About us

I’ve ridden and fiddled with bikes for lots of years now. In college, building high-end bikes from frames and components helped pay my way. I’ve toured a great deal of California, from San Diego to Santa Cruz, and living in Amsterdam for a year, used a bike for primary transportation. For several periods I’ve had only a bike for wheels, and living in Portland, it’s the only way to go of course.

In design, I have done a variety of things in the past, nearly all of which ultimately contributed to the development of the hardwood bicycle. After college, I founded Moore Lambert Industries in Torrance California, one of the first companies to design and manufacture energy-saving lighting fixtures. We were a vertically integrated company with full metal and plastics fabrication. After five years I sold that company and escaped to the Northwest to raise a family, fish and drink actual beer.

Recreation got old shortly, so I soon founded Wheeler Aircraft to design and manufacture composite kit aircraft. We grew to 70 employees and manufactured the Wheeler Express, the first all-composite, 200mph, four-passenger kit airplane. Ok, so that wasn’t such a green project, but it was educational and serious fun in oh-so-many ways. Again, this company was vertically integrated, so we produced nearly everything; welded and machined parts, the windows, and of course the composite parts. I became a licensed aircraft mechanic in the process, learned some aerobatics, landed in nearly every state in the union, and worked on a variety of aircraft types just for fun.

To commute to the airport, I replaced my 1977 Nishiki Ultra Tour touring bike, which I still have and love, with a 1990 Bridgestone CB-1 hybrid, which I still have and love. In the Bridgestone catalog of that time, Grant Peterson, now the owner of Rivendell Bicycles, had a couple of articles on bicycling and the environment which caught my environmentally conscious eye. Previously I was kind of swept along in the healthy/green thing about bikes, but his writers pointed out that the production of man-made materials for bicycles is incredibly polluting. The use of a bicycle for transportaton diminishes the impact, but still it was clearly a problem with no solution at the time. But I had airplane on the brain at the time, so I filed that information away and went on to incidentally learn about wood as an excellent aircraft material while researching composites.

Following the aircraft phase, I had the opportunity to design and produce a variety of wood products, and one day in early 2007 I looked around the shop and realized I probably had everything necessary to produce a sustainable bicycle of wood, and based on what I’d learned about wood, it would be an excellent ride, along with other advantages. Being in Portland at the time and relying almost solely on bikes for transportation lent cosmic momentum to the idea, so I began design work and enlisted the help of my son Stuart who is a bike nut and was just finishing college. He only had until the end of summer, when he was entering training as a Marine Corps fighter pilot. I think his main qualification for that job was he’d watched ‘Top Gun’ at least 200 times and could pose convincingly and quote any of the dialog appropriately. Anyway, he jumped right in and we spent the summer designing and testing. By September we knew all the best brew pubs around, had built our first bike and we knew it was good. My other son Clayton, and my daughter Samantha then pitched in to move us into production. Sam helped in the shop by wiring machines and organizing, then did a stint of handwork on the frames and a good deal of the bicycle assembly. She was our wrench wench for several months, and drew rave reviews for her skills. Clayton has worked in all phases of the biz from setting up our website servers to nearly all the metalwork, helping with the website itself, assembling and finishing frames and building bikes. He has also helped man the various shows we've attended.The bikes are way better than we dreamed, prettier too. And darned if Stu didn’t turn out to be a dead ringer for Maverick once he got his aviator sunglasses and all that pilot gear. He’s got a better bicycle than Maverick though.

 

Stu, Ken, Sam, Clayton and Barkley Wheeler

Semper Velo