Richard Sachs Cycles

[fortyfour]

Silca + Ballers atmo -

Silca? Forget that: I'm still recovering from seeing those two bottle mounts... What no tape ATMO?

[happycampyer]

Silca? Forget that: I'm still recovering from seeing those two bottle mounts... What no tape ATMO?

It's a road bike...

I was going to comment:


Silca + Campagnolo + Ballers atmo -

[burgess1108]

So proper. So Baller.

Sorry I'm missing Ballers this year. What a lovely bike (of course).

[e-RICHIE]

Bagnati's is longer than mine atmo -

[e-RICHIE]

I call this one "Looking Down With Fred Chung" atmo.

[e-RICHIE]

Here's a gem. I was already home from a year in London, now living in Connecticut, and working at Witcomb USA. But I still had my third frame from Bill Hurlow on order and being prepared for paint. Data point: WBH 1.0 was from circa 1971, and I ordered the second one immediately after unpacking the first. These two pages show the lengths I went to to decorate the third unit. Mind you, this was back when Harold Wilson was in office, the skinsuit hadn't yet been invented, and you could actually understand the words being sung on most records. So much has changed huh atmo. Anyway, I remember sketching these colors and panels over and over, and still never feeling confident that I'd like the result. I never knew what Mr. Hurlow thought when he opened my letters, but he answered every single one. I'll paste them in someday too.

[Amaro Bikes]

Ouch, you were a real pain!

You would not build a bicycle for your own past you (welcome to the club)

[e-RICHIE]

To those who think the internet era gave birth to people having strong opinions, I’m here to offer a counterpoint. This note to me from Dick Swann is from 1970 when I was still a student at The Peddie School with only a mild interest in bicycles. The page is in reply to some questions I posted to him in a letter a month earlier.

So, is this what the narrator in The Living National Treasures of Japan meant when he uttered the words, “To surpass the master is to repay the debt.”?

[ron l edmiston]

-- that is too friking good..
imho.., the debt has been repaid many-times-over..

ronnie with a smile

[e-RICHIE]

I used to advertise a lot. A lot. I had contract insertion orders in most of the mainstream cycling periodicals in the pre-internet era. That was then atmo. One of my self-imposed standards going back to that first ad in 1975 was to only present information, and to resist using (as in never) superlatives, adjectives, comparisons, or dangling participles. That last one is levity, so disregard it. Anyway, I ran the gamut of studio shots with text added to the mechanical art, and began working the irreverence angle. Here's one example from 1994. I had this European figurine that I hand drew a logo on and it lived on my windowsill. For a while, he'd somehow appear on my bench next to whatever I was working on. Grab camera, insert film, take shot. Who needs Mad men anyway?! This particular number had the word "Our" deliberately struck though with a "My" seemingly handwritten in the mech as a way of poking fun at how others used the corporate "we" and "our" when in fact they were only one-man entities. Heck - I thought it was funny. By the way, these advertisements were from the pages of Velo-News.

[e-RICHIE]

Here's a picture taken at the Tour de l'Abitibi in 1982. For three years in the early eighties we drove the junior team up to Absolutely-Nowhere, Quebec for the race. The paved roads ended north of Montreal and after about 5 hours of driving you'd arrive in the Abitibi region. This was a stage race for juniors only and the most prestigious UCI event on the calendar except for maybe the Dusika Tour in Austria. The rider enjoying a Coke is Steve Wood, a young phenom from Greenwich, Connecticut. Those are also my Weejuns on the left side of the image, and the khakis I'm wearing came from Hudson's Army Navy Store on 13th and Third. The six-pack water bottle crate was from the Yale Co-op. I've lost track of Woody, Hudson's closed in the early 1990s, and Co-op became a Barnes & Noble in 1997. I still wear Weejuns, but now they're black only and I prefer the Laytons (very hard to find...) over the Penny Loafers atmo.

[happycampyer]

I think the locals refer to it as Absolument-Nulle part, Quebec.

[e-RICHIE]

Here's an old letter from Yoshi Konno, maker of 3Rensho frames in Japan. We met in 1980 at the International Cycle Show that used to occur each February at The Coliseum at Columbus Circle, and had our own little mutual admiration society thing going on from day one. At the time, we were both making frames in a similar style that could be best described (using the lens of 35 years of hindsight...) as Italian, but with attention to detail. I'm sure to get a public hanging for that characterization, but wtf atmo. Anyway, the note is about his linking me with Ishiwata so that I could import and distribute the tubing in the USA. Nothing came of it because I lacked the ambition and foresight to think outside of the little box I was living in. Data point: That vow of poverty crap is overrated; I eventually got a bigger box, a much bigger box.

I'm also happy to add that Mr. Konno's son, Shin-ichi - maker of CHERUBIM frames - is now a colleague of mine. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, and all that.

[ron l edmiston]

--- boxes come in all sizes & shapes..
so many times i have stayed within my comfort zone in my box.., even painting myself into a corner or the center..

when we delete the poverty within our mindset and find our.., "what makes us smile compensation..," we have found the box opening..

i would say you have done very well at this e-richie..

ronnie doing my best remain outside looking in --- "boxes.."

[e-RICHIE]

I used to get many letters (remember letters?) like this one from 1980. And I answered them all. Some exchanges led to friendships that lasted, and others ended up in the ether - long before that was even possible atmo. A few people even entered the trade for a while. But that was rare. My point of view then was the same as it is now: the workroom of an independent framebuilder isn't the place to learn what goes where. The economy of scale, and the rate at which things are made, simply are too small. It may be possible to "show" someone what you're doing, but it's very difficult to "teach" it. I'm long on suggesting that one works in production, or at job shops, or at some subcontractor's factory to get a taste of the many individual tasks that make up the whole. Get it drilled in by way of repetition and routine. Many don't want to hear that because the faster one can call himself a framebuilder, the sooner he can blog about it and start taking orders.

[e-RICHIE]

When I got home from a year in London working at the Witcomb family business, my intention was to return to the matriculation situation and start life as a student at Goddard College. That plan went sideways when I proposed to the school that, in return for my teaching a class in framebuilding - being fresh off the boat from an intense curriculum of sandwich fetching, coffee making, and filing brake bridges - in return for this, they'd cut me some slack on the tuition. They left that offer on the table, and I decided to continue my accidental adventure, never to sit in a classroom again atmo.

The Witcombs thought I'd fit in well with a stateside enterprise they'd entered into a few months prior, and Ernie Witcomb wrote a letter of recommendation for the folks at Witcomb USA. This company was set up to import and distribute the English frames as well as a line of industrial-made branded bicycles made in Wales. It was much later that frames made in East Haddam would appear, mostly as a result of, and a reaction to, the original business plans going awry.

During my very first few weeks employed in Connecticut, I had the chance to be a mechanic for C.Y.B.C, the local team that W.U.S.A. was sponsoring. This image shows us at the Tour d L'Est, a stage race in Quebec. That's Bill Farrell, Rich Chillingworth, Lans Christensen, Wally Herman, Jim Fraser, Damian Slivinski, and Nick Dyslin. The hair model with the smiling face attached is me. Note that Nick and I are sporting lavender-dyed jumpsuits that match the brand's corporate colors.

[e-RICHIE]

Len Preheim was a good pal. We traveled a lot together, the last time being some 20 days in northern Italy to attend the Milan Bicycle Show - we sandwiched it between visiting the workshops of every famous framebuilder known to man (so far). That was 1979. Lenny's store, Toga Bicycle Shop on Avenue B, sold hundreds of my frames between 1976 and 1982. It was an alliance made in heaven atmo.

I remember walking into the shop in 1977 (I think...) and he showed me a sketch and plan for a new team to be called Team Tempo Thunderbolts. I thought it was a God awful stupid name. Back then, everything was Such A Road Club, Clarion & Beer Wheelmen, or Dorking-Upon-Thistle CC. Now those were names.

Regardless, Lenny and I made a deal that included my supplying him with special frames. It was my first real team sponsorship. For four years, he chose the riders and I made them frames. The green and yellow paint scheme became well known in and out of the metro area, and Team Tempo Thunderbolts became a name that rolled off tongues across the country.

Here are Lenny, Howie Reynolds, Jonathan Livesay, Dana Castro, Jimmy Keogh, and Thomas Donahue. Knowing Preheim, the shot might well have been staged for an article in Interview Magazine. Lenny danced in many circles.

[e-RICHIE]

In the late 1980s Panasonic Bicycles introduced the Panasonic Individual Custom Series (PICS). It was all about how a customer could walk into a shop, get measured, and order a bicycle that - according to the marketing spiel - was the net result of 10,000 design options regarding tube lengths, frame angles, fork offsets, and wheelbase. Full page ads appeared in all the magazines showing a rider and his "one-of-a-kind" bicycle.

I guess it struck a nerve with me that Big Industry Inc was appropriating the waters that I swam in. I mean, there may be 10,000 options but I believed 9,999 were the wrong ones. So, out came the cutting mat, the X-Acto blades, the photographs, and the 3M Spray Mount. This was war atmo.

[e-RICHIE]

After a few years at Witcomb USA, I started my brand in late 1975. In February I had some bicycles at the International Cycle Show in New York. Into my booth walks Oliver Martin. Now, I know Butch from racing. He’s a legend. Two Olympics. Raced in Italy before anyone even heard of Punky Brewster. And one of the most elegant riders I ever saw. Just a summer before, I watched him take Brian Chewter to the line in a 2-up break in the last stage of the Tour de L’Est in Quebec.

I know Butch, but he and I never shared the same personal space. And I’m thinking, “Holy fucking shit. Butch Martin is standing next to me in my booth at the New York Show and talking to me about MY bicycles.” I was awestruck.

I was 23 years old and was able to miter and braze tubes, shape lugs, and knew which end of a file to insert into a file holder. But I yearned for more. I wanted what Omar had. So, I kinda’ sorta’ found a way to ask.

Could he possibly condense his entire experience with bicycle design and riding position into words I could read and understand – please, could he do that for me?

A few months later, five pages all numbered and stapled together arrived in the U.S. Mail. Butch had gifted me some of his wisdom. It was now up to me.

The words didn’t contain the “answers to life’s persistent questions…” but I do recall holding the letter in my hands some 39 years ago and thinking that my path to enlightenment starts here.

[e-RICHIE]

Forget for a moment the twists, turns, and accidental coincidences that brought me to London and, later into my trade. I do remember vividly imagining what was in store for me as I prepared for the trip, then flew to Heathrow, and finally walked through the front doors on Tanner Hill in Deptford.

I liked nice bicycles and thought they were beautiful. It never occurred to me how they were made. My fantasy was that I’d arrive at a place more like a lab, with folks in white coats, and nice Formica bench tops all around. “Which way to radiology?“, and all that kinda’ stuff.

Witcomb Lightweight Cycles was a typical bare-bones, made-by-hand workshop and all that it implies. Low ceilings. An outhouse. Dusty. Just the basics. No fixtures or alignment tables. There were a few Rube Goldberg-y contraptions that held one thing, balanced another, and let you quickly complete a task.

The workers there were masters of these “tools” and approached framebuilding from a completely pragmatic stance. No one ever paused, took a step back, and lined up a thumb with a lug to take a measure of its’ symmetry or shape. Cutting and joining metal was a job of work, not a calling. It was a far cry from the PMS (Precious Maker Syndrome) that dots the landscape now.

I never got to make a frame during my entire stay in England, but the experience became the best possible foundation for what would follow some years later. Their no-nonsense attitude got into my DNA early, and has remained.

Here’s David Cotton at his bench, about fourteen feet from where I once stood. His station was down below by the refrigerator and coffee making area. Good times atmo.