Visiting Bilenky Cycle Works

Before we left on this trip, I was a photographer in Long Beach, CA, trying to make a small name for myself as the wacky photographer that goes to all his photo shoots by bicycle. During my emerging photo career, I needed a new cargo bicycle that could carry my dense Pelican case of gear, as well as some lightstands, and still be fairly mobile in traffic. After voluminous research, I went with Bilenky Cycle Works. That was several years ago. I have a fascination with handmade items and the artisans behind the work, so it was imperative that, should we pass anywhere near Philly, we go to Bilenky.

But before we get there, we have to go somewhere else first.

Through a strange small world coincidence, one of the people who works at Bilenky, Bob, was also a reader of our site and invited us to stay with his family. (Another small world coincidence: we stayed with an old high school classmate of Bob in Nashville – Dan, who now runs Nashville Bicycle Lounge.) Bob is about as nice a person as you’ll ever meet. He is soft spoken but friendly and generous beyond measure. He volunteered at Neighborhood Bike Works for years, having only recently stopped because he has a son to look after now. He shares an old row house in West Philly with another couple with child, so living quarters were a little tight, but nonetheless they greeted us with open arms. Our first evening there, he made an amazing feast of stewed pork and vegetables with beans and freshly made tortillas (we helped by making the tortillas on a tortilla press he recently acquired).

Bob’s first bike was cut, mitered and welded in a living room. His roommates at the time weren’t too happy with him. About five years ago, he knocked on the doors of Bilenky Cycle Works because he needed to use some tools to finish his frame – and through that first encounter, he began a relationship with Bilenky.

Bob is an avid bike tourist himself who has an impressive stable of randonneuring, touring and cargo bikes (most of the dozen or so frames he has built for himself and others are touring- or transportation-focused). He is tasked with making the forks and racks at Bilenky, as well as a fair amount of finishing work on the bicycles. Bob also designed the popular Bilenky booth at this year’s NAHBS, which was a re-creation of his work station at the shop, inspired by the concept of dioramas.

I start with Bob, because in my head I always had a vision that bike builders were somehow classically trained, newly-minted UBI graduates and not DIYers with welders next to their sofa. I suppose I always imagined bike builders to work in spaces that were as pristine as the mirror-polished lugs on the bikes they built. I imagined Dvorak blaring over the scream of mills and presses, perhaps a bottle of wine on a tool cabinet. It’s not like that at all.

It is a dirty job. It is sometimes a painful one. Bob tells me that he hasn’t burnt himself in a while. Kasey relayed to me that during the first few weeks of working at Bilenky, he managed to cut his eyelid with a piece of errant tubing (he now wears eye-protection all the time).

Those elegant images we see of builders with a torch in hand, like a orchestra conductor, are preceded by hours and hours of cutting and filing with crude and obstinate hand tools. I suppose it’s easy to correlate the seemingly high price tag of a custom bicycle with an imagined life of luxury of its builder, but that is part of the magic or illusion of frame building. A well-crafted and finished bike speaks nothing of the labor behind it. You can’t imagine it being made by nothing less than the graceful fingers of angels, when in truth it is the work of cut, blistered and burnt mortal hands.

Bilenky Cycle Works is nestled next to a junkyard (where their annual urban cyclo-cross race takes place) and steel fabrication business. They are at the end of the street, in a small brick building, with nothing to indicate that one of the country’s most well-respected bike builders work there, other than a hand painted sign that says “Bilenky.”

When we were there, Stephen was busy leaping from project to project. They had just been commissioned to make a bicycle that, when completed, will be their NAHBS bike for 2011, so he was working with Isis on the design. He was also checking up on Brian, who was painting a restoration of an English bicycle, and helping Kasey with a frame that was fluxed and ready to be brazed. On top of this, he was working with Ray to organize the first annual Philly Bike Expo.

Stephen had written an eloquent letter to Don Walker, frame-builder and organizer of NAHBS, lobbying for NAHBS to come to Philly. In the letter, Stephen wrote about the vibrant bike culture in Philly, the miles of new bike lanes, its accessibility by train (Stephen is a big Amtrak supporter) and the various bicycle cottage industries in Philly (such as ReLoad and Fabric Horse). In short, Philly would make an ideal host for an exhibition that celebrates the bicycle. In the end, Don Walker decided on another city, but the letter he had written, Stephen decided, was just too good. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. He contacted the local bike coalition and threw the idea around of having a bicycle expo in Philly, to which they responded immediately, with an enthusiastic yes.

The tag line of the Philly Bike Expo is “Activists, Artisans and Alternatives.” The scope of the event is beyond just hand-built bicycles, and also opens the discussion to bike infrastructure, the various handmade bicycle accessory makers, and how people can incorporate cycling into their daily lives. In a short time, they’ve managed to fill most of their booth spaces and develop great seminars to attend. Georgena Terry (of Terry Precision Cycles) will be doing a seminar on women’s bike fit, Richard Schwinn will be giving a talk about the Schwinn Paramount, and BikeSnob will be doing a book signing. SRAM will be sponsoring the “fastest bike mechanic in Philly,” where local mechanics will compete to see who can install a complete gruppo the quickest.

The last few years have proven to be good media years for Bilenky, with several articles written about them and a number of prizes at NAHBS and Cirque de Cyclisme. It seems only logical that they should take the extra step to organize an event that shines the spotlight on bicycling Philly. When I asked him why the sudden involvement beyond just frame building, he gestured around the shop and half-jokingly said, “I’ve got to feed all these people.”

Bilenky is more than just Stephen now. It is Simon, Bob, Kasey, Brian, Carl, Isis and the others that have come and gone.

It’s probably too cliche to imagine a solitary frame builder slaving away under a torch. We are somehow more comfortable with that image of the lone craftsman – there is something very ‘American frontier’ about it. And yet, while many begin that way (sometimes even in a livingroom), the ones that have been at it for a long time, like Bilenky, have grown to include more than a single pair of hands – and each of those hands bring something special to the work. Bicycles aren’t immune to the cult of personality. We want to imagine every brazed eyelet to be done by Stephen himself, or that Grant Petersen hand-dunks each shellacked handlebar grip on their bikes. But the truth is that there are many people involved with these bicycles we love – and we are the richer for them.

When the time comes to order my next Bilenky, I’ll be happy to know that it is not just Stephen himself who has worked on the bike – but Simon who has mitered the tubes, Bob and his passion for touring who has made the fork, and Kasey who is in the shop with his laconic smile, looking on from behind his safety glasses.

Welcome to the North-East

A couple weeks ago, we hopped on a train out of Durham, North Carolina, and got off in Baltimore, Maryland. Instantly, everything was different. No more South, with its slower pace and overgrowth of kudzu. In Baltimore, we found colonial-era buildings and a snappier attitude. By skipping over Virginia, we effectively skipped over the transition between the two locales.

Now we are in Philadelphia, reeling a bit from the enormity of the city, and the density of this whole region. It has been several weeks since we have set up our tent, as camping options are dwindling before our eyes. We laugh about how we camped through the bitter cold of last winter and the sweltering heat of the summer, but now that it’s fall and the weather is perfect for camping, we’re in an area (and on a trajectory) where camping isn’t as viable an option. But it’s all about the choices you make, and right now we’re choosing to explore this dense region and its varied cycling cultures.

Philly has been a delightful surprise for both of us. If we stay out of Center City and all its downtown-y madness, you can almost forget how big the city is, because it feels like a string of little communities. West Philadelphia, where we have spent most of our time, is full of old buildings and small restaurants and a vibrant, diverse population.

And the cycling is pretty fantastic! The roads may be extremely torn-up, the paint may be chipping away from the striped bike lane markings, the drivers may be crazy and only looking out for themselves, but it doesn’t make the city any less bike-able. For the most part, Philly is fairly flat. The blocks are short and the streets are narrow and crowded, which tempers the speed of most drivers. There are some incredibly great bike shops. And, most importantly, when we’re out on our bikes, we’re not the only ones. We hear that the city has had a cycling boom in the past couple years, and it shows. Yesterday, when I saw a mother riding in the street, with her two young daughters also riding in the street, it made it that much more clear how accessible this city truly is for cyclists.

We leave Philly tomorrow (Friday) and head to New York City (via my cousins in NJ). We’ve been working to nail down a presentation in the city, and we’ll let you all know when we get the details figured out. We’re hoping to spend a week or so in the area, so let us know if you’d like to meet up, or if you’ve got space to host us. And if anyone has any brilliant, lesser-trafficked routes into the city from the west, please let us know!

Let’s Meet up in Philly!

If you’re a reader in Philly, we’d love to meet you! We didn’t get a chance to set up a presentation this time around, but we still would love to talk touring and bikes! We’re staying near Dock Street Brewery (which also happens to be right next to Firehouse Bicycles) and thought it would be the perfect location for an evening of beers, bikes and good conversation.

Where: Dock Street Brewery
When: Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 6pm-8pm
Why: Drink beers and talk bikes.

Here’s the Facebook Event page…please RSVP so we’ll know how many tables we’ll need to commandeer! See y’all/yous on Wednesday!

Visiting Velo-Orange

Chris Kulczycki was trying to decide what to name the new company that he was about to start. “The orange bicycle. The orange bike?” Not quite satisifed and thinking it should sound a bit more French, Chris settled on “Velo-Orange.” The orange bike in question is an orange Ebisu that now hangs on a wall in the corner of their nondescript warehouse building in Annapolis, Maryland. “It’s as fine a bike as I’ve ever ridden.”

Velo-Orange began by reselling a lot of NOS (“new old stock”) parts (Simplex derailleurs, shifters, etc.) that Chris found through relationships with Mel Pinto and some European companies that had boxes of things that supposedly no one wanted anymore. After the success of selling the NOS parts, they found that there was a market for the sort of vintage parts that he was interested in.

The first part they produced was a bicycle bell brazed to a headset spacer. Since then, they have since ventured into components (racks, handlebars, stems, pedals, saddles, cranks), soft goods (handlebar bags, panniers, seat bags) and even frames. To this day, there is still a little element of surprise when they produce a product and it sells out. Take for example the wheel-stabilizer, an obscure part by American standards, which has been a strangely robust seller.

When we visited Velo-Orange, it was a relatively slow day. The showroom was a little more bare than usual, a lot of items had been packed up for InterBike. There was no large order arriving and the explosion of activity that usually ensues. The only real big appointment was a haircut that Chris was going to get before InterBike. Maybe two or three people came by the showroom to buy things directly, otherwise a majority of the business occurs online or with their dealers around the country.

Tom and Perry gave us a tour of the facilities. There was the shipping department, where folks were boxing orders. They had a small photo studio in one of the warehouse spaces with a DIY cardboard softbox where they photographed products for the website. There was also a plastic bin of prototype parts that didn’t quite make the cut – hubs and cranks and handlebars that weren’t going to see the light of production.

We talked to Tom about being compared with Rivendell. “People always want to put Rivendell and Velo-Orange in a cage and wait for a cock fight,” but he sees their relationship as more of a “cooperative one.” They share a similar market that has been ignored by the larger bike companies – “people who ride but don’t race.”

In the last few years, Velo-Orange has been, by all accounts, an undeniable success, growing 40% every year. Their operations have moved a few times to accommodate their growth and Chris has had to hire more staff to keep up with shipping orders. Their success hasn’t gone unnoticed by larger bike manufacturers that have tried to emulate the “VO style.” There has been a slurry of city bikes with swept-back handlebars, inverse brake levers and porteur racks.

Tom readily admits that they aren’t making new products, but are refining old designs with new processes and materials. And yet, there is a bit of resigned frustration when a large company introduces a new bike that so closely mimics the bicycles that Velo-Orange is known for. It is a story of the tail wagging the dog, of a relatively small company taking the risks in the market to reproduce parts that most people had forgotten about and in the process influencing larger bike companies.

In the end, the trend is good for those that “ride but don’t race,” the silent majority in the middle that larger companies have abandoned for the extremes. Chris and the Velo-Orange crew probably view themselves more as a business than a bike advocacy group. But by remaking components that excite people to ride every day (not just race day), they are inadvertently helping bikes move to the mainstream where they need to be.

Snaps: East Coast Blur

Everything is closer together in the East coast. In the West, we could travel days and weeks before reaching a city of any size. In the East, things are a lot more compressed. We’ve been a little remiss about updates, there has just been so much going on, so here are a few snaps from the last few weeks.

We led a successful overnight bike camping trip in Durham and turned some people on to the joys of bike touring (even super short ones!).

We met Jack and stayed with his family for a few days. He’s a bike commuter and an active bike advocate in Durham.

After hopping a train from Durham, we found ourselves instantly in the East coast. We rode around Baltimore for a few days, getting use to being in dense urban areas again.

We met some folks involved with the Baltimore bike scene and chatted with Tommy Nash, a budding frame builder and part of the Baltimore Bicycle Works worker-owned cooperative.

We took a day trip into Annapolis and stopped by Velo-Orange headquarters.

Then we took a long series of rails to trails conversions and made our way slowly to Philly.

We rode through the beautiful rolling hills of PA.

On one of the rails to trails, we run into some readers who generously take us in for the night. We have a great time talking about adventure and travel.

We stayed with Megan, a reader and energetic entrepreneur, who also happens to be a bike advocate way out in the middle of nowhere PA!

More riding through scenic rails to trails.

We’re now in Philly. We’ve banged out 115 miles in the last two days (which is a lot for us) and are tired. We’re hoping to set up a presentation, do some exploring and get my iPhone fixed (it bit the dust). If you’re in Philly and want to meet up or help us out with a homestay for a day or two, zip us an email!

USTREAM from Jonestown with a Special Guest!

Here’s the recording of our USTREAM from Jonestown, PA with our special guest Megan Auman. In the video, we talk about her website TheCreativeEmpire.net and one of her cool products, the CozyCuff. We also talk to Megan about what it’s like to be a cyclist and bike advocate in a small rural town.

Panniers & Peanut Butter – The Ultimate Gear Guide

After nearly 14 months of traveling the US on bicycles, we have finally put together a comprehensive guide to all of our gear, with great photos from the last year, and road-tested tips that we’ve discovered along the way (how to find electricity on the road, the virtues of the tortilla, etc.,) Today, it is available to the world!

We’re really excited to release Panniers & Peanut Butter and we hope that it makes bike touring more accessible and inspires you to put together your own touring gear, finagle the time, and hit the road!

Panniers & Peanut Butter is 75 pages long and goes way beyond a simple list of our stuff, or even a technical look at the pros and cons of different items. It’s chock-full of photos, tips, stories, lessons – and probably everything you could want to know about all of our gear.

Details:

Panniers & Peanut Butter is a downloadable ebook. You will receive a file in a PDF format, which should be readable on any computer, iPod/iPhone/iPad, and Nook.

Price per ebook is $20. (Payment is through Paypal, which also accepts all major credit cards.)

Upon purchase, you will be directed to a link, from which you’ll be able to download the file.

To purchase, just hit this button:

Thank you to all of our readers, followers, supporters and friends around the US and beyond! You have inspired us to keep traveling and exploring and inspiring others to get on their bikes as well. See you on the road!

It’s Almost Here…

We are very excited to announce that we will be launching our first e-book on Monday!

Panniers & Peanut Butter is a comprehensive gear guide, based on what we have used, broken, tried and lusted after over the past 14 months on the road. We get so many questions about all the little details about what we pack and carry (and why) – and we finally sat down and put it all into one neat package.

Panniers & Peanut Butter is 75 pages, over 20,000 words. It goes way beyond a simple list of our stuff, or even a technical look at the pros and cons of different items. It’s chock-full of photos, tips, stories, lessons – and probably everything you could want to know about all of our gear.

From the Introduction:

We have a love-hate relationship with Peanut Butter. It is the quintessential vagabonding food: easy to find, easy to carry, full of protein, can be eaten cold. Try as we might, we haven’t found another single food item that stacks up to peanut butter. And, after eating peanut butter every day for the past year, trust us when we say we’ve tried to find another option. Peanut butter stays with us, like the rest of our beloved gear, because we know we can rely on it.

In a strange way, peanut butter is the benchmark to which adventure gear must match up. It is reliable and doesn’t require a lot of fuss – because when you’re on a bicycle tour for an indefinite amount of time, the few things you bring with you HAVE to work, and work well.

Whether you’re new to bike touring or a veteran of the road, you will find useful information in Panniers & Peanut Butter, all presented in an approachable (and very thorough) way.

The Launch Details:

Panniers & Peanut Butter goes on sale on Monday, September 20 at 9:00am EST. Check back here on Monday for the purchase link!

Cost per book is $20.

Heading North

A few days ago, we made a command decision to hop on a train. We looked at the maps and we looked at the calendar and we thought about what we wanted to do with the last bit of time before winter descends upon us again. And we realized that we have a long list of places we want to explore and people we want to meet… in states that are further North. Friends in Baltimore, artists in Central Pennsylvania, bike builders in Philadelphia, Laura’s cousins in New Jersey and alma mater in Massachusetts, activists in Boston. Winter comes early to Boston, and we realized that, if we are to make it that far north without trudging through snow, we need to get there by the end of October. So, today, we hopped on a train.

It feels weird to cut out a huge chunk of the country that we would otherwise ride through, and to fly past it all in a big metal box. We look out the windows at beautiful rivers, quaint towns, restaurants with intriguing names, and we want to be over there, experiencing it all in person. Yet, we cannot see everything that we are skipping in the way that we would want to see it, and also see the NE in the way we want to see all of that. It’s a conundrum that comes up again and again for us… we are moving so slowly and seeing so much, and yet we are still missing a lot. We have to make peace with the fact that we can’t see and do it all right now, and we take comfort in the fact that we’re seeing and doing anything (and that, hopefully, we’ll have many more years to double-back over all these places that we have skipped).

Ironically, even though we’re “speeding things up a bit,” we still aren’t moving fast enough to reach New Hampshire and Maine and upstate New York before they’re blanketed in white. (And we’re steering clear of the white stuff this year.)

Tonight we are in Baltimore. We’re going to lay low and explore the city and see friends and relatives for a few days (and finally finish our ebook!). Because we can’t take the bikes on the MARC trains, we will likely skip DC this time around (sorry everyone!). But, if you’re north of Baltimore, drop us a line! We hope to spend a week or so in Philly, and possibly another week in NYC, before riding through Connecticut and Rhode Island on our way to Boston.

Durham S24O

Our S24O in Durham was a great success. Jack, our host and a local bike advocate did an amazing job of picking a route and coordinating the logistics. We had a real varied mix of people who joined us, which made the trip even better. There were a few experienced tourers but also some people who have never gone bike camping before. Here is a video and some snaps of the trip.

We rode about 20 miles from South Durham to Jordan Lake, where we camped for the night. The ride to the lake was cool and overcast, a nice change from the heat. We rode the American Tobacco Trail which is just stunning and shaded with trees.

We turned more than a few heads on the streets of Durham and on the trail. It was great fun to have our own bike parade and to perhaps expose people to a type of cycling they aren’t usually use to. The trip was also a great way to hang out with some readers who have been following our trip for a while.

We hope to do more of these as travel. As funny as it sounds, its great to be able to do a short bike camping over-nighter, even in the middle of our open-ended trip.