I’ve been making custom bicycles since 2010 when I first took United Bicycle Institue’s Frame Builder course. I knew I wanted to be a full-time frame builder for a few years before the course and had already taken several brazing and welding courses at Lane Community College and read everything about bicycle frame building, I could find back then. I built my first frame and fork in that class. I was lucky. it was Joseph Ahearne’s first time teaching a frame building class, so Ron Sutphin the President of UBI was there walking him through it. Tony Pereira, of Bread Winner fame, was also there learning the ropes as he was going to teach the next class and Gary Mathis one of the Ashland Campus head instructors also made an appearance for a few days and I was fortunate enough to meet and ask questions and get hands on instructions from them all. I got to go to a Frame Builder garage sale at Ira Ryan’s shop that same week and meet Sasha White, of Vanilla fame, and Mitch Pryor, of M.A.P. Cycles fame, as well as Ira. I still see, and bug and ask questions of them regularly, and have bought used tools and equipment from them on many occasions. Portland is kind of neat that way. I’ve met and befriended tons of other local professional and amateur builders over the years both locally and on Instagram.

It took almost a year to acquire enough tools and figure out how to make my second frame. I rode both for years! And, soon set up my first semiprofessional shop in a friend’s garage while going to school full time. I slowly built a few frames for friends in that garage and learned new tricks and developed my already retro-grouch style. One day five or six of my friends and I all rode down to our favorite bar and someone pointed out that we were all riding frames I built! And that was an amazing feeling! It’s something I’ll never forget.

A few years later I started my first shop: Kenton Cycle Repair, and started building under the name StarMichael Bowman, my name! I built several nice frames starting to focus on 650 B and Randonnée style bicycles there. I also perfected my style, taught myself to build racks and learned the art of modifying and upgrading vintage frames into custom randonneur machines!

That’s where I met the legendary graphic designer, Karl Edwards. He did a lot of Bridgestone’s designs back in the day as well as designing the logos for Ahearn, Soma’s New Albion Cycles, and finally traded me some extensive reworking and braze on mods for my logo. That must have been around 2013, because he drew that bike for Handmade Bike & Beer festival show in 2014. I still have the signed poster hanging on my wall to this day!

I met Mark of Belladonna Cycles at a handmade bike show around this time and he started hanging around the shop. It wasn’t long before deciding to sell Kenton Cycles and start a custom frame building shop with Mark. We drunkenly misheard each other while trying to come up with a name and logo for the shop and ended up with Norther Cycles and our unmistakable logo! We built that shop up from scratch with the help of some friends and made a lot of beautiful handmade bikes, a ton more custom forks for existing bikes, and modified and changed a bunch of cool old frames. We also perfected the handlebar bag rack and detachable low rider! But it was too big, too expensive, and too busy for me to manage by myself. We were custom frame builders building without any fancy tooling. Doing everything by hand in the most time-consuming way, but truly custom way, all while trying to run a retail shop out the front. I was spending all my time on walk in bike repairs, tune ups, and other distractions and answering emails from customers. I was rarely getting to spend time in the back building frames and all our money went to paying rent and falling behind on bills. I closed the shop in January of 2020, luckily just before the other major event of 2020.

Burnt out, I took a few years off of bikes, both literally and philosophically. Over the last few years I’ve been getting back into bikes, slowly, restarting my eBay store, covering a few shifts at a few of my favorite shops, and making YouTube videos. I’ve been thinking it’s time to do some cutting and brazing and frame building for a while now. The right opportunity has come up for a small but perfect space to make some cool bikes again. This time at a manageable scale. A secret spot that’s not in the know, not on the beaten path, but just barely off it. That won’t be interrupted by passersby. It’s not a retail spot, but I plan on having just a little bit of useful stuff for sale. It’s going to be a dedicated small time one off custom maker space. I’m going to focus on saving vintage frame by respacing and aligning them and adding braze ons. The occasional custom fork, custom racks, and some builds for custom customers. And hopefully really spend way too much time getting as nerdy as possible on some functional art, both for myself and eventually the rest of the world.

It’s scary letting go of the hustle and bustle, and cash, of retail sales and tune ups. But it’s time to focus on art and bicycle creating again. I can cover my rent with my eBay store so I can do bicycle art and YouTube for fun. I won’t be rushed or pressed to do customer work so I can focus on the art of it instead of doing it simply and quickly. The rent is cheap so hopefully I can do projects for myself more than customer work and make ends meet.

I hope to get some customers and do some amazing work. But I’m also hoping to make some amazing how to videos and teach some basic classes both in person and virtually through videos and online course work. I love teaching people the skills I had to figure out and glean and piece together the hard way.

I’m only going to be at the shop half time, and most of that is private work time. I’m planning on having an open house meet and greet day once or twice per month, otherwise it will be appointments only so I can actually get some creative work done. I will be open for appointments to all friends and former custom customers, and new custom customers for custom work. As well as old, favored customers for all sorts of work, like tune ups and fender installs. But I won’t be taking walk ins for normal bike shop stuff. I will be willing to do builds for some bikes I make or customize. Mostly partial builds like installing the hard stuff like fenders and dynamo lights and wiring. Maybe full builds when it’s slow in the winter. I’m hoping to follow the lead of the best bike builders out there and not over book myself in the spring and summer so I too can take some time touring and bike camping.

Please see the rest of the website for more details. And, come by on an open house day to check out the shop and the latest projects, or shoot me an email if you have a project in mind.

—StarMichael Bowman

starmichael.builds@gmail.com