing it, acknowledging it while not letting it derail me from persevering on whatever path I may be pursuing. Not a resolution so much as an intention.

Here I’m thinking of my relationship to writing. I write a lot, but I still hold myself back from sharing. I ask myself, Who really needs to hear underdog stories from another white dude in America? There’s part of me that believes we’ve heard enough from people who look like me.

But there’s another part that knows I have a story to tell. Contemplating what makes a meaningful life is a way of pursuing a concept that transcends stereotypes. I was born here, I am who I am because of where I came from, what I look like, who I’ve been around — parents and peers and punks — how I’ve engaged, and the feedback I’ve gotten along the way. You might say I started under water. It took a lot of years swimming around to even begin to see the surface.

Anyway, bike building gradually became a full stop on my previous life. Rather than continuing to search outward, I went in. All in. The only way I could make it work, as a craft, and as a business, was to look at what my hands were doing, and at what my mind was saying, and start being fair to myself and to give new things an honest try. To practice. To start using tools that were helpful and admit what was hindering me and to begin learning how to undo these things and let them go. To fail and fail again. And, as I’ve heard said about writing — To fail better.

Luckily, I like making things and seem to have a bit of a knack for it. I believe in bicycles and thrive on problem solving, and temperamentally, I can be as stubborn as they come.

I think it is a baseline requirement for making a craft-based business work: The obstinance of a mule and the desire to keep doing what you’re doing, even when you don’t want to. Without these it will be very hard to continue going forth when hard times come. And hard times will come, like a perfectly calibrated test to discover your personal breaking point. Resist as much as you like, it will come, it will push you right on over the edge and shatter you, again and again.

Anyway, I’ve got stories. This is my way of trying to convince myself to begin telling you some of them.

So let’s get started on down the road in this New Year.

From Portland to Portland: A Very Brief (Non-Fact-Checked) History of Christopher Igleheart’s Place in the Evolution of US Bicycle Manufacturing (& some other stuff)

August 2, 2022Joseph Ahearne15 Comments

Christopher Igleheart is retiring!

*Christopher Igleheart, photo credit: Dylan VanWeelden*

The master welder behind Igleheart Custom Frames & Forks is hanging up his TIG torch and moving on into his next phase of life. And, no less, he and his wife are moving to France!

Please mark your calendar and come to his send-off gathering:

Friday, August 5, 2022, from 4 - 7 pm in the Breadwinner Cycles parking lot, on Page St. in North Portland. There’ll be some beer, possibly some snacks. Bring a bike, bring friends, bring good cheer and let’s send off this legend of US bike building in style!

Some Bicycle History & Other Stuff

The history of bespoke bicycle making in the USA is mostly negligible until the “invention” of mountain bikes. Similar to almost any other invention, nothing about mountain bikes was completely new. It was more of a rearrangement and adaptation of already existing technologies — of fat tires and old bike frames, flat bars, dirt & gravity.

In this case, in the 1970s, some adrenaline fueled kids in Marin County, California, put together these various components and bombed down Mt. Tamalpais. From the bottom, shaking with joy, they rode back to the top and did it again. And again. They found this to be so exceedingly fun that they immediately began modifying & improving all aspects of these improvised bikes — frames, brakes, gearing — and in the process birthed an industry that would in a few years be worth billions.

By all accounts, this new sport of mountain biking started at Mt. Tam in the west. Someone had to bring it across to the East Coast, and one of the main players in doing so was a guy named Chris Chance. In 1982 Chance started a bicycle frame manufacturing company called Fat City Cycles in Somerville, Massachusetts. At the beginning, in 1981-82, Fat City wasn’t officially in business. It was, according to Christopher Igleheart, just few friends of Chris Chance. They built a dozen or so bikes and took them to a trade show in New York that spring to see if they’d sell. They did, and they took a few orders besides, and with that the business began. Its first bike, dubbed the Fat Chance, was designed for riding the tight switchback trails with roots, rocks and sharp climbs that were common throughout New England.

In the early 1970s, Chris Chance had been a part of Whitcomb USA, a satellite of Whitcomb UK, a bespoke steel bicycle maker. This was a short lived venture with two of the grand masters of US bike building — Peter Weigle & Richard Sachs — both of whom had traveled to the UK to learn the craft of hand making bicycle frames.

At that time all bicycles were built from steel and there were, in a sense, two trajectories that one could take to construct a bicycle frame — brazing, or TIG welding. Brazing is a way of adding a filler material, usually brass or silver, essentially “gluing” tubes together with molten metal. TIG welding involves melting the actual steel to fuse one tube to another. Traditionally, and to this day, brazing is considered a slower process, craftier, more artisanal, whereas TIG welding gets the job done more efficiently and better lends itself to production. Neither process is superior to the other — a properly built bicycle will be strong, will ride well (if designed well), and last a long time, no matter how the tubes are stuck together. The only significant difference is the aesthetic, and the time it takes to do the job.

Both Peter Weigle and Richard Sachs learned the traditional craft of brazing frames and have stayed with this process throughout their careers. Chris Chance saw opportunity in volume rather than in individual details, and with the help of welder, fabricator, and wild genius (and former roadie for Aerosmith), Gary Helfrich, Chance moved toward TIG welding & volume manufacturing rather than one-off designs. As a teacher of the craft of frame building, Chance had exactly one official student, our man, Christopher Igleheart.

At the time, Christopher was the owner of a small bike shop in Portland, Maine, called the Portland Bicycle Exchange. It was a neighborhood repair shop that he’d opened in 1975. Anyone tapped into the world of cycling had heard of this new craze of bikes with big tires that you could ride off road. But the problem, before Fat City Cycles, was getting ahold of one. East Coasters had to patch them together out of whatever they could find just like the Mt. Tam crowd had done.

In 1982, Igleheart started working part time at Fat City Cycles as a novice welder. As any welder will tell you, the only way to learn it is to put in hours with the torch, and Igleheart got his chops making hundreds of box crown forks. For the next 4 years he split his time between his bike shop, where he built wheels for these new mountain bikes, and welding for Fat City. Finally, in 1986 he sold his bike shop and started working at Fat City full time, further honing his welding skills and engaging in the whole process of bike making. In 1986 he was one of about 10 employees, and by the early 90s, at their peak, Fat City had around 30 workers, mostly young people.

These kids at Fat City Cycles found themselves at the forefront of a booming industry. Schwinn had been the reigning king of US bike manufacturing for so long and they totally missed the boat with mountain bikes, thinking it was a passing fad. By the time Schwinn figured it out it was too late to retool their massive factory, and companies like Fisher and Specialized and the more off-beat Fat City Cycles took over the market. Schwinn lost brand credibility, had internal problems, didn’t invest in modernizing production, all of which contributed to their fall. In 1992 they declared bankruptcy.

Another interesting piece of this story is, mountain bikes became popular during the same period when so much of American manufacturing was being exported overseas. This included much, but not all, of bicycle production as well. I imagine there’s an argument to be made that the hands-on education that young people received at small and mid-sized facilities like Fat City Cycles is part of the reason why certain kinds of manufacturing still exist as they do on US soil.

So much of manufacturing is hidden away, like under the hood of cars, or mechanical parts encased in appliances, that almost no one sees or thinks about it. With bicycles, though, everything is there in front of you, and it’s all relatively simple, so anyone curious enough can learn what it is, how it works, and with a bit more interest, how it’s made. The accessibility of the bicycle was invitation to many (like me) to become tinkerers and mechanics, sparking enough interest in some of us to take things further.

In a way, bicycles helped give manufacturing a face, and mountain bikes in particular helped make it cool. As Fat City Cycles grew, these young people learned the wider skillset of bicycle making, the “nuts & bolts,” as well as the art, craft, and business of it. Even though exportation of most bike manufacturing set up a competitive imbalance in costs (think unconscionably cheap overseas labor vs. skilled & semi-skilled US labor), it also created a valuable niche market for what was American made, and set the stage for the post-millennium surge of one-off bespoke builders such as myself. But in that time in between, from the early 1980s into the 90s, this one bike brand — Fat City Cycles — introduced dozens of smart, creative young people to the trade, giving them a testing ground to learn all aspects of making things and how to run a business. These were skills that many of them continued to adapt, perfect, and build upon for years to come.

It’s significant to note that several former Fat City employees went on to become influential contributors to the US bicycle industry at large, helping to shape it to this day. Famous people you may never have heard of, like the already-mentioned mad bike-scientist Gary Helfrich, who went on to found Merlin Bikes and who is considered the “grandfather of titanium bicycles;” Rob Vandemark who was a founder of Seven Cycles which continues to be a thriving US bicycle manufacturer; Ron Andrews of King Cage, “Ant Bike” Mike Flanigan; Jeff Buckholtz of Sputnik Tool, and a handful of others. And of course, the bike world also got Christopher Igleheart.

“Forkin’ Off:” Igleheart Fork Building Time-Lapse

On His Own, and then with Me

In 1990 Igleheart set out from Fat City and started building bikes under his own name, Igleheart Custom Frames & Forks. He stayed (mostly) on the East Coast for the next twenty-odd years, around the Boston area, and then moved to Portland, Oregon in 2012, which was on the trailing edge of the next wave of popularity of US handmade bicycles. Arriving in Portland, Igleheart worked with Cielo Bikes (of Chris King Precision Components) for a short stint, and then moved his tools onto Page Street, to the workshop where I’d been plying my trade for a few years.

*Friends wearing hats: Thank You Smitherman at PDW for the cold-weather swag!*

Sharing a workshop over the past decade, Christopher & I periodically teamed up on projects under the name Page Street Cycles, and we both continued building separately under our own names. Our skill sets are different, but complementary — he’s the welder, whereas I braze; he’s got a background in production and I’ve only ever been a one-off bike & rack builder. We’ve both benefitted tremendously from each other’s experience, and are better builders and business people because of our time spent together. Not to mention we became great friends.

Ten years is a long time to get to know someone. He and I would sometimes joke that we ought to be married since we spent way more of our waking hours together at the shop than either of us did with our significant others at home. Sometimes, but not often, we’d bicker like an old couple. Most of the time, though, we got along famously, like Frick & Frack, bantering and laughing at stupid shit that most people would shake their heads at.

*Trouble on Page Street - photo credit: Kristina Nash*

Christopher & I have a lot of common ground in our unconventional life experiences and we both loved the music that we grew up in. A crucial element in our getting along so well over the past ten years is the crossover we have in our musical tastes. It’s not only that, though. It’s also how we listened that was similar. It wasn’t just the way music set the tone of our workflow, it also holds so many stories, bits of history both cultural and personal, and while listening we compared notes on bands we’d seen or stories from the past or trivia we have about the musicians. It was a central point at the shop, a way of sharing these memories while making new ones.

*Igleheart & Co., 1969. Can you pick him out? (hint: look at the kid with the pipe…)*

As a side note, one of Christopher’s biggest regrets, he tells me, is that he missed seeing Jimi Hendrix play at Woodstock. He saw so many of the greater & lesser bands play there, including Janice Joplin, Santana, Creedence — but he and his friends had been there for three days.

“We were hungry and tired, sick of being in the mud,” he says. “We didn’t know when Hendrix was going to play and we decided to leave. He played like two hours after we left.”

(My comparable experience of bands missed — I never saw Nirvana play live. I was near the scene in Seattle for a while, but I was always broke, and it just never happened. But this isn’t about me…)

Back in the day Christopher hitchhiked from New England across the country with his basset hound, Scruff, to visit family in Portland, Oregon, and from there headed into California to visit friends. He has lived on both coasts, has always been off-beat, creative, and a bicycle-head. He and I agree that people drive too much and the world would be a much better place if everyone rode bikes more. Christopher went bike touring back when it was considered a pastime for hippies, weirdos, or financially unfortunate people who couldn’t afford to drive. Christopher was, and is, kind of a hippy and a weirdo — I say this only in the most endearing terms. It’s likely one reason he’s been a successful bicycle frame & fork fabricator for so long. Nobody overly “normal” seems to make it in this business.

Christopher is one of the kindest, most big-hearted humans I know, and for him, people always come before work. Anytime someone stopped into the shop wanting to talk, he would set aside whatever he was doing, often times missing hours of work, just to be there for them. If someone needed a few dollars, more often than not he’d give it to them. He loves people, any and all kinds of people. And I think he loves it most when he can make someone smile.

And now…

With Igleheart’s retirement the lineage of American bicycle frame building is passed down into the hands of the next generation of builders. East Coast builders, West Coast builders, in a lot of ways, these days, the internet brings us together. There’s Bilenky Cycles, Firefly, Chapman, Coast Cycles, Sycip, Curtis Inglis, Hunter, Rex, Breadwinner, Desalvo, Wolfhound, just to name a very few. And lest I forget, I’m a part of this list, too. We all come out of the history of it, taking our place. We’re in it as long as we’re in it, making it up as we go along, leaving traces of what we know in the bikes we build. It feels a little strange placing myself in this historic context, but here we are.

I feel very fortunate to have spent this much time with one of the old timers. Christopher has a wealth of knowledge, of inside stories, the history of bike people and of the craft. Even most of his tools hold stories, where they came from, who made them, who used them before. And I’d say, perhaps equally as important as his contribution to frame building is his unacknowledged role as Bicycle Ambassador. He’s brought many bicycles into being and he’s brought the joy of cycling to the world around him, every single day, literally for decades. This is just who he is. In so many ways he’s a mentor for the rest of us bike folks, and for humans in general. Christopher exemplifies the youthfulness and curiosity that comes with getting out and pedaling, breathing in the environment, finding joy on two wheels.

*Bike Heads: Jrdn Free (red), Igleheart (blue). The photo in Jrdn’s hands is of Alex Singer in his workshop in France*

It’s hard for me to think about what life is going to be like at the shop once Christopher has moved on. His goofiness, his impish laugh, his lightness of being. He’s been such a close companion and work mate for so long that his presence at the workshop on Page Street is, for me, integrated into the walls and the mess of tools & machines. Without him around I imagine it’s going to feel pretty hollow. Kind of like it feels at the end of the workday when we stop the music — the whole vibe changes.

Christopher didn’t know what it was, but he knew that I was writing something about his leaving, and every time I asked him questions about some detail from his past he’d say jokingly, “Oh, is this for my obituary?” For years, since I’ve known him, one of his favorite phrases when talking about being such a long-time bicycle frame builder is, “Not dead yet!” That’s right, man, you aren’t even close.

As a builder, as a friend, as a human being, I admire him tremendously. He’s messy as hell, but he’s the sweetest man you’ll ever meet. And I admit, I’m kind of jealous he’s moving to France. That’s not going to suck, not even a little bit.

The End is the Beginning

You are going to be missed, my Dear Friend, but I’m also so very happy that you & Fran are headed out on this new adventure. You’re going to have to put up with me soon enough when I bring a bicycle over and visit. I’m excited to share a plate of oysters with you and then go on a ride, let you show me around your new town and the French countryside. It’s gonna be wicked-pissah!

(Did I say it right?)

Below: Video love for our friend Jude: Ahearne (earmuffs), Igleheart (welding helmet)

Are Steel Bikes Heavy?

October 3, 2020Joseph Ahearne2 Comments

The Ever-Loving Question: Why Steel?

Recently, I’ve been asked why I use steel for building bicycle frames. I’ve been building steel bikes for so long, and I’m so immersed in it as my material of choice that I forget that this conversation sometimes needs to happen.

The short answer is: I use steel is because I believe it’s the material best suited to the kinds of bikes I build. There are a lot of different types of bikes and styles of riding, and I won’t claim to know what’s best for everything, and everyone. I only know my own experience, and my methods of bike construction, and the time I’ve spent in the saddle, riding bikes in various situations — touring, commuting, road rides, off-road, city meandering and neighborhood exploration.

What’s It Made Of?

The four main materials used for bike frames are steel, titanium, carbon fiber, and aluminum, and I believe each has their place, their “genre” of bike, exploiting each material’s best attributes. Steel and aluminum are the most commonly used for bicycle frames, and they’re the most versatile. But steel has, in my opinion, the widest range of desirable attributes. If you want to read more, here’s an interesting blog post that compares steel and aluminum.

As a custom bicycle maker, I like options. When I’m designing a frame for a person, I take into account a lot of variables, including the rider’s size and strength, their flexibility, as well as what they tell me they’re going to do with the bike, what they’ll expect from it, where they think they’ll go, what they’ll carry, and so on. Based on this overall picture, I design the bike and choose each individual tube to try and balance all the demands, and bring out the best qualities.

Each manufacturer of steel tubing offers their own versions of heavier, stronger, and lighter tubes, harder and “softer” materials, varied butt lengths, cold-rolled, heat-treated, welded seams or drawn tubes, etcetera, each of which has different properties for construction, for ride quality, weight, and cost.

What’s Weight Got to Do With It?

In regards to weight, I forget that some people still have the perception that if a bike is made from steel, it must be heavy. There is some amazing steel tubing available, extremely thin-walled, hard, and incredibly strong. It’s not too difficult to build a steel bike at or below eighteen pounds. Depending on the size and strength of the rider, and how much money they want to spend, it could go lighter. Eighteen pounds may sound heavy these days when compared with carbon fiber bikes that push toward ten or twelve pounds, but a twelve-pound carbon bike tends to have a fairly specific purpose, and is not, in my opinion, a bike most people really need.

In the Real World

Carbon fiber and aluminum bicycles have finite lives. If properly cared for, a steel frame will last much longer, potentially a lifetime. This has to do with the inherent flexibility of steel, which is one of its greatest attributes, and one of the main reasons why it is considered such a desirable material for bikes. Steel accepts rider inputs and road vibration, dispersing these over the span of the frame, and doesn’t so readily translate into rider fatigue, and, over time, frame fatigue. It creates a relationship between the rider and the ride, giving a bit of snap to the acceleration and carve to the turns. It’s this same flexibility that prevents a steel frame from wearing out.

Without going too deeply into physics or metallurgy — subjects I’m not qualified to discuss for more than about 30 seconds — what we’re talking about when we talk about frame flex is the material’s elasticity. What makes steel so interesting is that there’s a balance, a “sweet spot,” between its weight and flexibility.

When we reach the end of a material’s ability to flex, we’ve arrived at its “yield point,” which is its point of no return. This is when you’ve bent the material so far that it won’t ever bend back to exactly where it was, to “straight.” What happens is that the molecules have stretched beyond their ability to return to where they started.

Let’s translate this to everyday riding: Every time you push on the pedals, hit a bump, load your bike with gear and take a hard corner, stand up out of the saddle to crush it up a hill, and so on, you are stressing your bike frame.

Whereas steel will flex and absorb these stresses, carbon and aluminum frames gradually, incrementally, microscopically, become weaker and weaker. Over time, these inputs will cause aluminum and carbon frames to lose their rigidity, and eventually, they will become soft, noodly, and inefficient. And, especially with aluminum, it will finally crack. This may take years. But if the bike is being ridden, it will happen.

I don’t talk too much about titanium here because I consider it to be in a class by itself. It’s an amazing material, but it presents several barriers to use for general purpose bikes. It has the most elasticity, meaning it’s incredibly flexible, which can be beneficial, or detrimental, depending on what you want the bike to do. It doesn’t corrode, and it’s very light, but it is much more expensive to manufacture than the other materials, and the way it flexes limits its versatility. But, for the bikes it works for, it works extremely well. The ti bike I most want is a hardtail mountain bike.

Gravity’s Rainbow

Getting back to the discussion of weight: If you compare frames of the same size made from carbon, aluminum, steel, and titanium — frames that were built to do the same job — you will discover that the actual weight range between them is relatively small. Probably within a couple of pounds. If you’re talking about a road racing bike, this may make a difference, but if you’re talking about touring or commuting bikes, this additional weight matters much less.

One major problem with comparing frame weight is that each material lends itself to certain kinds of bikes, so there aren’t all that many ways we can draw meaningful comparisons. Carbon fiber touring bike? This doesn’t sound like a good idea. Steel competition road bike? In the not-too-distant past, yes, but those days are likely over. Titanium full-suspension downhill bike? Possibly, but I can’t imagine the cost of machining all the hardware for the suspension mounts and pivots, and, in the end, so what? — aluminum is probably as good for this application, and it’s way cheaper.

Also important to think about — for a relatively traditional bike, the frame only makes up about a quarter or less of the overall weight. So if you’re going to talk about weight, you’ve got to talk about the components. The single greatest upgrade that I’ve made to my bike over the past few years was to switch to carbon wheels. I was a purist for a long time, a nay-sayer to anything carbon. But then I bought some Rolf Prima wheels for a show bike and afterward when I rode them, it was like, Oh my. This transformed my mid-weight gravel bike into something so light and fast that when I first rode it I felt like a superhero. It was amazing.

For me, I think the main issue with talking about bike weight is, there is almost no correlation between weight and ride quality. A bike rides well because of choices made in its construction, including the material used, the geometry of the bike, front end design, chainstay length, and bottom bracket drop, etcetera. Ride quality, in my opinion, is so much more important than weight. And steel bikes — especially the ones made custom — bring these positive qualities forward like no other material.

As with everything, there’s a balance to be stricken, and if you don’t know for sure, you could go discuss frame materials and components with someone at your local bike shop. Ask questions. And whatever you hear, take it with a grain of salt — everyone has their experience and their knowledge base and their own special bias. The only subject I can think of that’s lousier with bias might be politics.

Speaking of which, are you registered to vote? If not, please do so. And vote. Then make sure everyone you know has voted, too. If you’re not sure how or where to register, here’s a link.

The Most Important Thing

Of course, and lastly, the most important way to learn about bike materials is to ride your bike. If you’re paying attention, the bike you are riding is going to give you so much information. Do you like it? Could you like it more? How so?

If you would like to discuss options for a ride that might suit you, feel free to send me a message. But be forewarned — we can talk about all sorts of things related to bikes and life and whatever, but I may not want to talk much about frame weight. Or, for that matter, politics.

Thank you for reading!