Artisans show off bicycles made from scratch at MADE bike show

Jan 15, 2024

Community members at the MADE homemade bike show at Zidell Yards, that made its debut in downtown Portland this year. (Kayla Nguyen/Kayla Nguyen/The Oregonian)

Most of the bikes on Portland streets are built in factories, but a few are fully customized rides, from the wheels to the handlebars.

Bicycle tinkerers from all over the world gathered at Zidell Yards, along Portland’s South Waterfront, last week to celebrate the tradition of handmade bikes and showcase the intricate craft that they have built their careers on.

The MADE handmade bike show featured over 200 framebuilders from a host of countries, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan and Namibia, to put their work on display. Visitors milled around custom bikes and chatted with builders about their workmanship.

Most bicycles — even those heavily customized by riders — are mass produced in factories. But from a cyclist’s perspective, a handmade bike gives them the opportunity to tailor each part exactly to their liking, ensuring maximum quality and comfort.

Each bike at the show was specially designed and measured to fit an individual rider, according to Billy Sinkford, co-founder and director of the show.

“Not only is it custom in sizing, you also get to decide how the bike is going to look, so you get to make the bike 100% your own,” he said. “When you have something that’s made just for you, you have a much deeper connection than if you had just bought it off the shelf.”

Todd Ingermanson, a framebuilder under his label Black Cat Bicycles, brought a few of his showpiece bikes from his shop in Aptos, California, to demonstrate his process. Although hand-crafting a bike takes much more time to assemble than a factory-made one, Ingermanson said he savors the art of the build.

“I like to think of it as music,” he said. “It doesn’t have to logically make sense. It’s an emotional thing.”

Like several of the brands represented at the show, Ingermanson has been building bicycle frames for 20-plus years.

Dan Craven, of Onguza Bicycles, chalked it up to a longtime love for the profession. The two-time Olympian cyclist from Namibia said he has builders back home in Omaruru, on the edge of the Namib desert, who construct every part from scratch.

“They don’t use machines, they use hacksaws and files. That is the precision of their ability, how good they are,” he said.

Billy Sinkford (L) and Dan Craven stand together with Craven's brand, Onguza Bicycles at the MADE bike show in downtown Portland. (Kayla Nguyen/Kayla Nguyen/The Oregonian)

Craven added that since the 2012 founding of Onguza — which translates from the OtjiHimba language to “the vast expanse of nothingness out there” — he has advocated for the power of building with one’s hands.

“When we launched, our very first bicycle sale went to New York City,” he said. “The fact that we’re building bicycles in this tiny town on the edge of the desert, and we’re selling bikes to New York City, London and Berlin, it’s like, it’s not just me who feels like this needs to exist. There’s other people out there.”

From component manufacturers to established builders, Sinkford said that all who occupied the Zidell Yard warehouse — formerly a site for barge construction — prioritize high-performance, lifelong products for clients. Some companies have operated in the Portland area for decades, bearing witness to the evolving cycling scene.

Paul Components is widely known for its American-made bicycle products and high-quality aluminum among the cycling community. (Kayla Nguyen)

Dave Levy, founder of Ti Cycles Fabrication in Portland, has seen it firsthand. Levy, an avid road cyclist, opened the shop in 1990.

“I would say that I have seen the road-riding community get smaller and older over the years,” he said. “But with the advent of gravel road bikes, I have seen an expansion of people in both older and younger riders coming out and interacting with places where there are less cars.”

Sinkford said that in his 13 years in the Portland area, he has noticed a marked decrease in the number of people using bikes to commute downtown, especially in recent years.

According to a recent report from the Portland Bureau of Transportation, bike ridership dropped by 46% between 2016 and 2022, with small declines prior to the pandemic and then a larger drop-off during COVID-19 as more people transitioned to remote work.

“I’d love to see more people on bikes; I know that we’re down,” Sinkford said. “Hopefully, this show will stay in Portland indefinitely and help boost those numbers.”

-- Kayla Nguyen, [email protected]