Adams, 35, of Kingston, is a co-owner of Around Town Bikes, rear 59 N. Main St. in Wilkes-Barre. In addition to fixing bicycles and running the retail shop, Adams also builds custom frame bicycles.
Last month, he even exhibited a couple of his frames at the Fourth Annual North American Handmade Bike Show in Portland, Ore. He didn’t win any awards, but as he says his bikes aren’t “show bikes.” He was only looking to exhibit his work and generate interest in his designs.
Under the Rich Adams Custom Fabrication label, Adams builds bicycles from start to finish, measuring his customers, cutting the tubes to their measurements, and then either brazing or welding the tubes together. The main difference from a mass-produced bicycle is that Adams can build the bikes exactly to his customers’ specifications. Everything is customized — from what type of bike the customers want to the measurements of the bicycle to the paint scheme. Most customers are bicycle enthusiasts who know exactly what they want. They know when a bicycle is good and when it isn’t.
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“People do like the final product in terms of the feel of the bike,” Jones, 46, said of Adam’s bicycles.
And Jones should know. He has one of Adam’s designs. It is a compact design Adams made for Jones before they went into business together.
Adams grew up in Kingston, and as a teenager, he loved riding bikes around the Wyoming Valley. One of his favorite rides was going through Kirby Park, across the wooden-plank Black Diamond bridge, and then to a dirt track at Barney Farms. Now a residential area, houses and driveways fill the space where Adams and his friends used to jump tires and do other tricks.
“When I see that neighborhood, I feel old,” Adams said with a laugh.
A graduate of Wyoming Valley West, Adams attended Lehigh University, where he majored in material sciences and engineering. After college, Adams landed a job in the semiconductor industry in Willow Grove. A couple of years later, he headed to the Silicon Valley where he worked at DNS Electronics in California.
While on the West Coast, Adams lived in San Francisco and commuted each day to work. He rode his bike to the train station, and then rode the train to Silicon Valley. On the train one day, Adams was paging through a bike magazine when he saw an advertisement for the United Bicycle Institute in Ashland, Ore. The ad said he could learn to make a bicycle during a two-week course at the institute.
“I thought this is it. This is what I’m looking for,” Adams said.
Adams already had experience fixing bicycles because he did it so much on his own. Soon after completing the bicycle school, DNS closed the lab where Adams was stationed. He decided to became a bike mechanic or — as they call them in the bicycle industry — a “wrench”at a bike shop in Berkeley, Calif.
“They were closing the lab. I got a job at the bike shop. It was good timing,” Adams said. “I got to work in the city, and that was fun.”
Adams also worked for Tim Medina, who runs the Web site www.wrenchscience.com and a bike shop in Berkeley, while he continued to build his own bicycles on the side.
Adams’ decision to come back to the East Coast was influenced by a number of factors. His family wanted him to move back; he didn’t have enough time to spend making his own bicycles and then he was robbed at gun point.
After running into Jones at a bicycle conference, Adams and Jones decided to go into business together in 2003. Jones said the original plan was to set up a business in Philadelphia but after touring the old Schmitt Printery, they both knew it was right to come back to the Wyoming Valley. Plus Jones was familiar with many customers in town because his family used to own Sickler’s Bike Shop in Wilkes-Barre.
“We were really one of the first new business downtown. It was right around the time when Mayor Leighton went into office, and we gained an enormous amount of exposure because of that,” Jones said. “We were kind of the poster boys because we moved and came back.”
Jones says there are only about 100 active builders in the U.S., active meaning they build more than 10 frames a year. In terms of having a retail shop in conjunction with the frame shop, Jones says there are probably only about 10 in the U.S. Frame shops are popular in Europe, Jones said, but Americans are better at building bicycles.
Adams explains his career in the bicycle industry with an observation. When he was younger, he worked at the Ski Shack and the employees never stopped talking about skis and skiing equipment. Adams liked skiing, but he couldn’t quite understand why anyone would want to spend all day talking about skis. Now he understands. It’s all about love. He loves talking about bicycles and all day, every day, he wants to talk about them.
“I don’t get tired of talking about bikes,” Adams said. “When you leave here, you don’t stop talking about them.”
csheaffer@citizensvoice.com, 570-821-2083
