Richard Sachs, the master bike builder, doesn’t do high-performance materials (just steel). But for a hand-built bike from him, you must wait years and pay top dollar. Here’s why.

 

by Ben Hewitt

Len Janssen wanted a bike built just for him. So a few years ago he made the trip to rural Connecticut to meet Richard Sachs. There, Sachs went straight to work, poking and prodding him with a tape measure, appraising his sternum and arm and femur with obsessive precision. Sachs rode with Janssen, constantly circling him, observing the intimate, nuanced relationship between rider and bike. Are his shoulders and chest open while climbing? Does he stretch uncomfortably to reach the handlebar drops? Do his hips rock side to side as he pedals? After about four hours, Janssen left Sachs with nothing but a promise that, someday, maybe years from then, his frame would be ready. Sachs had a deposit check, but no delivery date, final price, or pledges of performance were given. 

“A bike is just a tool, and a frame is part of that tool,” Sachs insists. “My bikes aren’t going to make you a faster or better rider.”

Janssen, a CFO in Indiana who pedals 5,000 miles a year, was not dissuaded by Sachs’s warning — and he is not alone in his desire to ride a bicycle that was designed solely for him. The custom-frame industry has exploded in recent years as riders are won over by the personalized fit and handcrafted allure of having bicycles fabricated one by one, under the discerning eye of master builders like Sacha White (see “America’s Top Bike Builders,” on page 3). “In an era when most everything is made in Asia to generic specifications, riders are saying, ‘You know what? I want something that’s more me,’ ” says Don Walker, proprietor of Don Walker Cycles and founder of the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS). “Richard is a big reason it’s happening. He’s a little eccentric and definitely opinionated.” (According to urbandictionary.com, Sachs coined the acronym ATMO — “according to my opinion.”) “But he’s also entirely selfless and willing to share his knowledge.”

It’s not a role Sachs ever imagined for himself. But with nearly 40 years of experience, 4,000 frames, and a well-established reputation as the Zen sage of frame building, the self-described recluse unexpectedly finds himself at the fore of the biggest hand-built bicycle boom in, well, ever. 

Sachs began building after being rejected from a bike-repair position at a shop in Burlington, Vermont. He sent a letter of interest to 30 European frame shops — “It was basically a way to get back at the people who denied me the job” — and ended up at Witcomb Lightweight Cycles in London, at the time a leading builder of race-quality frames. In 1975, after returning to the States, he launched Richard Sachs Cycles. He was then one of the only custom bicycle makers in America. (This year’s NAHBS drew 176 exhibitors, up from only 23 at the first show in 2005.) 

Major bike manufacturers are not threatened. “Modern mass-produced bikes are so damn good,” says Sachs from his perch on a stool in the center of his shop, which is cluttered with the tools of his trade: bare metal tubes, torches, vices, and files. A nearly complete frame sits on a workbench: Free of paint, Sachs’s intricate metalwork is on full display. “For $1,500, anyone can buy a bike that’s capable of racing at the pro level,” he says. Indeed, when Lance Armstrong launched his post-cancer Tour de France comeback in 1999, he famously did so atop a carbon-fiber Trek.