Good Influence: Wayward Machine Co.

Bobby and Kacy Middleton and the 18,000 lb Press Brake

Less than 3 years ago, Bobby and Kacy Middleton were living in a house in the suburbs with a yard the size of a football field.

Bobby had made a name for himself building vintage motorcycles under the name King Kustom. Over 15 years he’d won awards and been invited to build for the Born-Free vintage motorbike show for 3 years in a row. He had a social media presence and a following — kids who followed his work on instagram and aspired to make a living building award winning bikes.

But life in the suburbs left something wanting.  They didn’t particularly like yard work. “We were really bored,” Kacy says.

When their friend Daniel moved into a cool storefront on Morgan Street, they told him “If you see something else like this, let us know.”  A few days later, Daniel called to say that his landlord had bought the building on the corner of Morgan and 32nd Place. They drove in to see it that night. It was a shell of a building with cratered floors, a retail storefront and a garage large enough to build motorcycles.

Leaving a house they owned to rent an apartment, moving a whole shop of machine tools, seemed like a risk.  “We were asking ourselves ‘ Are we really going to do this?’”

Five weeks later the landlord had built out an entire apartment, the Middleton’s had rented their house, they shipped 10,000 pounds of machine tools to Bridgeport and opened the doors as Wayward Machine.

They’d brainstormed the name with friends.  They wanted something with attitude, and broader than motorcycles, something open to the possibilities of the space.  Maybe they’d open a lifestyle clothing store.

Meanwhile, Meg McMorrow, a good friend, had asked Bobby to build a couple restaurant light fixtures for Siren Betty, the design firm she was working at.  The fabrication jobs just snowballed from there.

Wayward Machine has spent the past 2 and a half years growing furiously by every measure - employees, shop space, tonnage of machines.  And not least in social footprint which has taken on dimension with a videographer on staff, and their street presence in a real neighborhood.  Every contact they refer to in the Chicago restaurant industry industry is also ‘a good friend,’ or ‘a great guy.’

“He’s figuring it out,” Kacy says of a good friend who runs a complementary business, like Wayward is doing.

Milling Machine - the Tool That Could Reproduce Itself

Wayward Machine opened with the tools Bobby used to build motorcycles: a lathe, a bandsaw, a welder and an antique Bridgeport mill (from Connecticut) that’s so versatile Bobby says it could reproduce itself.

They worked out of the garage at the back of their apartment.  As positions opened up, they drew on Bobby’s social media media followers - other bike builders who knew how to weld - or on neighbors, the barista at the coffee shop who knew auto CAD, the young woman who lived upstairs.

Then Meg, their friend at Siren Betty, took a job at Heisler, a restaurant development machine responsible for the Queen Mary Tavern, Estereo and Bad Hunter.  Heisler advertises its work on forward trending projects, a design aesthetic of “rawness of refinement,” and a desire to “mentor and champion the people they work with.”

In its first year of existence, Wayward Machine Co. was busy building furnishings for Bad Hunter for the better part of a year.  They built chairs in the hundreds, they built giant back bars, kitchen partitions, dropped ceilings from steel frames inset with wood, or with frosted glass to look like skylights.  They built a lot of steel and glass doors.

Steel and glass, for doors, windows and walls, has turned out to be a big moment in the interior decorating world.  Wayward builds them for a growing list of private residences too.

To keep pace, Wayward Machine has added staff; they moved the shop to 1100 West Cermak Road in Pilsen, a space large enough for work stations, fabrications tables and an office, and they’ve filled it with machine tools from old industry machine shops going out of business.

They’ve bought a punch press, benders to shape tubing, and an 18,000 pound brake press.  It puts down 100 tons of pressure to bend uniform angles into thick steel plate. They bought a sheer that slices 10 gauge plate like it’s cold wax with the push of a button.  Cutting it by hand would take someone 15-20 minutes with an abrasive grinder.  It would also be a screechingly loud, filthy job, and even without error or injury, the cut wouldn’t be clean.

"Like a giant mechanical paper cutter"

The tools themselves are all analogue technology from the 60s and 70s, “We can’t afford half million dollar machines,” Bobby says.  “We had to mess with them to make them work, because they’re old.” But they work well for the scale of Wayward’s jobs, and analogue has other advantages for a skilled mechanic.  “I never hooked up a press brake before, but I can make stuff work,” Bobby says,  “I’m not afraid to jump in there and figure it out.”

They still draw on some tried and true contacts in the suburbs - a certain chrome shop, and a certain powder coater. “His paint is perfect, no bullshit,” Bobby says.  “But we have to pack up the truck and send it to Addison.”

That’s one big advantage of their urban location.  Their steel supplier is just down the street.  Since founding Wayward there have been more connections close by, a 3-D printer, a foundry, a stamping company on the far south side.

Especially around the restaurant industry, they tend to describe their associates as people they’ve become close with, like the mill worker who makes wood tops for Wayward’s metal table bases. The electrician they use is doing all the hip restaurants. He doesn’t advertise, Bobby says. “Everybody just knows him.”  Wayward Machine built metal for his house; when Wayward moved the shop to a much larger space in Pilsen this Spring, he wired the new shop.

Their upholsterer, is a young businessman in West Town.  “He’s one of our best friends, we love him to death.” He’s upholstered every barstool Wayward Machine has built - over 300 of them so far. His father ran a cottage scale upholstery business, Aaron saw opportunity to grow.  Father and son still work together at the new business, Urban Craft Custom Upholstery.  Urban Craft is 7 years old, with 20 employees.

“We thought that was shocking,” Kasey recalls.  Now they’re half way there themselves.  They’ve got a project schedule 50 jobs long, they can point out 6 different jobs in progress from where we stand on the shop floor.

As the jobs multiply, the problem solving gets more complex.  There are endless calculations of dimensions, quantities and costs, of schedule and logistics, of keeping 5 or 6 jobs moving timely from one phase to the next. Not to mention the problems involved moving really big, cumbersome objects through space.

A Shop Full of Windows and Walls

Bobby points out a large steel structure that’s been built to fit an industrial size window for a loft conversion in Wicker Park.  “We could make this in 3 pieces,” Bobby says, “but we’d put it in and it wouldn’t look as good as it does now.

“So me being a psychopath, I say ‘Let’s make it one piece and we’ll just figure out how to get it there.’  So we’re going to figure out how to get it to Wicker Park.  We’ll put it on a trailer somehow, move it late at night.  We’ll figure it out.”

There will be more problem solving when they do.  The building is an old warehouse, so none of the floors are straight, none of the windows are square, it’s built of old brick that will start to come apart as they’re working it. It’s going to take a lot of patience to fit it in just right.

Bobby says problem solving is the part of the job he likes most.  He says Stephen Adzemovic excels in that area too, if you’re wondering what he’s up to since leaving Bridgeport Coffee.  They hired him because he could draw in autoCAD, but a lot of people can use software. “We work really well together,” Bobby says. “We bounce ideas off each other all day long.”

Kacy problem solves on the marketing side. “I make sure that we’re visible to the people that I know need us,” she says. “I can steer what our jobs are.  I know if we post a picture of a brass hood, and we post it in enough places or in the right way, tomorrow we’re going to get an e-mail from somebody who wants a brass hood.”

Last year, she started shooting video of the crew working on the shop and posting that on social media.  Now they have Nicolette Nunez, a full time videographer who follows them around with a video camera.  She found Wayward Machine on instagram, she’d offered to work for free. They said ‘Let’s try it for 2 weeks and see what happens.’  “She made herself invaluable,” Kacy says, “so we hired her full time.”

Street Presence

There’s something about the thought of a lot of people who may never have worked in a factory, who may never have reason to weld 2 pieces of steel together, wanting to watch video of other people doing it, that seems almost wholesome. 

We often use the word ‘lifestyle’ with a wink, to refer to appearances not connected to real substance.  But if we don’t resent being social creatures, we can’t reduce the way we watch each other, the various social cues we read, and send, as if they only work as status markers.

The Middletons have been communicating an attractive lifestyle since before they opened Wayward Machine.  King Kustom's social media accounts built on a shared an appreciation of a common object.  Wayward Machine’s communicate a style of life tied in to a style of work, one where something additional to cash is in circulation. It spills out from the social media accounts into their work networks, and from their house in Bridgeport, it spills out into the street.

The building on Morgan and 32nd Place had a sweeping mural across the street-side wall before they moved in.  Bobby and Kacy didn’t like all of it, so they engaged friends to repaint parts with motorcycles, wrenches.  They installed goose necked lighting so the sidewalk is bright at night.  They engaged Pat Finley, an elder sign painter, to paint the Wayward Machine Co. sign at the center of the wall. 

“He just paints, he doesn’t do any vinyl stickers,” Bobby says appreciatively. “He draws a big stencil on paper, uses a pounce pad that leaves an outline, just as a reference, then goes and paints on there.”

And they sit on the stoop with friends, and talk to anyone who pauses to chat as they walk by.  They’re out there a little less this year.  It’s been cold, they may be working all the time.  But that’s why they can tell you about a half dozen creative businesses going on behind curtains and storefronts on Morgan Street.  Appointment only vintage clothing shops - one for ladies a block or so north, and one for gentlemen just south, a print shop, urban gardening, documentary film.  Other folks who are figuring it out.

Since they moved the shop to Pilsen this spring, the house on Morgan Street is bigger than they strictly need to live in.  They use the storefront as an extra living room; they’ve installed kilns in the garage.  Kacy uses them to make art and household objects that look like geologic curiosities.  They run on the electrical that Wayward Machine used for welding.

“We definitely struggle with whether it makes sense to stay in the space financially, because it’s so large,” Kasey says.  “But we love it there.  As long as we can afford to pull it off I think we want to stay.”

Ever curious how it works around here? Full video link in bio! PS @team_ussa wears a beret......go check it out! #wamcoworkday video by the talented and uber creative @nicolettenunez.photo

A post shared by WAMCO | Bobby Middleton (@waywardmachineco) on Jun 27, 2018 at 4:09pm PDT

Two Careers in Rolling Steel

Tapping a Blast Furnace, image from ArcelorMittal

Before he came to Blue City Cycles to work as a bike mechanic, Mike Okelman got 2 engineering degrees and worked at a steel mill in East Chicago –  home of the largest blast furnace in the Western Hemisphere in fact – where he made 4 times as much money as he ‘s making now.

Engineering is the kind of profession his parents wanted for him, and steel mills offer the kind of secure, well-paid jobs that have become hard to find.  But after 4 years in the mills, Mike says the work he does at the bike shop is more satisfying, and it also supports a more sustainable lifestyle.

Mike always knew he wanted to do something technical.  He had an idealistic admiration for American manufacturing and an abiding respect for the labor unions that made industry a source of good jobs. His parents wanted him to pursue a professional career, so he enrolled at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign to study mechanical engineering in 2002, and worked straight through his bachelors and his masters by 2008.

Back in 2005, he toyed with the idea of trying out an internship in the auto industry. “I was imagining working on energy efficiency and fuel cells,” he says, but GM’s presentation that year was all about the Hummer.  Instead, he found himself at a job fair talking to 2 guys from International Steel Group.  They had a table top model of a steel mill they’d probably last used to recruit new talent 25 years ago. “No one was talking to them,” Mike recalls.

Ladle of Steel
photo from NW Indiana Steel Heritage Museum photo gallery

2005 was an excellent year for steel makers worldwide, as economies boomed the mills couldn’t pour metal fast enough.  But American steel makers had been in decline for decades.  In 1967, the industry represented almost 5% of US manufacturing output; by 2001, it represented less than 1%, and the labor needs of the steelmaking process had dropped by a factor of 1,000.  Recruitment hadn’t been a priority for most mills in recent years, as evinced by that dusty table top model.  Plants that hadn’t shut down were still rearranging themselves to find a comfortable position.

International Steel Group had just purchased Acme Steel, a venerable Chicago company whose fortunes more or less tracked the local industry – starting in 1880, when Acme first opened as a maker of steel clasps and barbed staples. In the 19^th Century, dozens of small makers of steel goods were embedded in Chicago neighborhoods.

Over decades they tended to combine into big vertically integrated operations that could smelt iron from ore, make coke from coal, turn iron into steel, cast it into blocks and roll it into finished materials. They also tended to precipitate on Chicago’s southern edge, by Calumet, where raw materials could be brought by the barge-full to their doorstep, and from where the beams, rails and pipe they produced could be shipped to all points of the country, if they weren’t absorbed into the construction of Chicago itself.

Acme opened a plant in Riverdale in 1918 as the Acme Steel Furnace Company.  Acme Steel employed 1,400 workers during the Great Depression, and by the 1950s ranked among the top 300 largest manufacturing companies in the nation. In 1964, it merged with Interlake Steel, itself a combination of Federal Furnace and the By Products Coke Company – they were located just across the Calumet River from Acme’s plant.  By the 1970s, Interlake Steel Group employed 3,500 in the Chicago area and posted annual sales of nearly $700 million, even though the American steel industry had already started its uneven descent.

Smoke Rising from the Indiana Harbor Works Plant
image from NW Indiana Steel Heritage Museum photo gallery

Steel making is dirty, dangerous and energy intensive, so maybe it’s natural that the industry should move to emerging economies less concerned with protecting their labor force and their environment.  When the steel industry first got started in the US, native born workers wouldn’t take those jobs, but the steel mills could staff themselves with immigrant labor.  The immigrants worked 12 hour days until late in the 1920s, and the unions didn’t get a foothold in the mills for another 10 years.

Decades later, when foreign competition gained ground with lower labor costs and government subsidies, the Americans still had the advantage of massive capacity in plants already built, but their calculations about whether to maintain or modernize them were getting more complex.

The big integrated mills weren’t just expensive to build, they were hugely expensive to operate.  Reheating a blast furnace after it’s cooled down costs a lot, both in energy and in stress on the equipment, so the blast furnaces would run continuously for years at a time.  Every 15 years or so they’d need to be overhauled, their insides gutted and relined with new refractory brick.  When the No. 7 furnace in East Chicago was overhauled in 2014 the operation took all summer and cost $70 million.

By the 1980s, more steel makers faced with maintaining old equipment were opting to reconfigure as “minimills.” They’d skip the costly process of reducing raw iron in the blast furnace, and focus on the latter stages of processing steel.  A minimill might have an electric arc furnace for melting steel scrap, another furnace for finessing the alloy’s chemical balance, and a continuous caster for extruding semi-finished goods.  To be cost effective, integrated mills need to put out at least 2 million tons of steel a year.  A minimill might put out 200 to 400 thousand tons a year, and the electric furnace could be started and stopped to meet changes in the marketplace in something closer to real time.

Relining Acme Steel's Former Blast Furnace

Acme Steel spun off from Interlake in 1986, unhitching itself from its blast furnace and the coke ovens on the other side of the Calumet.  By the early 1990s, it employed 1,200 workers, about the same number the old Acme Furnace employed at its Riverdale plant.  It was still using oxygen furnaces from the 1950s, but in the 1990s they invested in a continuous caster – a major modernization that would allow them to skip the intermediate step of casting molten metal into ingots first, before rolling it into sheets, bars or rods in a separate process.  The continuous caster extrudes metal through a track of rollers into long, semi-finished products.  Acme’s new caster was employed rolling out spools of pipe.

They never quite recovered the investment. Mike says it helped put the old Acme Steel out of business.  By 2001 they were in bankruptcy protection and finishing a phased shut down.  The next year, the shuttered plant was acquired by investors headed up by WL Ross.  Ross got his start as a bankruptcy adviser, he says he helped clean up the mess left by Mike Milken’s junk bond buyouts in the 1980s.

By the 2000s, he wanted to intervene more directly to turn troubled industries around. And there was clearly still money to be made in steel.  Competition is global and margins are slim, but world consumption was exploding.  The US was enjoying its housing boom and a new heyday for really big cars.  Emerging economies were racing toward the middle class, pushing up prices for commodities of all kinds, from metal to meat.

Ross’ investment fund first created International Steel Group to reorganize Pennsylvania Steel.  In 2002, ISG Riverdale reopened as a minimill employing 250 workers.  In 2005 the company merged with Ispat Inland Steel Company in East Chicago, and LMV, a holding company controlled by an Indian steel magnate, to form Mittal Steel USA.

Blast Furnaces of the old Acme Steel

That was also the year Mike took an internship at the ISG Riverdale plant.  He says it was different from a big, union shop. Which is not to say the workers at Riverside weren’t unionized.  They were a rough around the edges, but their roughness mainly expressed itself as hijinks.

They used to call him Monica (you know, because he was the intern); they once glued a little crown cut from a styrofoam coffee cup to the top of his helmet and called him to the shop floor to see how long before he figured out why everyone was chuckling.  But then when he broke his foot in an accident involving a radio flier wagon and a flight of stairs (not at work) the guys in the machine shop made him a little stick figure model to commemorate the incident.

Mike says the Riverside plant itself was almost quaint.  The carts and moveable equipment all still said “Acme” on them.  They didn’t melt their own iron anymore, it trundled over from Indiana in torpedo shaped rail cars, the big vessels of molten metal passing through residential neighborhoods, apparently without incident.  If it were to harden en route they’d never extract the iron from the car.

They made it into high alloy steel in oxygen furnaces that date back to the 1950s.  The whole room was coated in thick coat of kish – carbon particles exhaled as graphite dust by the steel as it's chemistry is refined.  Mike says it glitters in the air, it rains over everything, settling as a thick gray smudge.  The continuous caster was newer of course.  They used it to cast high alloy steel into spools of small pipe that would be used for making things like knives and golf clubs.

After graduation, when he took an engineering job at the former Inland Steel mill in East Chicago, their continuous caster would be turning out spools of pipe for oil pipelines and sheet metal for the auto industry -- materials for big industry and massive infrastructure projects.  A 3,100 acre integrated mill, the East Chicago plant, now known as ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor, is the largest plant in North America.  It employs 4,900 workers and puts out 9.5 million tons of metal a year.

Collectively, America’s big integrated mills still produce almost 90 million tons of steel annually, and have remained attractive acquisitions, even if no one is building new blast furnaces in the States anymore.  Inland Steel was acquired by ISPAT, another company controlled by the Mittal family, in 1998.  Ispat Inland became part of Mittal Steel USA in 2005.  Then, in 2007, Mittal Steel and Arcelor, the 2 biggest steel companies in the world, merged into one.

Indiana Harbor Ship Canal
image from NW Indiana Steel Heritage Museum Photo Gallery

When Mike came to work at the Indiana Harbor plant in the summer of 2008, world steel was still booming and the ArcelorMittal was on a buzz, calling meetings at their Indiana plant to announce all the great new benefits they’d be extending.  A few months later big banks were collapsing and all those new benefits were quietly dropped.

The steel industry has always cycled between boom years and catastrophe – by 2010, the industry was cautiously recovering, by 2013 it was declaring a rebound.  Back in 1999, the Chicago Tribune ran a feature on the steel industry that profiled Inland’s famous No. 7 furnace (built in 1980, 10 years into American steel’s decline) and the trends that had gone on to close two-thirds of the nation’s blast furnaces in the 20 year since it was built.

Workers were boasting to the reporter about the hellish working conditions, and about their deep attachment to their work, an attachment the reporter attributed to “the lore of the furnaces, and the psychological rush of harnessing raw – and potentially deadly – power to create something.”

The reporter observed that the process of steelmaking is basically unchanged from what it was a century ago, when Inland first opened the mill.  But engineers are still employed refining the process, partly because molten metal doesn’t readily submit to controlled study. Before computers, Mike says engineers would use water models to project how it would behave, because water has the same “kinematic viscosity,” it pours the same way.  Now they use computer modeling to study fluid flow, heat transfer, factors that might cause molds to break, or cause defects in the steel.  They’d test the latest equipment being pitched by vendors.

Steel mills use water applied with a system of nozzles for cooling.  One of Mike’s projects at the East Chicago plant was to investigate a new cooling system.  For a year, they took measurements, studied blue prints, consulted with nozzle makers and other engineers, and concluded the new system would have definite advantages – it was more flexible and could reach parts of the process that were particularly hard to access.  But in the end it was shelved as too expensive to implement.

The global financial meltdown did not help.  The Indiana Harbor Plant tightened its belt. Workers who could retire did so.  The company reassigned engineers, including Mike, to work as supervisors on the floor. That was technically a step down, though Mike says he liked the work more.  He hadn’t been drawn into the field by the promise of computer modeling. “I’m very hands on.  I want to build things…I want to be part of the process.”

On the floor there was lots of moving equipment and parts were always breaking, there were literal 

fires to put out.  Between castings, the supervisors and their crews would go over every part with a checklist, performing audits and writing maintenance reports.  The supervisor takes attendance, makes sure everyone’s appropriately deployed – and then inspects the quality of the steel as it rolls out from the of the caster.

Steel moving through a continuous caster
image from ArcelorMittal

The molten metal starts to cool as it passes through the casting machine, it forms a hardened skin, or sleeve, that allows it to move smoothly over a system of rollers that are working it into shape as it passes over them.  If the metal cools too fast or too slowly, it might break out of the sleeve and create big problems.  Or if a roller gets stuck, or mucked up with pieces of debris, it’ll leave tell tale imprints in the finished steel.

A ladle of molten metal can be worth a million dollars.  Mike says you’re taking chemical samples throughout the process to make sure the composition of the metal is right – if it’s not, you can sometimes fix it, but steel can also be “poisoned” by an excess of certain ingredients, like copper for instance.  And once it’s poured, if it doesn’t react the way it’s supposed to in the mold, it could spill over, or explode – like a lethal home baking project.

So the work was interesting, but the atmosphere was tense.  And that rash of retirements only widened an experience gap created by decades of industry consolidation. The floor was manned by a lot of guys with 30 or 40 years of experience, and a few new guys with 1 or 2 years.  It wasn’t easy to be a 27 year old, supervising salty workers in their 50s and 60s.  And there was nobody with 10 to 15 years who could remember how they were trained.  The old guys were often impatient to stop and answer questions, or to show the new guys what they knew.

He recalls there were a lot of strong egos, a lot of communication accomplished by in your face shouting matches – a method encouraged by the physical intensity of the mill, which is basically a huge open air warehouse.  It’s freezing in winter, or sweltering when they’re pouring steel.

“You can easily kill yourself.  You’re not always sure what you should or shouldn’t do,” Mike recalls.  There’s molten metal, poisonous gases and explosive steam.  “Mistakes are either life threatening or they cost a lot of money.”

There were several guys who died while he was at East Chicago plant.  One guy got crushed by a leg of a gantry crane; another was crushed in a truck-rail collision.  One of the supervisors was killed by a sudden steam explosion; a senior supervisor he knew succumbed abruptly to mesothelioma -- he woke up one morning and he couldn’t breathe, they rushed him to the hospital and he was dead before afternoon.

The mills needed to be staffed around the clock, and they were short staffed, so everyone was logging in long hours. The long hours meant that Mike was making good money, and also that he had no outside life, so he wasn’t spending any of it. He paid off all his student loans, and then he started socking as much as he could in retirement account. And then, after 4 years, he had enough.

Inside the Shed
image from NW Indiana Steel Heritage photo gallery

“I got to the point I realized it was important to me to respect and like the people I work with,” which was not the overriding atmosphere at the mill.

Now, he jokes that he uses more of the skills he’d hoped to use as an engineer working at the bike shop.  It’s certainly a hands-on job – with a lot less housekeeping and filing of reports.  The mechanics each have an area of unofficial specialty based on their favorite kind of bikes.  Owen Lloyd, one of the shop's owners, gets any English tourers or racers that come in the door.  “Owen’s an English three speed kind of guy,” Mike’s a Japanese road bike kind of guy himself.

Even customer service never approaches the stress of the mill.  A lot of Blue City Cycles’ customers are in the service industry, they’ll do the mechanics little favors, like bringing donuts to the shop.

Some customers won’t bring their bikes in for service until they’re completely unrideable, they make for entertaining stories -- like the guy who came in with a flat that he’d kept riding even as the inner tube was forced out of the tire and wrapped around the rear gears, he rode it until the wheel wouldn’t turn anymore.

Then there’s the customer who had her bike in for brake adjustments a few times, and then came back one day to buy the tools and cables to do the repair herself.  “We love that,” Mike says “We were like give us a call if you have any trouble…”

Feel good stories aside, you’d expect the most significant drawback to Mike’s career change would be the effect on his financial well being .  His earnings have been greatly reduced.  Probably part of the reason he can swing it is because he’s not raising kids right now.

But the bike shop also helps sustain him in indirect ways. Because it effectively ties all of them in with a community -- of customers, and of owners and employees of the neighboring businesses .  They’re embedded into the neighborhood; it’s quality of life benefit that spills over in immeasurable, but material ways.

The clearest example is Mike’s apartment.  It’s just few blocks from the shop; he pays a very reasonable rent.  He leases it from the girlfriend of the owner of a business across the street.  It’s an apartment that’s been in her family for many years, so she probably doesn’t have to bring in big rents, she rents the other apartment to one of her boyfriend’s employees.

Trying to live on a bike mechanic’s wages would be very different in Logan Square, where DNAInfo just reported a developer’s plans to build 500 square foot “micro apartments” with rents starting at $1,200 a month.

Logan Square renters are paying a lot for their neighborhood’s amenities – it is better stocked with hip restaurants, boutiques and bars -- and for the street vibe that comes with them.  Bridgeport has a street vibe too.  It’s not based on cool-factor or cache, it’s the vibe you get from running into 5 people you know between the coffee shop and the drug store, and Mike thrives on that.

He lived in Humboldt Park near Logan Square before he worked at Blue City Cycles, he says it felt more transient, people live in an apartment for a few years and then they’re gone.  There were plenty of neat restaurants and neat little bars.  “I’m the target demographic for a lot of that,” he says but he thinks there’s something a little artificial about them, like they’re decorated new to imitate the kind of quirky, run-down color you find at a place like Bernice’s. “Why not just go to Bernice’s?” The beer costs half of much.  And you might swap some stories with Mike Okelman there.

More Bridgeport Bike Work

Michael Catano of Humble Frameworks at Work
photo by Rob Lomblad

Chicago’s hand built bicycle industry has gained momentum this year, and Bridgeport builders are still at the front of it. The custom builders at Bubbly Bicycle Works, the frame builders co-operative founded by Owen Lloyd [and described on The Hardscrabbler in January 2011], have been joined by Legacy Frameworks, a small batch manufacturing company.

Manufacturing jobs have a good reputation in the US, people sometimes forget they haven’t always been ideal. The industrial revolution was hard on workers. The jobs were dirty, dangerous, and poorly paid. They were also unskilled and tedious, labor was reluctant to give up their sense of craftsmanship and meaningful work.

Labor unions helped change that, but so did owners like Henry Ford. Ford’s great innovation as an automobile manufacturer had less to do with the efficiency of his assembly lines [similar efficiencies had been achieved before, at the Stockyards for instance] than the bargain he struck with his labor force, who agreed to show up reliably for impoverished jobs, in exchange for a higher wage. And paying better wages helped create the market for Ford’s new cars.

Ownership’s commitment to that bargain has wavered in recent decades, so it’s satisfying to see some of the labor force making its way back to the old way of work, even if their numbers are still pretty modest.

Alignment Table at Bubbly Bicycle Works, photo by Rob Lomblad

Nationally, the hand built bicycle industry grew gradually for decades, then took off around 2005, the year the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS) launched its first event. Don Walker, NAHBS founder, estimates there might be 50 craftsmen earning a living building custom bicycles in the US today, and another 150-200 who supplement their income that way. In fact, a few US builders have grown to factory scale production, employing dozens of skilled craftsmen to build bicycles by hand. Jay Townley, whose market research firm Gluskin Townley Group, LLC tracks the bike industry, estimates US hand-builders sell 30,000 bicycles a year.

Chicago’s hand-built bike industry is still modest for a city of its size. Portland, a city of 600,000 people, has at least 25 bike builders; Minneapolis, a city of 400,000, can count 12.

Chicago has 2 full-time custom builders, and several who build bicycles part time. Garry Alderman of Method Bicycles and Michael Catano of Humble Frameworks each build 20-35 bikes a year. Method operates from a West Loop building shared with an art gallery owned by Alderman’s wife; Humble operates from Bubbly Bicycle Works, Bridgeport’s framebuilder’s co-op, alongside custom builders See-More Cycles, Comrade, and Lloyd.

What they charge can vary widely, depending on what a patron wants. A complete bike from Method or Humble typically falls within the $3-$6,000 range, though it could cost as much as $10,000 with rarefied wheels and wireless components.

A cyclist can buy a high quality mass production bike for a fraction of that price, and it may be superior, by some measures, to a hand-built frame. That makes it even more impressive that a growing base of customers will pay more to have something a craftsman has built by hand.

Bicycle by Humble Frameworks

“The mass production bike industry has done a very good job of defining certain criteria that a bike should be, and then excelling at them,” Catano observes. “A bicycle that I make will never be as light, or stiff, as a single-piece carbon molded frame…. But if lightness and stiffness are not the two things you care about most, then this whole other world of things opens up.”

Lightness and stiffness are often prized in bikes built to race. Steel frames flex slightly, that can make them more comfortable to ride over jolting terrain, because they absorb shocks, but they also absorb some of the power of the cyclist’s pedal stroke.

Catano, who races cyclocross, has been refining his design on frames he’s built to ride himself. Many of the design features in his bikes, like shaping of the tubing, are calculated to build stiffness back into key points of the bike. Others are more purely aesthetic, like his painstaking bi-laminate construction technique.

Humble Frameworks: Raw Frame with Shaped Tubing

Bicycles may be welded or brazed – welding is quicker, the material of the tubes is melted together. Brazing uses a softer metal, usually silver or brass, as cement, and requires a careful hand. The tubes must be mitered to fit precisely, or the joint will be weak; the heat must be controlled evenly, or the cooling material will deflect the angle of the joint.

Humble Frameworks: Carved Lugs

Many vintage bicycles are joined with lugs, or sleeve-like fittings. The braze seeps into the fitting to hold the tubes together. Fillet brazing joins tubes directly to each other with a ribbon of brass, which is then filed smooth. Bi-laminate technique combines the simple lines of fillet brazing and sleeves with hand carved embellishments. It’s a technique mass production builders don’t use anymore.

Humble Frameworks: Bi-Laminate Joint

Catano describes browsing photostreams posted by fledgling builders on Flickr, showing design features they’ve borrowed at random from various sources, without really offering anything to “the larger conversation” of what a bike should be. That conversation is often conducted in subtle variations rather than grand gestures. If you consider the progress of a master like Richard Sachs, those variations might not be visible from 10 feet away.

“He’s essentially built the same bicycle over and over again, working toward this perfected idea of what a bicycle should be,” Catano says. “I think that’s what people respond to – something resonates with what a particular builder is doing, and they want to be part of that, they want a piece of that themselves.”

Humble Frameworks: Seat Cluster Detail


Hand built bikes are still a small part of the US bicycle market. There were 15.7 million bicycles sold in the US last year, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association, and over 99% of them were imports. Though the market is undergoing glacial shifts. Jay Townley, of the Gluskin Townley market research firm, says imports were down by 4 million bikes last year, but sales held steady in dollar terms, thanks in part to the resurrection of millions of used bikes.

Townley says affluent male baby boomers have owned the high end bike market for more than a decade, and mass producers have been pushing their price points upwards over the last 5 years by developing high tech bikes for pro circuit teams, and then making those bikes available for sale. As the high end price point has moved from $3,000 to the $6,000 range, the price gap between mass produced and custom bikes has narrowed.
The baby boomer males are the lightness and stiffness crowd, the demographic that buys the same bikes the pros ride, but they are aging out of the market. They represent just 80% of it now, they were 88%, Townley says.

Gen Y wants different things. They’re into green design, car-lite culture; they are unemployed, but entrepreneurial. The outlines of their consumer profile are not exactly crisp. “The brands are confused,” Townley says “they don’t know what to do.”
Some of Chicago’s Gen Y shoppers doubtless make their way through Tati Cycles, a 200sf boutique bike shop in Wicker Park.

Tati’s proprietor, J, describes 2 types of customers who are drawn to custom bikes – one is the 23 year old who went to art school and will spend a lot of money to have a few very good things. The other is the 35 year old architect, who has money to spend, but doesn’t want anyone to know. “He wants really, really nice things, but things that don’t look expensive,” J says. “The average person will look at it, and won’t be able to tell.”

J attributes their modesty partly to Midwestern conservatism. Friends in the fashion industry tell him that conservatism is echoed in the local market for men’s suits. It also suggests nuance to his motive for buying custom, or hand made goods.

The classic explanation for why a consumer will buy something that displays his discernment more than his wealth, is that he is showing off his cultural capital to sophisticated peers. That motive may be real, but it seems to be joined by a real desire for a more personal, less alien relationship with objects themselves. Some consumers want to participate in the production process, if possible, or at least to know everything they can about how the object is made.

J describes a recent encounter with a customer who came to Tati shopping for a jersey. Tati, a tiny shop, maintains a selective collection, so J had just 1 jersey, in black, by Search and State. Search and State is a small company that makes a couple, technically excellent garments from carefully chosen fabrics, in the actual garment district in New York. J and his customer had a 70 minute conversation about the jersey, the customer decided it was exactly what he was looking for, and bought it.

As customer tastes take new dimensions, the categories of custom and mass produced are blurred. Tati Cycles offers cyclocross frames built by Humble Frameworks, at cost, J says, because he wants to help Catano’s business grow to a sustainable scale. But he also sells bikes made to spec by Maxwei, a mass production builder in Taiwan – they are custom, but not built by a single craftsman.

Legacy Bicycle Detail

Legacy Frameworks sells manufactured bikes, but they are all hand built by Levi Borreson. He builds the same style in 2 sizes, in small production runs to make them more affordable. Legacy bicycles are carefully engineered for bike commuting, they are slightly less expensive than European commuter bikes, and they only weigh a third as much.

Borreson has been marketing Legacy Frameworks through big organized rides, bike swaps, and pop-up retail events like the Guerilla Truck Show that coincides with NeoCon, partly to avoid retailer mark-ups.

Legacy Bicycle and Rear Triangle Detail


Heritage Bicycles, Chicago’s other small production builder, has taken the opposite tack. Heritage builds very stylish bicycles, and sells them at a Lincoln Park general store, where you can also shop for accessories, and hang out at the store’s coffee shop. In fact, Heritage has developed its own line of waxed canvas panniers.

“I don’t see Heritage Bicycles as being a bike company,” owner Michael Salvatore says. “I see it being a lifestyle brand, and the bicycle is an entry way into that.”

Customer Suzanne Fox describes how Salvatore customized her Heritage bicycle by building it out with racks and panniers – she would have bought the Heritage panniers but they were still under development, “I liked the idea of having an all-Heritage bike.”

Prior to opening Heritage, Salvatore was co-owner of Bowery Bicycles of New York, which sells bikes with a similar combination of local construction and retro-aesthetics. He recalls that when Bowery Bicycles first opened, they expected their customer base to be hipsters and boutique shoppers, but it turned out to be broader – extending to other small business owners and the buy-local crowd. Something similar is happening in Chicago. Heritage opened its doors in January, and Salvatore said he expected to sell at least 10 bikes this year. By mid-August, they had sold 80.

In some ways, Humble and Heritage make very different kinds of bicycles, but Humble Framework’s Catano is enthusiastic about the profile Heritage is bringing to hand built bikes in general. At one point he says “I think they’re the most important thing that is happening right now, in terms of Chicago bike culture.”

“When I started building bikes in Chicago,” Catano recalls “I was really excited that there was a huge population of cyclists, with no one building custom frames here. I thought ‘I’m going to make out like a bandit.’”

He quickly realized the fact it was a wide open market also meant there was little awareness of handmade bicycles as an item someone might want. Heritage makes hand built bicycles accessible, and visible, to a much broader public. Catano hopes that will help other local builders as well.

“Every time someone sees a hand-built bike on the road, and says ‘Oh, that’s cool, hand-built bikes are a thing that I like,’ it’s got to help.”

photo by Rob Lomblad

UV Awazu's Custom Metal Shop

UV and Daughter Ingrid by Dad's First Saw

UV Awazu does custom metal fabrication from a shop in Bridgeport’s old Central Manufacturing District, at a significant intersection of Chicago’s bike cult and its small-industry renaissance.

There’ve probably always been small fabricators who do precise custom work, where half the job is figuring out the best way to do it. And there have long been urban cyclists, maybe also bike messengers racing alleycats in their off hours. But bicyclic culture in Chicago began to accelerate in the late 1990s, sometime around the launch of Chicago Critical Mass. Something happened in its old manufacturing buildings around the same time.

Ken Dunn bought a 1920s era parking garage at 6100 S. Blackstone, and housed the Resource Center there, in the 1970s. It was an incubator of sorts. There was a book and clothing exchange, a community garden, a co-operative workshop, and a curbside recycling program, which Dunn eventually moved to 7800 S. Dorchester and built into a waste-stream fueled economic development engine.

But by the late 1980s when Chicago artist Dan Peterman took up a studio at the Blackstone building, many of the other ventures had disappeared or were in decline. Peterman’s Wikipedia entry describes him as an artist and a practitioner of ‘adaptive reuse’ before everyone else was doing it. He once installed a bus inside one of Dunn’s giant compost heaps -- the heat from decay kept it warm all winter and they let a couple homeless men sleep in it at night.

There was also a big pile of bikes that attracted neighborhood kids, and there was talk of restoring old bikes to useful lives, a concept that didn’t get off the ground until Peterman bought the Blackstone building from the Resource Center in 1994. He wanted to get the incubator started again. And he wanted to tweak the model.

They launched Blackstone Bicycle Works under the corporate umbrella of the Resource Center, and got a grant from Richard Driehaus. The shop would teach bike mechanics and other job skills to neighborhood youth, and also operate a retail shop. Peterman rented the rest of the space to a mix of social and business ventures: a small furniture maker called Big Fish, Wong Lee’s Auto Parts, Jamie Calvin’s Neighborhood Resource Center, also Monk Parakeet, an arts program, and The Baffler magazine.

Peterman says there had been artists staking out a frontiersman lifestyle in old fireproof buildings where they could make stuff for years when he bought the Blackstone building. But those buildings were basically cheap subdivisions let for low rents, they weren’t set up to incubate businesses per se, and “they tended to stay in the art world.” The Blackstone building would be different. It’s evolved over the years, it’s called the Experimental Station now. Peterman saw it as a managed ecosystem operating on principles of mutualism – as opposed to principles like survival of the fittest, or “parasitism,” a business model the Experimental Station describes as “the ‘I'm going to exploit all of the resources that you offer as cheaply as I can’ mentality.”

It made a difference that Blackstone’s reinvention was happening in the 1990s. The urban atmosphere was different than when Peterman first rented his studio from Dunn. In the 1980s, Chicago’s population was still shrinking, its buildings, especially its industrial buildings, were emptying out.

By the 1990s, the back to the city movement was visible on the street. The population of urban art students was growing too. At Columbia College, for example, enrollment was about 2,000 in 1975. By 1990, it was about 6,500. Today there are about 12,000 students enrolled in degree programs at Columbia -- it’s one of the largest arts colleges in the US. The School of the Art Institute enrolls another 2,000.

When Peterman, Dunn and Calvin first launched Blackstone Bicycle Works in 1994, they hired Andy Gregg to run it. Gregg was an art student in Michigan, but he had a friend at the School of the Art Institute who had got to know Dan Peterman. Greg was virtually raised in bike shops. Peterman says he was softspoken, and had a certain cool factor that helped charm the neighborhood kids.

While in Chicago, Gregg took up racing with bike couriers. He never worked as a courier himself, but he excelled at alleycats, unsanctioned street races, which is hard to do if you come from out of town. You’ll never know the streets like a courier does.

His cycling acquaintance would sometimes show up at the shop. UV was one of them. Today neither one can put their finger on when UV started working at Blackstone, though Gregg acknowledges he would have been the one to hire him. It was sometime between 1996 and 1998. UV was an art student, a cyclist and a racer. Soon it was Andy coming in #1 in Chicago messenger races, and UV coming in #2.

The kids at Blackstone appreciated that. Blackstone tied some of the Woodlawn kids into the youth program for XXX Racing, then a fledgling sanctioned race team sponsored by Yojimbo’s Garage.


Meanwhile, back at Blackstone, UV was learning how to weld. He says it was Andy Gregg who inspired him to start building beautiful things from metal scrap. Gregg was becoming known around town for furniture he made from wheel rims, upholstered with inner tubes -- he’d made a prototype as an art student -- it fit with the Blackstone aesthetic. You can see an early example of one of Gregg’s lounge chairs at Yojimbo’s Garage. Gregg made the bar stools for The Handlebar. Lance Armstrong’s bike shop also owns a few.

Eventually, Gregg would move back to Michigan, where rents are cheaper and off road riding is better. He’s refined his wheel rim furniture and sells it through the internet as far away as Singapore. He’ll still build you furniture from your own parts, if you’re sentimentally attached. And he says he still consults UV for technical expertise in metal work.

A Classic Gregg Lounge Chair

Even back when UV first started building choppers from scrap bikes down at Blackstone, long before he made his living in fabrication, he was known as a perfectionist. There is a strain of chopper bicycle enthusiasts who appreciate the hacked together aesthetic. “I was reacting against that,” UV recalls. “There was a group of people who’d ride together, and they’d laugh about how their bikes would break on the ride.” He would never build something that might threaten the safety of the person using it. But more aesthetically speaking, he couldn’t stand to build something that might break.

For awhile, there was talk of expanding the Blackstone program to include bicycle frame building, partly to accommodate older kids who were ready to learn new skills. Blackstone sponsored UV to study frame building at the Urban Bike Institute in Oregon. In the end, Peterman says implementing a metalworking program was just too complex for Blackstone. UV says he thought about framebuilding professionally, but this was in 2001, he concluded it wasn’t commercially viable.

2001 was also the year the Blackstone building suffered a catastrophic fire, and took years to rebuild. UV kept Blackstone Bicycle Works going from a semi-trailer for awhile. Meanwhile, his metal working business began to evolve.

He launched it with a $3,000 on a 0% interest for 12 months credit card deal -- he started with a saw and a welding machine. He built his business doing fancy custom jobs for wealthy patrons. For awhile he supplemented his income coordinating deliveries for Bari’s sandwich shop. Then a friend moved to Denver and handed over his steadiest client, a wealthy individual with a “really expensive habit” for renovating homes – he told UV he’d finished 60 of them in his lifetime.

A steady patron helped UV transition to full time metal work. In 2006 he moved his business into Bubbly Dynamics in Bridgeport. “That’s when I began doing it full time, versus doing some jobs on the side, out of my house.”

Bubbly’s owner, John Edel, was an industrial designer who was making his living building virtual environments. He bought the real world warehouse in 2002, and was doing the renovations himself, like an exceptionally ambitious home improvement project. His gradual pace, and his creative disposition, let him maximize use of waste stream recycled materials – some of them came right to his door through a deal he’d struck with a waste hauler who would park half filled dumpsters in Edel’s loading yard over night – and free labor from his tenants who’d lend their skills in lieu of rent.

The end result is a small business incubator built out with great care and with a mutualistic culture. Once installed, the tenants would swap skills, or occasionally employ each other to complete big jobs.

UV and Edel were acquainted through bike circles. Edel sometimes rides a high wheel. He was also an early member of a chopper bike gang called the Rat Patrol – he let them set up shop in his basement. When UV moved in as a tenant in 2006, his skills were so helpful he didn’t pay rent to Edel for a long time. If you visit Bubbly today you can see his handiwork in the staircases and doorframes, and especially in the showcase hand railings, assembled to look like cascades of bubbles in stainless and frosted glass.

UV did other jobs. For instance, he taught himself to apply powder coat – an enamel-like finish for metal objects that’s not mixed with toxic solvents. The powder is applied electrostatically and cured with heat. At first, he was doing it manually, using heat lamps and a hand held temperature sensor. Eventually he built a cabinet to simplify the process. It’s basically a big convection oven, assembled from steel plate, with a control panel he built into a modified toolbox.

UV’s known for his careful detail work. He can create special effects through layers of pigment, he can fade colors into each other from one end of a frame to the next. If he doesn’t like how it comes out, he’ll strip it and do it again.

UV Powder Coat Detail

2008 turned out to be a transition year. His client with the house habit had just finished his first new construction project. “It was very high end,” UV recalls. He put it on the market just before the economy collapsed, which slowed him down for awhile.

But by year end, UV had met Rocky Levy, of Icon Modern furniture. “It was totally random,” UV recalls. Levy was looking for a fabricator to build metal bases for a new account. UV had just powder-coated a bike for a friend of a friend of Levy’s wife.

Icon Modern makes furniture from reclaimed urban wood. Reclaimed wood has emerged as a small industry itself. Its rescues good wood from the waste stream, and the furniture comes with a backstory. Icon Modern advertises that in a lot of cases “we can tell you where your table ‘grew up’.”

Levy says they buy wood from the Rebuilding Exchange, which deconstructs old buildings as an alternative to demolition. The Exchange opened in Chicago in 2009. He also has 3 to 4 sawyers who harvest wood from urban trees that have been taken down for other reasons. A lot of them have been infested by Emerald Ash Borer – the scars will be left visible in the finished furniture. Levy says they once sawed open an ancient oak and found a bullet lodged deep inside the trunk – they had sawed it exactly in half. Counting rings they calculated someone had shot the tree about 80 years ago. They left it in the table top.

In 2008, Icon won an account with Starbucks to furnish tables for their midwestern stores. Big retail chains renovate stores on a regular cycle – they work their way through all the stores and by the time they are finished, the early renovations are ready for a new look. Often, that new look means replacing the old furniture, but Icon Modern sold Starbucks on furniture they could spruce up, not replace. The table tops are an inch and a half thick – they can be sanded down and refinished. “And UV builds the bases like tanks,” Levy says.

“I don’t skimp on structural integrity,” UV says, and he’s particularly careful about tables. “People do really stupid things on tables.” He imagines employees standing on them after hours, or even an elderly customer having a heart attack, and sitting down abruptly. “I think of random stuff that could happen, because that’s how life is.”

Levy says in 3 years, they’ve built furniture for 450 stores – they might supply 1 – 5 tables per store. Almost every table is different. That places the job at a spot just between custom and mass production that might pique the interest of large fabricators, but makes them hesitate to do it. UV’s got the flexibility to modify each table, though the job sometimes pushes the envelope of what he can produce.

He hired 3 employees, and trains them to do the welds he wants, exactly the way he wants it done. “I’ve developed a certain way of doing tables. It’s cost effective...if we stick to it. Otherwise we’re wasting labor.

“When I tell other welders how much time it takes us to build these,” he adds, “they’re impressed.”

Though sometimes they still modify a design to work with his equipment. Icon Modern’s latest tables resemble airplane wings: the original design was shaped like an ellipse. In consultation with UV, Levy modified it to a tear drop shape, so the weld is done where the flat sheets come together, and so UV could make it. He bends the quarter inch steel on a slip roller, but “I wouldn’t have been able to do a tight radius bend.”

Levy accepts that as part of the process of using a small local producer. For some of his conscientious corporate clients, the small local producer is part of the appeal. “Just because something could be done, doesn’t mean you should have it done,” especially if it means sourcing it further afield.

And his small local producer can also do his “super custom” work. Levy describes a decorative screen of antique nails he designed for Roka, a sushi restaurant. He had a source for antique iron nails, so he incorporated them into a 40 by 8 foot tapestry that UV engineered.

A Small Swatch from Roka's Nail Tapestry

On UV’s end, volume and time may have tempered his perfectionist instincts.

Once the steel table bases are built, they clean off the oil with acetone and use a torch to burn off lint, and any moisture in the pores of the metal that might seed rust later on. Then they cover the raw steel with lacquer.

UV says the raw steel look is very popular now. But he can’t help adding that “really, if you’re looking for durability, lacquer over raw steel isn’t the way to go.”

A few years ago, he was building steel table bases for the library in IIT’s Crown Hall – a Mies Van der Rowe landmark. He did it the way it ought to be done, which involved primers, toxic solvents and expensive paint, even though the client wanted the look of raw steel. “We have him the look,” UV says, “but we gave him a really tough finish.

“In hindsight, it was over the top.”


While his shop at Bubbly Dynamics is packed to its limits, UV says he’s resisted the temptation to move, because he thinks of the Starbuck’s contract as a once in a lifetime job – particularly since they’re building the tables so they won’t have to be replaced. If he moved to a larger space, he’d fill it with more equipment.

“Maybe I’d pull in more business,” he says. In fact, he has done projects for Icon Modern’s other conscientious corporate clients, like Whole Foods and Google. "But it was a level of risk I wasn’t willing to take.”

Now his wife, Kelly, has landed a great job in Columbia, Missouri – they’ll move there with their young daughter, Ingrid, this spring. So he is selling his Chicago business in 2 parts.

Angela Chan has bought his powder coat business. Her boyfriend, Owen Lloyd, builds bike frames – in fact he founded the frame builder’s co-op that also rents space at Bubbly Dynamics. Before he leaves, UV is training her to do powder coating so she can keep the quality up.

Down in Missouri he plans to start out slow, and see what builds. First thing, he would like to build a cargo bike with seats for a toddler or two, while he’s still got free time.