Builds

My friend Joe really liked the bike I built for Dave. He asked if I could build him something similar that was clean and simple and of course I said YES, absolutely! I took his measurements so I could find a frame with a perfect fit and after a bit of searching I came across this great little Fuji mountain bike frame. With the cantilever brakes it looked to be roughly mid 90's vintage. This was back when Fuji was still a legacy Jappanese brand with high quality ( They are a commodity brand now and I cannot recommend the newer ones) . The frame was made in Japan by hand with brazed lugs. Everything on this bike was high quality with attention to detail- it was a top shelf bike in it's day. But as you can see that day was a long, long time ago.

This was one of the first "custom" bikes I built. I found it on Craigslist for $60. It had sat outside by a barn most of it's later life. It had the typical Suntour / Sugino running gear of the time period- all of which was junk. The bearings in the crank were seized, and the freewheel was not ever going coming off the hub. I have noticed this is a common problem on the older Suntour freewheels, they just get welded together by time and rarely ever come apart. The derailleur was a mid level Suntour that had seen better days ( I think I rebuilt it and gave it away- but don't honestly remember - I built this bike in 2019) These older Schwinn Travelers are some of the best cheap frames you can find. They were hand brazed in Taiwan from 4340 steel tubes. This makes them very easy to modify and quite durable. Considering how cheap they can be found, I think they are a great value if you come across one .

This bike was another cheap craigslist find, I think it was roughly $50 when I bought it. It looked clean in the pics and turned out to be quite nice when I got it home. Paint was a little beat up but not too bad, and everything worked on it. Modern carbon and aluminum frames are faster, more rigid and better in almost every measurable way, but there is something about these old lugged steel frames that keeps me coming back to them. They are very comfortable, affordable and bomb-proof reliable.

This is an early 1970s AMC Free Spirit that I restored for a friend, Charissa . It was originally a burnt orange color with a hint of metallic flake in the paint- it was a sharp color combo. This bike has a simple 1 piece bottom bracket typical of bikes of this era, the bearings were in good shape but the grease had long since been compromised. It had come from an estate sale, and at one point in the past I think it had been through a minor flood. Most of the "bones" of the bike were in good shape, but the rims were completely rotted out in about a 30 degree arc on both rims that I suspect was from sitting in water. Unfortunately I do not have a lot of "before" pics for this project. This was one of the first bikes I restored and I was not thinking that I would need pics later so not many were taken.

This was a frame I bought at the Brazen dropouts bike swap in Madison WI - almost the whole build came from there. The rims are some 36H blue velocity rims that I got for 25 bucks just as the show was ending. The bars are BMX bars I had from a BMX build that never materialized. I had the frame sandblasted and Powder-coated flat black. The front hub is a Shimano 4000 series hub, nothing special but a good hub- the real jewel of this bike is the 2-speed Sturmey-Archer kickshift hub. I really like the stuff from Sturmey, most people don't even know these exist. It's a two speed that you shift by just touching backwards with the pedals- and it has a coast brake! Out here in the driftless area we have way too many hills for a single speed bike to be practical outside of a townie bike. These two speed hubs let you set up a very clean and simple looking bike and still get a low gear for hills -- I very much love these hubs.

If you are here on this site it's no secret we really enjoy building bikes. We were trying to find a way we could use this to do some good and got the idea to do a bike share here in our home village of Gays Mills WI. Gays Mills has a community imrovement board called Connect Communities, which seeks opportunities to make the community a better place for everyone. This was a natural fit as a host for the bike share program. Everyone's involvement on the board has been very supportive and fantastic since we started. Our goal is to have at least 4 bikes being used by Spring 2025. Rather than just raise a bunch of money and buy new bikes, We wanted to resurrect discarded bikes that would otherwise be thrown out. This makes the bike share not only cheaper to start, it also helps keep these older, unloved bikes on the road with a new purpose- and We love that. This did however, mean most of the bikes we found for the program are absolutely trashed when we first get them and need to be completely rebuilt, and if I am honest...I kind of love that part too! We decided to go with cruiser style bikes with coaster brakes to keep them simple and low maintenance.