Ahearne Cycles | Thoughts and Words

Brethren!

It’s Saturday. I woke up to the sun shining here in Portland and had an overwhelming urge to go for a mountain bike ride. We’ve had a few days of really nice weather, and I’d been feeling the need to get away from town, see the trees and experience the quiet. There are a series of trails only a few miles north of town, near Scapoose, that would do the trick. These trails are on a hilly tract of forest that is, I think, privately owned. They are maintained by some local folks, but I don’t know much about it. I’ve only been out there a handful of times. It’s a kind of playground for mountain bikes. There’s a gated gravel road that goes maybe a mile or two back, and has a whole network of trails that run off into the trees on either side. The loops are short, and many of the trails link into each other, wind around, crossing other trails, so you’re constantly choosing paths to one side or another. It’s a lot of fun. There are some fast parts, short somewhat technical climbs, I saw a few ramps, drops and ladders that people had built, there are a lot of switchbacks – there is a little bit of most everything, at least a taste of it, so that if you’re in Portland and you need a MTB fix, it’s there for you.

I checked out my sorely neglected mountain bike yesterday, put the wheels back in (I use them for dummy wheels on frame builds), dialed in the brakes and shifting, lubed the chain. It’s always fun getting a bike back into order, making it ready to ride. It’s like reacquainting yourself with an old friend you haven’t seen in a while.

One thing about mountain biking that is an issue with me is that for the most part, if you want to get to the good trails, you have to take your bicycle there with you. You have to drive. There are those who are lucky enough to live within a short distance of a trail head, but for most of us, the really good trails are too far away to be that easily accessible. Fortunately, well within a hundred miles of Portland are some of the best trails anywhere. I drove to the trail today, but one consolation is that my car, an old Mercedes wagon, runs off of biodiesel and WVO (waste vegetable oil). Most of this trip was fueled by veggie oil. The exhaust smells like a hamburger and fries, but so be it, I got where I was going and I didn’t fuel a war in the process.

I went out to these trails today because I needed to think. It’s been a couple of weeks since NAHBS, and I’ve been slowly coming off of all that was involved with the show, letting the dust settle. My world had become pretty small. For the three or so months prior to the show I worked a lot, and I mean crazy amounts, trying to attend to all the regular business, and also to make a couple of extra special things. It’s taking some time to decompress, and to reacquaint myself with the rest of the world.

Every year just before the show I think I’ve got a show-stopper, something really great that is going to blow everyone away. That feeling lasts until about the time I enter the hall and start to set up my booth. As I see more and more of the bikes around me I am floored. The builders who go to the show are so very creative, so innovative, and I am amazed at all the great work being done in the name of the bicycle. This brings me back to the planet, gives me a good humbling. There are a lot of folks out there doing really incredible work, and I feel very privileged that I can present my bikes in the same room with them.

This years’ show was a success in most all senses of the word. There was a large attendance, somewhere in the nature of 7100 people came over the three days. This in spite of the (in my opinion, and, I think in the opinion of many others) outrageous cost to get in the door. Having paid as much as I did for my booth I had the obviously ill-conceived notion that this was to cover the rental of the convention center, and many of the other expenses involved.

I go to this show each year because it is a way to make what I do visible to whoever might be interested. The high cost at the door serves to limit the attendance only to those who are really very interested in bikes. This suddenly cuts out a large portion of the people who I really want to see attend, mainly, those who may like bicycles but maybe aren’t living a bicycle lifestyle; people who ride on the weekends and enjoy going to bike shops but don’t really know more than what they’ve seen from Trek, Specialized and the rest. These are the folks I really want to attend the show because I think we, as bicycle builders, as crafts people, will knock their socks off, will give them an education in bicycles that they didn’t even know they needed. I guess that what I’m saying is that I’m not only interested in showing my bicycles to bike-people. I want converts; I want people to come to the show and look at all the amazing things there and say, “My God! I had no idea that a bicycle could be like this!” We, as frame builders, are setting the bar so far above what is available in most bike shops, and most people don’t even know it. The people who do know it are the only ones willing to pay so much to get into a hand made bicycle show. Most of those who don’t know what they’re missing aren’t going to pay $18 to see it, and so they’re still missing it. That’s a bummer. I have a lot more to say on this subject, but I’ll reserve the really fiery part of this for another day. For now, I’ll get off the soap box.

At this years’ show I received the award for “Best City Bike.” I consider this a great honor, especially considering that this year the show was in here in Portland, which is one of the best commuter towns in North America. That I’ve won this award for two years running is especially heartening, considering the category for “Best City Bike” as an award possibility was only begun at last years’ show, meaning it’s a category that wasn’t even initially thought worthy of an award. That’s kind of funny to me. Bicycles were made for transportation long before they were mountain bikes or cross bikes or race machines of any sort. And most especially, for custom builders, the commuter presents a vast amount of potential for pushing the limits of the craft, where function is the name of the game, and aesthetic follows suit. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more effort put into building these sorts of bicycles in the future. I certainly intend to keep on building them and continuing to refine what I know. I really enjoyed building Maggie's mixte, which won the award last year. I'll tell the story behind that one some time. It was quite special. And this year, Tony's commuter really caught a lot of attention. I know he's very excited about it.

The race scene began early in the history of the bicycle, and has probably given it the most visibility over the years, but throughout the world, by far the most common bicycle on the road is one that takes a person and their stuff from point A to point B; in one variation or another, the commuter. Granted, here in America we do things a little differently, but I think we’re catching on. If you look through any of the most popular cycling magazines you’ll see that a lot of the talk is devoted to racing bikes, the “newest” technology, the lightest weight, the most plastic, and so on. Fortunately there is a new trend coming. Momentum Magazine, based in Vancouver, BC, is a really good example of this burgeoning awareness of the bicycle as a viable form of transportation. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of them quite obvious. You’ll probably be hearing a lot more on this subject in the near future. You certainly will be from me.

Now that it’s Sunday (no, I haven’t been writing all night, I took a break to eat and sleep) and the sun is again shining, I think it’s a good time to go for another bike ride. Peace, and out.