About

Back around 2015,  I found myself in poor health.  I was overweight and I drank too much.  As I started getting older I started to feel the affects of my bad habits and I decided to do something about it.  I started watching what I ate, gave up the booze,  and eventually I found cycling around 2017.  I bought an older Trek 800 that had sat outside for about a decade and rebuilt it.  I had experience with this sort of thing in the past having been rebuilding motorcycles since the late 90's.  It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for and scratched my itch for not only restoration and craftsmanship,  but also my newly found appreciation for physical fitness.  I eventually upgraded to a Giant road bike and then the Red 1986 Schwinn on the build page.

Eventually I started building and restoring bikes for friends and family until around 2021 I started Ten Hill Cycle. It's not really a business at this point, just a passion project to output a bit of creativity to the world.  I very much enjoy the build and restore process and look forward to many more builds in the future.

The Mission of Ten Hill Cycle is to promote cycling while reducing the amount of manufacturing needed to get and keep more people on bikes.  New bikes are getting more and more expensive. To increase profits, bike companies design many new models to become "obsolescent" faster by using proprietary parts to keep control of the secondary market that allows us to repair and maintain our bikes.  There is a big environmental and financial cost this bears on all of us.  Older, perfectly serviceable bikes are being cast aside for the next soon-to-be-outdated purchase and allowing the cycle of unnecessary consumerism to repeat.

There is an easy answer to this problem. 

While cycling technology does get better and better every year - it is by arguably very marginal gains. For the most part these small gains really only matter in racing.  Most of us use our bikes in the real world for transportation, fitness and fun.  It does then, make sense to keep older bikes on the road with mild updates - (a simple set of rims and cables can do wonders).   My mission has become to keep these older bikes going as long as possible with a bit of simple elbow grease and creativity. 

I believe bikes should be

 The process of refurbishing a bike over buying a new one is a much more rewarding experience, with the added bonus of being much more environmentally and financially sound. I have found this to be the case and I want to help more people to experience it.

I don't have any.  I want no part of it. If you need to contact me simply text or email and I will get back to you as soon as possible.  No need to have a tech conglomerate taking notes on you in the background so they can sell you to the highest bidder. The modern world of social media has become all about collecting data to sell, sell, sell more of whatever their clients want to move more of.  It is all about increasing commerce at all costs, to matter the product or the consequences-  this is not compatible with our mission.  It is a deal with the devil I are not willing to make.

If you want to post or share any of the builds etc. on social media please feel free,  I just feel it would be an impossible conflict of interest for me to participate in those platforms.

Thanks!