Brian Chapman makes bicycles in his small workshop behind his house in Pawtuxet Village. The shop is less than 400 square feet and it’s packed with tools, milling machines, sand-blasting equipment and a fixture that holds up nine steel tubes that are coming together to form a bicycle. Chapman Cycles is a one-person operation, Brian makes bicycles one at a time and each bike is made specifically for one customer. It all starts with a conversation about what the cyclist wants from their bike.
Brian Chapman: So ideally, the customer comes here, we continue our conversation about the bike, and then we take their measurements. I will take their measurements and design the bike they’re looking for.
Chapman: I’ll start cutting tubes soon after they approve the design and then fitting it up in the fixture which is here in the center of the shop mounted to a post. So the tubes get cut, I put them in the fixture and I start the process of building a bicycle.
It’s a laborious process of joining the tubes together using lugs or fillet brazing, carefully filing down the joints, sanding and polishing the welds, building custom components like brakes and racks, and finally painting the frame and assembling the parts.
Chapman: So I’m a slow builder by industry standards. So I build about a bike a month, Each one a very doted over machine.
Bike building – on a large scale – has a long history in New England. Columbia Bicycles was the first real bike manufacturer in America with factories in Hartford, Boston and Westfield Massachusetts. In Providence, there was Vulcan and Narragansett Bicycles. Cannondale got its start in Wilton Connecticut. Now New England has a concentration of small, custom bike builders like Chapman Cycles.
Eric Weis: People like Brian, in this day and age where we, for economic purposes, really can’t have large scale bicycle manufacturing around here. It’s Brian and his cohort that are keeping that tradition alive.
Eric Weis is a bike collector and the founder of the Builder’s Ball, a custom bicycle show in New England.
Weis: There are few builders in the US with better reputations than Brian. And that’s because of his impeccable craftsmanship. For Brian, it’s a really interesting combination of engineering, and art. it’s a machine, but built with such care and such precision and such skill. That it can resemble a sculpture. And with finish work that makes you just want to run your fingers over it.
So why get a custom bicycle? Eric Weis told me that it’s like getting a custom, well-tailored suit. If you wear one every day, you want it to look good, and you need it to be as comfortable as possible.
Weis: It’s the same for bicycles, somebody who is on their bicycle for long distance touring because that’s their hobby, or they’re a daily bike commuter and they’re on their bike 20 miles every day just to get to work and back. These people need something that’s going to fit them to a tee and is going to deliver to them exactly what they need out of the machine.
Brian Chapman had a more technical answer. He told me that you can get a perfectly fine bike at a bike shop.
Chapman: and it will suit the job perfectly, especially if the bike fits you well. But if you look closely, there’s a lot of differences in regards to like, who was this bike designed for? Was this bike designed for a 250 pound man?
Most manufacturers’ bikes are overbuilt with heavier tubes and if your body isn’t the exact proportions of what they designed for, they may not be so comfortable. Brian is able to make his bikes with lighter steel tubing for a more lively feel.
Chapman: The thinner tubing and just being able to customize the geometry of the bike for the specific rider is the benefit.
Brian started making custom bike frames in the early oughts after ordering a custom racing bike from Chris Bull at Circle A Cycles – a frame builder in Providence that’s no longer around.
Chapman: It was during that when I was like, Hey, can I be a part of this and I just hang out and, and honestly as a builder now if someone said that to me, I’d be like, No way. But he knew my intentions were to build, and the premise of Circle A was to be this worker owned collective. And I shared in his punk rock ethos and his idealism, and I wanted to be part of it no matter what. So he let me come in and see when things were being brazed, like, joined together. I was really enthralled with being able to see the process of how a bike goes from a pile of tubes into something that I’m going to race against all these other people on like carbon fiber or aluminum race bikes.
Taking a pile of tubes and turning it into a beautiful bicycle is a delicate craft and it doesn’t come cheap. Just the steel frame and fork will cost you more than $3,000. Then you start adding on wheels and the cranks and gears and all the other pieces you need for a bike and pretty soon you’re looking at seven thousand dollars, or more if you decide to get fancy with the components. That’s a lot – but for comparison, the most expensive high-tech carbon fiber bicycle from a major brand like Trek has a list price of fourteen thousand dollars.
Here’s Eric Weis again.
Weis: For frame builders, nobody’s in it to get rich. This is not a good career choice for people who expect to retire at age 50. It can be to some degree a labor of love.
Custom bikes are a tiny slice of the overall bicycle market, but Brian’s bikes are in demand. In fact, he has a three year waiting list. With so many people wanting his bikes, I asked him why he doesn’t raise his prices.
Chapman: even though there’s demand for the bikes, the price of the bikes, in my eyes, I want people to be able to afford them. The average person. Like I don’t want to cater to a funky like luxury snob kind of crowd. I want these bikes to be ridden and not to become wall hangers. And I charge what I think is fair for the amount of work that I put into the bike. Yes, I could charge more but I think…I don’t know.
I went for a ride with Brian on the backroads and trails of Tiverton and Little Compton. At one point, I swapped bikes with him and rode his personal custom bike. It felt wonderful. It was light and springy and just beautifully made. On the drive back into town I asked him what he loved about building a bike for someone.
Chapman: The best thing is when you hand off a bike, and they’re excited about it, and they can’t wait to ride it and then they ride it and they’re like, oh my god, this is like…there’s a little bit of disbelief or a “thank heavens, you did make it right, in my size and it does ride straight and everything is to spec.” But that the the other best thing is when that rider comes back to me in like 10 years and says, “Man, I still love that bike. I ride that bike all the time.” I’m like, yeah, that’s, that’s a good feeling.
For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
