Motivation
I am an avid cycling enthusiast: commuting to work every day, some short tours or even day tours on the weekends and at least two cycle tours a year, one of them longer than a week.
Owning three bikes, I do myself all mechanical work. Every one of them has its own story, its own role in my cycling life. None of them is an expensive bike and yet I developed kind of a sentimental attachment to each one. I know them intimately after many complete overhauls over the years and after many thousands of kilometers. It would be difficult to decide parting with any one of them.
Being an engineer, and having a strong do-it-yourself approach, I usually have a couple of projects in the pipeline. Some of then reach a certain reasonable level of completion just before entering the misterious status of "on hold". Just a few are ever definitely finished. While visiting my main source of metal and material for my projects, the municipal dumping place, I noticed over the years the large amount of bicycles that are discarded. Among many cheap mass-produced mountain bikes, it is not difficult to spot once and again high quality gems manufactured in the old days, with lugs hand-brazed frames, with top edge classical components like Campagnolo, Weinmann, Shimano, Sachs, Brooks.
On the other hand, a certain fact came to attention as I was reading an article about cycling statistics in Britain. The article analyzed the number of active cyclists and compared with the number of new bicycles sold every year and the number of bicycles scrapped every year to reach the conclusion that a large amount of bicycles have a life cycle that includes being purchased, "owned" and scrapped rather than ridden.
Bicycles became, at least in Europe, USA and other developed countries, more a consumer article than a true means of transport. A standard bicycle shop in Switzerland, for instance, will have on display very expensive models, in general over-engineered for the purpose. Of course, a downhill mountain bike cyclist with serious competition goals will need specialized adjustable full suspension, titanium and magnesium alloy frames as the serious racing bike enthusiast will intend to reduce every gram of weight by using reinforced fibre carbon components and aerodynamically shaped frames and spokes. However, the fact remains that for most of the standard cyclists the bikes are over-engineered for the function that they are targeted to perform. Without exaggeration, I can say I have seen grandmas cycling to the supermarket on nice urban paved roads, basket included, on bikes with full suspension and hydraulic brakes worth 2 or 3 thousand CHF.
Many organizations exist that address the bicycle life cycle issue by recycling
http://www.bicyclerecycling.co.uk/
http://bikerecycle.org/
and it is not only about non-profit organizations; there are also some shops trading in used recycled vintage parts for restoration projects
http://www.recycledcycles.com/
http://oldroads.com/bicycles_for_sale.asp
Things did not change dramatically in the history of the bicycle since the introduction of the so-called "safety frame" in 1880s as opposed to the high wheel bicycle type or penny-farthing. The diamond frame became since then the very paradigm of bicycle construction.
I was always attracted to alternative bicycle concepts that would challenge the paradigm in a true Kuhnian sense (I cannot help it!). Recumbents, tandems, Pedersen, folding frames, rowing propulsion... Such bikes, even if you can find what you are specifically looking for, cannot be bought for reasonable money, as they are hand-made and usually carry a premium tag price for rarity, scarcity or oddity. They are out of reach for a reasonable and price-to-functionality minded engineer. A hand-made Pedersen, for instance, will offer for more than a couple thousand Euros basically the same functionality than a second-hand granny bike for 50CHF. After all, even if the Pedersen concept is charming, such a bike represents the very consumer object that I so deeply reject.
Therefore, and in order to give way to my interests on alternative non-standard bicycle concepts, my interest on workshop activities and to explore my creativity and sensitivity as a plastic artist; I am founding Badenia cycles to create rolling sculptures out of discarded and neglected materials and scrap metals at hand in the local dump.
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