A Q&A with the dean of American framebuilding on his new book series, the lessons of 50 years in the business, and why he will never make a perfect frame. The original version of this interview with Joe Lindsey lives on Escape Collective and has many, many photographs too! Link here.
Richard Sachs wants to make it clear that he is not retiring. Even as the celebrated framebuilder is past a half-century in the business, he’s still going to the workbench every day because he finds purpose and fulfillment in the work.
Last year, however, Sachs did start to put the final touches on another long-term project: a series of slim books that is part memoir, part handbook, part meditation, and thoroughly, authentically Richard Sachs. Titled Arrange Disorder, the series traces his life and career arc, and is an attempt to distill the decades of writing – on his website, in forums, and in his unpublished journals – and share the most meaningful parts.
There are four volumes so far, with more planned; part four is just out now. The books are non-linear, and that’s by design. “I don’t want each particular volume to be like, ‘the correspondence book’ or ‘the old catalogs,’” he said. “I’d like each book to have a cross-section of things.”
Sachs, himself, is in many ways an open book. He’s not shy about sharing his honest assessment of the custom framebuilding industry today, for instance. Agree with him or not, after more than 50 years at the bench, he’s earned the right. But Sachs isn’t trying to be framebuilding’s metaphorical torchbearer, just a literal one, and his frank and critical eye extends to his own work (I can picture his eyes rolling as he reads that “dean of American framebuilding” line above, even if it is true).
In our discussion below, Sachs talked about the books, how they came to be and what they represent, but he also spoke openly about his own struggles with imposter syndrome and his acceptance and embrace of the imperfections inherent in making machines by hand. Richard Sachs knows he will never make the perfect bicycle, and he’s perfectly OK with that.
This interview has been edited for clarity and, believe it or not, length.
Joe Lindsey: Arrange Disorder is a collection of mostly existing writings. Did you write anything new for this that’s not on your website?
Richard Sachs: Yeah, because not everything is on my website, which is where, up until about COVID, anything I wrote was deposited there, mainly for future reference or use. By the time the aughts were coming and going, I realized I had spent – willingly, of course – an inordinate amount of time on forums and listservs and whatnot that were primarily devoted to framebuilding. I realized, like, “I got a lot of stuff,” and I thought if I can go back and find all the stuff that I think should be kept or permanent for myself, I’m going to paste it in someplace else, and that became, you know, the original page.
People might think that I’m on the internet all day, but the thing is, I don’t use the phone. I don’t have customers [walking in] and whatnot, so it’s my way of keeping myself aware of what’s going on out in the real world, and I really wanted all this stuff to be in one place. And then in the middle of our time in the woods [Sachs moved to rural New Hampshire for a period of time. – Ed.], I started thinking about the bigger picture, and I thought, “Well, I have all this stuff written, you know, dozens or scores or even hundreds of entries. How about if I start writing for myself rather than just mining my old comments and replies to other people?”
So I made it a point to go up into the loft, you know, maybe five or six days a week, and grab something, whether it was a catalog of mine from 1981, or a letter I received from somebody or God knows what, and then simply sit in the chair and write something about it. At first it was forced, but then it became kind of something I looked forward to, and then little by little, time and the years passed, and one day, probably in 2005, I took the motherload of it, I did a ‘select all,’ and grabbed the entirety of what was there at that point, and I pasted it into a Word doc, and I had over 600,000 words.
JL: Wow, 600,000!
RS: Yeah, that’s when I realized, “Holy shit, there’s something here.” I had a client who was in publishing and he was reading my entries regularly. He got in touch with me and said, “You know, you got a book here,” so of course affirmation is like a drug, for me at least, and so Deb [Richard’s wife – Ed.] and I went to Boston and spent the day at their offices, and he proposed to me that we make a book. So that’s the beginning of the next thing.
So long story short, in in my head, I thought, “Well, I already have the book. We simply have to take everything that’s on my website and make it look good. And somebody with some editing skills would tell me what shouldn’t be there, and then voila, we publish.” But of course, I realized it wasn’t that simple.
This guy had an editor assigned to me, and they thought, “Well, it really needs to be a book, not a bunch of essays.” Unless your name is Emerson, nobody wants to read a book of essays. They suggested I get a ghostwriter. I knew a woman from New York City who had done some work that included me in a book that she published for a museum, and she agreed to do it. About four months later, she got hired by the New York Times.
I was lingering for a year or two, and I kept writing on my own. Then a friend of mine from Connecticut, who taught at Yale, pushed me into writing everything in a memoir form. However, none of it resembled what I’m doing now, and then I kept thinking, “OK, now we have about 300 pages of a book. When do we do something about it?”
So I found somebody else in the bicycle and the publishing business, who had an old editor friend in New York who he thought I should talk to because they have a company that could maybe get me to the next level. And he says, “Well, we could find you an agent. But we think it is a little too soon for that. What you need is a killer proposal, because that will get you an agent. So he gave me a tiered list of how they bill and what you get for each level, and it was like going to a car wash. You just want the car washed, or you want the thing on your rearview mirror that smells nice? I figured I’ll take a chance. I’ve already spent about $30,000 with my first editor, pre-production editor, thinking we would just roll this along, and I just thought “Well, I’m in pretty deep now.”
So ultimately, after about 18 months of emails and maybe one or two phone conversations, they sent me the proposal that I paid $10,000 for, and I thought “Oh my God, this is not me. They’ve kind of created a persona based on everything they read.” In addition to getting your killer proposal, they give you 10 [agent] names and a mock email to send to each of those names. They were handpicked and thought they would be the best targets for this killer proposal. So all of them were strikeouts, and I thought, “Holy shit! I didn’t anticipate this. I thought like we’re good to go.” So I wrote to them and I said, “Hey, I didn’t really think this was going to be the way it ended up, but I spent almost two years. I did everything that you asked me to do, and I got nothing.” And the replay was basically, “Well, for another you know $2000 we could give you 15 names that we think would be good.” I thought, “I don’t think so.”
So there was a lull, and then I thought, “I got to go back to what feels right.” What I felt was right, what I wanted to do, was “let’s give the public a way to read what was already written and continue writing.” So I thought about it for a while, and I had known my friend John Segal from the ’90s on several levels, and I knew he was also a book designer [and Escape member, as John noted when graciously furnishing the photos used to illustrate this article – Ed.]. So I contacted him. I told him everything I just told you. I thought, “I got nothing to lose. This is what I envision. What do you think?”
This is how I got here. These are the things that inspired me.
–Sachs, on the reason he started the Arrange Disorder series.
And before you know it, within a year, we had taken enough content to create the first small book of 72 pages. He and I both had a friend in West Haven that had a huge publishing and printing business called GHP Media and, of course, I could have probably shopped this overseas and gotten the printing done for a third of the cost, but GHP Media was just like a candy store worth of presentation and colors and capabilities, and John’s best friend, Ted, worked there, so we decided to give Ted the business. And then the first one came out. I kind of did my best to promote it. We went immediately to the second one. There was a little lull, and we did the third one, and now we’re doing the fourth one.
So that’s how I arrived here. If somebody says to me, “Oh, we heard you have a manuscript or a memoir,” I’ll talk to them [about a different book]. But the driver here and my motivation remains these precious little books of just enough information so that I could say, “This is how I got here. These are the things that inspired me. These are the places in my life where I felt or remain vulnerable,” and you know, just kind of roll it forward.
JL: So, you described this long circle, which took years of going to various agents and ghostwriters and agent representatives and all of this kind of thing, only to come back to where you started, doing most of this yourself. And so this is something that basically you and John put together entirely from design to editing to all of that kind of stuff. Correct?
RS: There’s nobody else involved except for Ted and whoever works at the printing press. Actually, the printing press is bigger than my little town here, so I shouldn’t really call it a printing press. So that brings us back to the present. I have to tell you: The fact that these things are small books, the inspiration for that, I have to give mostly, if not entirely, to [Columbus Tubing CEO] Antonio Colombo over in Europe.
When I was over there giving a presentation for the 100th anniversary [of Columbus], he also has this really nice art gallery, which I think is his primary interest. And every time they did a presentation or a gallery opening, they’d create a book that goes with it. And he had a whole wall of books that were all about the size of a DVD case with a spine, so that you could read it if you turn your head. And I thought these were pretty cool because the one he did on the show that I was involved with was a set of three books, and I came home with I think one or two sets, and they’ve always been something that I thought “Oh, these are so beautiful that you don’t even want to open them.” They’re just like little pieces of architecture.
So when I was chatting with John about this several years ago, I sent him all these small books that I had been saving through the years, and I said, “This is the direction I want to go.” What’s inside is important, but I also think that I wouldn’t mind turning heads with just what these things actually look like or feel like in your hand.
JL: I wasn’t sure what it would be when you offered to send them, and when I got them, I got this immediate sense of the quality and the intentionality behind everything about it, from the design to the printing, everything. It feels very much like a Richie Sachs project, honestly, because it’s very carefully considered.
RS: Yeah, I appreciate that, and that’s really the goal. Because in this era we’re living, where everything is digital, on a platform or social media or Substack, I wanted to go completely the other direction. Once I put myself through the agency and the ghostwriter and pre-production editor thing, I thought, “These are going to be like my bikes.” You know, nobody’s going to touch them unless they’re part of the inner circle.
JL: You said something early on about how you copy-pasted everything into a Word doc and realized that you had some 600,000 words of writings. The editor in me has to know: How the hell did you edit that down into four small 72-page books?
RS: Well, I haven’t. I think with luck and enough heartbeats, four books will become 14. Everything is kind of like a moving target. But what John and I envision at this point is that there are certain themes in each book that I think will continue, but I don’t want each particular volume to be like, ‘the correspondence book’ or ‘the old catalogs.’ I’d like each book to have like a cross section of things. Even if it’s a poem I wrote or some story that I wrote about what I do in the morning at 6:15 when I take my dog to the cemetery, or anything. I want people to be exposed to the fact that I’m a human being. I’m not simply a bikemaker who’s trying to put down in print what it takes to be a bikemaker.
JL: That said, you write a lot about the process of becoming a bikemaker and this journey of expertise. And it seems like your view for sure is that it comes only with time, and that seems like a very hard lesson at a time when there’s always a faster way. I’m curious how your understanding of that process deepened over the decades of your work.
RS: Well, I’d say it began to crystallize in the internet era, which for me is roughly from 1999 forward. Because I kind of think that’s when I started participating, like daily, on internet things. There’s really no nice way for me to say this, but I think that the 21st century interest in framebuilding, which came kind of in the internet era as a result of forums and NAHBS and other bike shows and websites that heralded the next big thing in framebuilding, I kept seeing this complete lack of practice, and lack of business acumen, and lack of any really deep participation in the sport of riding a bike.
It seemed like a lot of people, if not most people, wanted to associate framebuilding with craft and with the maker movement, and I kind of thought, “Well, that’s very, very nice, but these are vehicles, and people take them on the open road, and I think that one needs a certain amount of practice and supervision to be able to say without a doubt that you can stand behind your work.”
I’m sure a lot of people hate on me because I’m one of those guys that says, “You can’t do it.”
It’s not a question of, “My bikes have a stainless steel head badge,” or, “My dropouts double as a bottle opener,” or God knows what. There was so much of that stuff for the first 10 or 15 years of the internet, at least my internet, that I kind of thought, “I don’t want to be a prick about it, but you don’t have a fucking clue what you’re doing.” I would never actually say that, but I think that I was able to use my wordsmithing to get that message across.
And you know, I’m sure a lot of people hate on me because I’m one of those guys that says, “You can’t do it.” But I think that in a perfect world, people would realize that everything is practice. You simply can’t take a course or download a book on framebuilding written by somebody who made a frame and start whacking out frames, because there’s a certain responsibility that comes with it when somebody else uses it on the road or the trail, and I wanted to somehow keep the bar high. I realized that mastery comes at a price, and that price includes time and practice. A lot of people will say, “It’s easy for you to say; you went to England. I can’t go to Europe. I can’t leave my family.” And I’m thinking, “I gave up my college career and anything I could have maybe benefited from by having a degree to work at a bench.”
When I went to England, I didn’t go there to leave a framebuilder. I went there to kill some time before I was going to start college, which, for other reasons that have nothing to do with this book or this conversation, never happened. So I basically stayed in it. But people will say, “Well, nobody’s making these things anymore. So how am I supposed to find a place that can take me in as a worker if everything now is made in a factory?” Bingo, that’s the market speaking. If they can make really fine bikes in China or Taiwan or wherever, and the need for a framebuilder in the first place isn’t what it was in, like, 1960 or 1980 or whenever, then why do you think that you can make a living doing this?
And I think most people never really thought it through, so I wanted to be the person that would maybe, with the best intention, try to handhold whoever had a question or started a conversation about, “How do you do this?” Or, “What tool do you use for this purpose?” I wanted to give them the information, so that’s when I started realizing that there’s a real line between a couple of the generations that are part of the framebuilding community now.
I actually don’t even care too much what happens after me, but I do think that if somebody wants to be a part of this now, they really need to think critically about the product, the market, their own need to make a living, and all the stuff that I’m writing or rehashing touches on that. I don’t want to dramatize it too much, but in volume one I wrote about how, in The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi tells the kid, “I’m not going to give you the information or the wisdom; you have to steal it from me.” He doesn’t actually say that, but that’s the vibe I get, and I feel like there’s some value in that.
JL: That you have to do it the hard way because the hard way is the only way.
RS: I’m not really ready to characterize it that way. OK, it’s not hard. It’s simply repetition. Back in the really old days when I was still writing longform, I was telling people you have to practice the three R’s: repetition, routine, and relentlessness. And I kind of made that up because it sounded really like a sing-song way to describe what I was trying to get across. But people don’t want to miter brake bridges for three weeks before they could say they know how to miter a brake bridge, or they don’t want to file dropouts for six months. They want to look at a YouTube and say, “OK, that’s how you do it. Bam, I’ll be doing that after breakfast tomorrow.” And I’m the one telling them that I don’t think that’s a very prudent approach to this.
JL: I was going to ask you about that. There seems to be almost a disconnect where it sounds like people are coming to you saying, “Where do I apprentice for something like this now?” You know, to have the opportunity that you had with Witcomb. But at the same time, if that opportunity were there, it sounds like you’re saying that you think they wouldn’t necessarily avail themselves of it because it’s just too long and kind of a dreary drudgery – a pain in the ass.
RS: Well, there’s a couple things going on here. First of all, as I mentioned before, I didn’t go to England to study framebuilding. I wasn’t an apprentice. I didn’t have an apprenticeship. I simply was there to spend 10 months before college was going to start for me. As an 18-, 19-year-old, I became fascinated with the working-class environment that I kind of threw myself into. I didn’t get paid. I spent the entire time there living off of whatever money my mother would send me from the first year’s tuition that we were saving until I got home.
The term ‘apprenticeship’ I think is probably among the most misused terms in my trade because I don’t know any place where apprenticeships existed. The one-man-one-frame thing was not a thing when I started. I think in America it ended up being that way by the time the ’70s were over, and there’s a lot of independent guys who made it through that decade that stayed one-man shops. But that’s really – and I get these two words confused – that’s either an anomaly or an anachronism. [What Sachs is describing actually sounds like both. -Ed]
The way to learn how to do this is not from some apprenticeship. It’s simply to go to a production shop and work, and Witcomb was a production shop. People don’t really think of it that way, but they had probably four full-time framebuilders and a bunch of, like, neighborhood kids and people like me who showed up, and they gave you a bench vise and some tools and if you finished packing boxes, or making coffee, or going out for sandwiches, they’d say, “Here, let me show you how to file this.” And anytime they needed one of these things filed, they’d give it to you. But basically, I stood around and exposed myself to a full staff of people making bikes around me, five days a week for nearly a year. So I came away absorbing a fair amount of stuff, but I didn’t leave even having made a single bike.
People can’t even conceive of, “Well what are you gonna do to get what you want?” No, an app doesn’t exist. No, you can’t watch a YouTube and become this. You don’t want to go to Taiwan or to Giant or to Panasonic or to whatever factory you might want to name and work there for two years so that you can get a sense of things. “Well, I can’t. Who would take care of my dog or my daughter?” Basically, it’s like everybody has a reason for not wanting to practice or even make the first attempt.
So back to this conversation on the books, it’s like I’m mapping out, from different points of my life, what I saw, what I wanted, what turned me on, what turned me off, what inspired me, and if you could read it and come away thinking, “Well, if I want to really do this, perhaps like Richard did, then I know now what tools I need in my life toolbox to get there.”
JL: A lot about this industry has changed in the last 30 or so years. One example you mentioned in Arrange Disorder is the profile of you in Bicycle Guide, and you mentioned that story – which was a cover story – and the role it played in elevating your profile. And those days are long gone, would you agree? The days when a media hit, for lack of a better term, could be that important for a builder?
RS: Well, yeah. I never asked Chris [Koch] or Mike Furman why or how they ended up calling me rather than somebody else. I simply thought, “Holy fucking shit,” and that was before they showed up for three days to do the story. When I pulled the magazine out of the mailbox months later, I was awestruck because they never told me what the goal of their presence was. I didn’t even know if it was going to be a generic story about how people make frames or whatever. So they put me on the cover and made me “that guy.” Like I said before: “Affirmation. Holy shit!” And that was 36 years ago, so I was still in my 30s, and I had just barely been at the workbench for, like, two decades. I’ll take it. Like, believe me, I’m not throwing this back.
But over time, particularly once 20 or 30 years passed, I kept coming back to that and thinking, “How did this happen?” It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, how do I live up to that? On the other hand, how do I live this down? Because every so often I’ll find a copy in my shop and I’ll look at it and wonder if the ink is dried yet, because obviously it helped me immensely, but it was also like I didn’t really think I was “that guy.” I didn’t think I was worthy of this kind of stardom, if you will. But like I said a moment ago, I wasn’t gonna go and tell people, “Oh no, that’s really not what I do here.” I didn’t really even take it and promote it until the early aughts or teens, 15 or 20 years since they printed it. It happened 30 years ago [36, actually. – Ed], and it’s like I’m not even sure I was that guy when they were here, and I certainly don’t know if I’m that guy now.
JL: It’s interesting you mentioned the feeling of how do you live up to it? How do you live it down? Because I think I think that would be really interesting for people to know that that even someone like yourself struggled with the weight of that. I don’t know if I want to go so far as to call it imposter syndrome, but this idea that you’ve had this reputation or notoriety as an archetype of framebuilding and now that sort of defines you, and I’m curious how that evolved for you over the years. Do you still suffer from self-doubt? I certainly do.
RS: 24/7. When Larry and Sue, my first pre-production editors back in 2014, encouraged me to start writing a book rather than compiling all my essays and adding them as we go, I wrote deeply about what you’ve mentioned. Imposter syndrome is a term I had never heard until I think [Bruce] Springsteen used it to describe his own existence in an interview. It was like a light went on. I think there’s several entries in each of the three books so far, and definitely in the fourth that’s coming up, where I talk about what I didn’t know, or the fact that sometimes you make these things and three days in, you realize you’ve got to dumpster this because it’s not going your way.
Every single thing that I do or touch is one step away from being ballast.
Everything you’re doing is a collaboration. It’s not like because Richard Sachs has been making bikes for 25 years or 35 years or 50 years that there’s some magic switch he flicks in the morning. Every single thing that I do or touch is one step away from being ballast or two pieces of what it once was, if not more, because I could hacksaw it up. And I think the book speaks to that in some ways, and I want people to know that there’s a level of vulnerability that comes with standing at the bench and realizing, “Oh, I got nobody to ask if I have a question because there’s nobody left doing this,” and I mean that literally.
When I was 25 or 30, there was still a complete landscape of real framebuilders in Europe that were second-generation or maybe third. If you had the right connections, you could maybe write to them or give them a call or send them a fax and say, “Look, I’m kind of struggling with this. Is it something that maybe you could help me with?” That doesn’t exist anymore. Basically, now everybody goes on, like, the frame forum or the framebuilder’s Facebook page, and it’s kind of like the dumb leading the blind, because there’s no full-timers directing the traffic there. And before you know it, everything that they ask and answer becomes cached, and somebody will come in a year or two later, and do a search and find. But the answer’s not rooted in reality.
So that’s an everyday struggle emotionally for me because I really came into framebuilding when it was the top of the food chain in the bike business. When I used to go to trade shows in the ’70s and even through the ’80s, industrial-made bikes were not really considered the highest of the highest class, even though they might put Campagnolo parts on them, or have a Reynolds tubing decal or whatever. If you wanted something that was as close to being unique and compromise-free and fit and had a proven design, you bought a frame from a shop that made frames, not from a bicycle company. That’s all changed now. That’s completely different, as we both know. I just really bought into the construct, and for me, that’s part of the story. The construct is that these men and their experiences with the peloton, either as former racers or suppliers to this team or that team, knew something that other people without that experience could never know.
In boxing, you have the cut man in your corner, and when you’re in the ring, the cut man and the trainer are the ones that know what you’re capable of. And I always thought, although I don’t think it as much anymore, that the framebuilder, whether it was Ernesto [Colnago] or Faliero [Masi] or Ugo [de Rosa] or whoever it was, they knew what they knew, and the people who were racing on their bikes had complete faith in what they offered, whatever changes they suggested, even if it was like a sugar pill or whatever, a placebo. I kind of felt like that’s the model that I wanted my adult life to have some similarity or some overlap with. And before you know it, everybody grows up, their kids don’t want to become part of the business, and framebuilding kind of vaporizes.
And on the other side of the conveyor belt, all the industrial-made factories are doing superb work. Some are doing the kind of fabrication that I couldn’t even dream of, and I’m still working at my bench. I think my bikes are mighty fine, so I’m not trying to compare what I do with what they do and say theirs are better. But I think that if you don’t come into this now in the 21st century with some kind of depth of experience, whether it’s practice at the bench or some liaison with a team or some racers, that you’re really running at a deficit because what do you have left? Well, you got a stainless steel head badge and a dropout that doubles as a bottle opener. I’m really catty about it because I think that’s the way my life has gone. I don’t really want to be condescending, and I don’t really want to be that guy who says you can’t do it. I’m simply trying to lead softly and with intention.
JL: So, part of what I hear you saying is that when you started out, there were these people who you could go to, and there’s you now filling that role for other people, but there’s not really anybody left like that for you. You are in this position of sort of forging new paths where the only people who’ve been here before are gone now, and so you have to figure it out for yourself. You can help other people figure it out too, but for you, you have to figure it out yourself.
RS: Yeah, and you probably know this about me if you’ve followed through the years, but I think by the time the ’90s rolled around, which at this point is a long time ago, I wasn’t even getting inspiration from our own industry. I had to look around and I had to absorb [outside influences], whether it was like a George Nakashima, or the A. Laubin Oboe Company in New York. That was a family business that has now been sold to a non-family member.
Whether it was a guitar maker in Brooklyn, whatever it was, I found the inspiration that I need to drive myself forward is non-existent in my own bubble. So I took it upon myself to expand my radar, and before you know it, everything that inspires me to make my bikes better or to pay more attention to what I’m doing on a daily basis comes from outside of our industry and our sport. And it’s been like that for decades.
JL: I think I know the answer to this next question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. And that is, after decades of doing this, do you leave your bench every day still feeling like you’ve learned something? And what is it that keeps you engaged and interested?
RS: Well, I’ve never made the same bike twice. I’m not sure I’d want to make the same bike twice, even though my bikes have level top tubes and the forks that I make, and all the tube ends are joined with lugs, and I turn on the torch to do the joining. Each bike is unique because I have to make it or somehow design it for the client who ordered it. Every time you pick up a bunch of material, and pick up a bunch of tools, and then you take all of that over to the fixture, or whatever it is you use to hold them so that ultimately it might start looking like a bike frame, there’s no way that any single operation or operations together ever happen the same way. They happen within a certain range of similarity.
Not that I have any experience with it, so I’m riffing here, but it’s probably like baking, or it’s probably like making a cabinet out of wood. There are some pieces of wood that simply do not want to be a cabinet, or a guitar, or a bookshelf. And sometimes when you’re baking a cake, I suppose that if you have a momentary lapse of attention, and you add one more pinch or one extra stir of something, all of these things are going to make the end result different. And when I started realizing that those differences existed, at first it was like, “What do I have to do to tame the beast?” That’s a term I use too much. Look, I’ve been doing this for like a million years, and I still get to a certain point where the beast tames me, or the beast tells me, “This is what I want to be today.”
So, if I can come within a few percentage points of having it come out the way I wanted it to, or planned, or is acceptable for both me and the potential client, then that becomes a finished product. But I think the acceptance of the small idiosyncrasies within the range that we’re making, that becomes part of the thing too. And rather than become anxious that it didn’t go 100% the way I planned, or something looks differently than I thought it would after I finish carving it, rather than stew on it, I started finding ways to at least accept it or celebrate the fact that I’m making a fucking handmade bike.
I can’t make the same bike twice. Because if I ever do, there would be no reason for me to continue.
I follow horology fairly closely, and even if you take a Philippe Dufour watch or one made by Svend Andersen or whoever, it could be the most beautiful piece. It could have the most painstakingly precise inners, and finishing, and everything is perfect. But it still will not tell time as accurately as your iPhone, right? So how do you reconcile that? Well, at first, I thought it’s not my job to reconcile that. It’s like, “You know, there’s a certain humanity in that I’m making them by hand, and if you want something that looks just like the 400 that was made before it, and the 700 that was made after it on that given day, then get yourself a Giant, or get yourself a Trek.” I’m not trying to create a market for handmade, hand-wrought goods that happen to be bicycles, but I am trying to say to you that after five decades and then some of doing this I can’t make the same bike twice. Because if I ever do, there would be no reason for me to continue.
Part of that sentiment is stolen or borrowed from an interview I heard on NPR years ago. Do you know the ceramicist Eva Zeisel?
JL: No, I don’t.
RS: She died in 2011. So in 2005, I was listening to an interview that Jennifer Ludden of NPR did with Zeisel, who was also an industrial designer. At the end of the interview, Jennifer Ludden was praising Zeisel for doing something that looked perfect to her, and she interrupted Jennifer Ludden and she said, “Oh no, if you try to do something perfect, I think this is the last time you do anything. If you feel this is when you have now reached perfection, then there can’t be anything beyond it.” And when I heard those words, I thought, “Holy shit! That’s what I’m feeling here!”
But I don’t have the depth of experience in public speaking or presentation to actually articulate it that way. So I kind of mined the quote and I wrote a story about it. And it says I’m not here making waffles, so I don’t have a waffle iron. If you want a waffle, you know, go to the waffle iron bike company, and you won’t have to worry, because they’re basically making clones of whatever it is the people in the design department mapped out for them for that year or for that model.
JL: That answers the next question that I was going to have for you, which is: have you ever walked away from the bench feeling like, “I just made the perfect bicycle”?
RS: No. People have asked me that question before, and I’ve gotten close, but I’ve never gotten to 100%. There have been fewer than maybe a dozen bikes in my life that I thought, “Man, I’m on a fucking roll here,” because you disregard the fact that the bike has to fit and work, mainly meaning the layout of the geometry has to accommodate the rider and his morphology and strengths, and also has to carve turns and instill confidence.
So if we just talk about the fabrication process – if everything goes completely stress-free, and the brazing is 100%, and the metalwork that you put in to make it beautiful before it’s painted is just so, then you could consider all of that perfect or 100%. I’ve gotten really close, but on like a dozen or so, where if we have to use a rating system, I might have gotten above 95%. There’s a story or three in these books where I talk about how you know you’re done because the files tell you. If you lay one more file stroke in, then you’ve kind of ruined all the ones that precede it. I know that situation intimately.
JL: I wanted to ask about something you mentioned in the books. There’s a story in volume two, where you mention a guy by the name of Nick Dyslin and the recommendation letter he wrote to Witcomb. I thought that captured a lot of the serendipity around our lives. If Nick hadn’t written that letter for you, you might never have started at Witcomb. So, I’m curious, what your views are about the role of serendipity in you finding a career that it seems like you were meant to do?
RS: Well, I certainly am appreciative of fate. I’ve described it this way after the fact, because while it was happening, I didn’t really have the self-awareness to know it, but if you remain light enough, like a balloon, and let the winds take you, then I think you’re in good hands. If you’re somebody who second guesses everything, or needs some kind of reinforcement, you know, from others to say, “Don’t worry, you’ll be OK,” I’m not sure it would work the same way. Nick’s part in my journey is immensely important, and it’s definitely a high water mark. But if you have a moment, I wanted to tell you what preceded that. [Click the sidebar for the full story – Ed.]
So anyway, where does Nick fit into this? Nick was the head salesman [at Witcomb USA]. Nick and his wife Lisa were the people I lived with, you know, when I moved to Connecticut, and nobody had any money. So Nick and I and Peter would drive to work every day at Witcomb USA, and Nick had something to do because he could sell like the outdoor sports stuff that Ed was the agent for, but Peter and I really didn’t have much to do until everything blew up.
So the funny thing was, when I was in England, Ernie said something to Nick about this boy that was working there, and Nick said to Ernie, and I have all the letters because Ernie gave me them, “Richard Sachs is a good guy. I think he would fit in really well. So we would definitely recommend him,” and that’s an invaluable fork in the road for me. But the irony is, I had never known anybody by the name of Nick Dyslin.
JL: Yeah, you said that you’d never met him at that point. It’s just like an irony that you get this recommendation from somebody who you didn’t really know.
RS: I didn’t know him at all. Nick ended up being like both a brother and a father figure to me for the duration. I mean, he’s in his ’80s now, and I’m in my ’70s, and we keep in touch mostly on his birthday in May. Once he left Connecticut after the entire Witcomb thing came and went, he moved up to Lake Placid and stayed in a different lane than the one that we were in. But he’s just one example of the complete serendipity that my life is filled with. People know I’m a framebuilder, and I’m like, “Oh, whatever, I have notoriety,” but they don’t really know.
Unlike all the guys who went to NAHBS, or you know, went to UBI or talk about how they want to be a framebuilder, the difference is I didn’t want to do this, and yet here I am, 54 years later. Peter [Weigle] is the same way. Peter was over there at Witcomb USA because Ed had hired him as a salesperson, but he sent him over to England for two or three months to get firsthand experience, so that his presence in Connecticut would be legitimized by the fact that he worked at the same benches that the bikes were made at.
So we became friends when he moved to England because I was there I think about a month or six weeks before he showed up, and the two of us are probably among the most long-standing entities in our end of the business all these years, and neither of us entered the room to become a framebuilder. So to me, that is like the ultimate irony, but it also speaks to the fact that you have to be resilient and you have to accept fate, and you have to just know when the decision is right to go right or go left or go backwards even.
JL: 54 years is a long time to build bikes, and I know that you have evolved your process of the business side too. You took your book of orders and wound that down in 2018, and now you basically open one year at a time. Was that a conscious choice because you’re looking at, “I’m not going to do this for forever,” or were there other things behind it?
RS: Well, I expect to do it forever, so there’s no end game in sight. Believe me, I still probably make more frames per year than most one-man shops, but it’s not a contest. When 2008, 2009 came along, I must have put something on my website that the model that I had been making for X amount of years was something I no longer was going to continue making, and I used to call it my signature frame. I don’t even remember half the details.
However, I put something up that, after a certain point, the signature frame will no longer be available. I never said I’m quitting or anything, but for some reason that became its own energy flow, and people saw it and they said, “Ah, he’s either retiring, or he’s quitting, or he’s not making bikes anymore,” or whatever. As a result of that whole period, I ended up getting more orders than anybody ever deserves to have. At some point, I might have had like 400 or more orders at a given time.
And what people don’t know, and they shouldn’t know this because they’re probably not part of my bubble, is that the orders were between me and the client. I said to clients, “Well, I have this amount of work in front of you, if you commit, then it’ll take five years or eight years before I get to it, and all I ask is a $400 deposit for me to put your line in the book.” I said, “When I get close to your line in the book, we can deal with the details,” because I didn’t want five years or even more than that of people emailing me once a week telling me they changed their mind and they don’t want blue, they want pink. I said, “Nothing happens until I get within 10 orders of your name,” and everybody who ordered accepted those terms, yet the internet was like, “Who does he think he is making people wait almost a decade for his bike?” And I’m thinking, “That’s not my problem. If you don’t like that, talk to the people who are in my list,” which is an impossibility because I didn’t publish it.
I really like what I do, and I can’t imagine if I didn’t do this what I would be doing after breakfast every day.
So, I got a bit of a reputation for being the guy who somehow … I didn’t create the situation, I simply rolled with it and then I didn’t really have a lot of people complaining because they knew that if I didn’t get in touch with them, then their $400 was safe and their order was safe and we’re good to go. But in the middle of it all, my mom had a stroke, which of course nobody planned for. I didn’t realize that every five or six weeks I’d be driving back to New Jersey from Massachusetts to sit by her side for a week, and before you know it, the amount of time that I was away from the bench was starting to take its toll.
So, in 2015, I wrote a letter that I sent to everybody from that period forward who still had an order that was yet to be filled, and I said, “Hey, life had a way of changing my routine, and I am sorry. I expect perhaps your routine might have changed too. So, long story short, if the bike that you ordered in 2008 or 2009 is not something that you want or need, or you lost your job, or you bought two other bikes in the meantime, whatever it is, if you decide that you don’t want the bike, just send me this back and check this box, and I’ll return your check.”
I mailed it out to several hundred people whose orders were still pending, and then I think about 60 or 70 people sent me a note back and said, “Look, thanks, but no thanks.” So I sent them all back their $400, and I still had three or four years worth of work left to do. In 2018, I finally got to the last order of people who didn’t want their money back because they were willing to wait, in spite of all the changes. And then I took some time off and I rebooted. And from that point forward, I thought the prudent thing to do is to take a certain amount of work and then cap it off, do the work, and then rinse, repeat. Sorry I was so verbose.
JL: That’s a good example of the misunderstandings that people have. It’s good to clear up that you have no intention of retiring anytime soon. That’s not why you did this. [Sachs opens his order queue annually now, taking enough orders for a single year. -Ed]
RS: Yeah, and I also want to put this in black and white: When all that happened, and I finally took stock of how many orders I returned, I probably wrote checks for $60,000+ that was in a separate account that I returned to whoever asked for it. And if somebody says to me, “Well, you had the interest,” at 2% interest or whatever it might have been at that time, by the time you put that under the microscope and try to figure out how much of that you might have wanted to return to the people whose money it was, it’s like, they might have gotten $7. It’s not like it was a scheme, and I don’t know any other way that I, as an independent operator with no accounting experience [could calculate it]. I did the best I could, and that’s the way it goes.
And in addition to that, with the kind of work I do, if I did a first-come-first-served type of business, and then I get to somebody’s order and he’s not ready, then you say to the guy, “OK, I’ll just table your order and get back to you.” So the ideal was to do first-come-first-served, but the reality is, you know, if you have 400-500 people waiting over the course of eight or nine years, it ends up being a real jumble. Some people might have moved ahead six or nine months or 18 months because there were other people in the meantime who couldn’t make up their mind. So trying to figure out the accounting for that is not something I even care about. I survived. I survived.
JL: Last question: how do you feel about the next stages for your business and how long you will continue building? And it sounds like the answer is as long as you’re able, as long as you want to.
RS: Yeah, I think that I kind of use this term a lot lately, especially in the 32” or tubeless tire/disc brake era: I am definitely in my own lane at this point, and I have a lot of work. And every January or February, I get a lot more work, and I got so much raw material, and I design and produce my own raw material. That’s a separate sidebar to my framebuilding business because I sell that to other framebuilders who want to have my stuff on their bikes.
I’m healthy. I’m level-headed. I really like what I do, and I can’t imagine if I didn’t do this what I would be doing after breakfast every day. So all of that is a recipe for continuing, and I also feel like, in spite of the fact that I’ve been doing this for five-plus decades, each assembly or each attempt to get to that next level is practice, and I thrive on it. I was telling Peter [Flax] about this in the interview about Joe Bell, but there’s this Japanese term that I’ve only learned about maybe within the last decade. It’s called shokunin, and it’s devoting your adult life to a singular pursuit, so that you don’t let any distractions in that would keep you from becoming a master of whatever it is you are chosen to do.
I’ve come away feeling like, even though the bicycle is a product or is a commodity and has taken a bunch of turns through the high-water mark days of framebuilding, I still have a lot of interest in what I do. People are still willing to pay me and wait for what I do, and that every time I get the opportunity to start a new one, it’s kind of like “Oh, maybe this is when I could approach mastery,” and for me, that’s intoxicating.
I do my best to create or use filters to not get too moved by what happens outside of my lane. But it’s hard when you open up the internet and you see the handlebars are like 36 centimeters apart, and the brake levers are toed in, and people are using shorter cranks now, and all this, like, noise that really affects the marketplace. And I’m not really part of that; I’m not part of that at all. So framebuilding, you know – in quotes and in boldface and underline, as a trade – I definitely think has changed since I first decided to stay in it, when I realized I was never going to go to college and write. But I like what I do, and people like what I do, and there’s more people that want my bikes than I can make bikes for. So, it’s a recipe for continuing.
JL: Thank you. You’ve been incredibly generous with your time. We’ve been on the phone for close to two hours and that’s a lot of time to devote to one interview, and I really appreciate that.
RS: My pleasure.