Scott Cox was an undergrad at RIT in the early years of this decade. Some students come in every year and ask to shoot pictures of my store or of me. I think that the composition possibilities of a cluttered store and a disheveled merchant make for a good photo.

Scott was very modest and insisted that I not feel at all compelled to pose, but we had had several conversations about bikes and traveling, and he was an interesting person. I was eager to see his work. It was October and he thought it would be a good shot if we could go somewhere outdoors where there were lots of yellow leaves on the ground. I took him up the street to Mount Hope Cemetery which has 200 acres of rolling hills and valleys.

Some parts of the cemetery can truly be said to be nearly wilderness in that you can see no city clutter on all four sides. It was gratifying to be the person to introduce an artist to this wonderful location, and we did two days of shooting that resulted in this photo and one other which shows the rising sun from the east and my red outfit with a red racing bike. He used an old fashioned view camera that uses full size glass plate negatives, and a huge flash unit that barely fit into his little car. His eye for detail and for deep focus is hard to discern on the computer screen, but if you come to the store you can see a real good print he made me. He also made prints for my sister, my wife and my parents. This was expensive for a starving student!

I heard from another student some months later that Scott had received some nice commissions after graduating and that he was traveling in Central Europe. His work on Scott-Cox.com is very special. If you see his self portrait I think you can get a good idea of what he is like as a man. His demeanor is calm and he is a good listener. I expect great things from him in the future and that he will make a contribution to the world of documentary journalism. His pictures of the hard working people in these scenes shows real talent.

It used to be that bike shops hired and trained skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen who built the bicycles mostly from scratch. But retail is no longer seen as a lifetime career by most owners and employees. People who own bicycle stores do not want to take the risk of training skilled mechanics and offering them lifetime employment and good wages. (This is not unique to my industry, as we all know.) The bike industry has complied with the desire to make bikes easier to build and sell by assembling them in mass quantities on an assembly line, usually in China. The work they do has vastly improved in the last decade, actually. Wheels, for example, are spoked tight by the automated wheel machines. They were really bad back in the 1980s.

Because bikes are assembled in the factory, bike shops can just take them out of a box and in less than twenty minutes, sell them to you. But the mass assembling of bikes in factories is still done with poor practices; nuts, bolts, spokes, brakes and derailleurs are screwed on with no lubrication, control wires are installed similarly dry. They can corrode easily . They are stiff and soon wear out.

I totally renovate these parts by hand. That is fairly simple and takes only a few minutes to take apart and reassemble. The most complicated renovation in my process is the overhaul of internal ball bearing assemblies. These parts are also factory-assembled with hardly any grease inside them. Hubs and other components that have ball bearings have to be dis-assembled and each of the parts must be visually inspected. I then re-build them. I can vastly improve them with cleaning and by replacing the ball bearings with much more precise ones.

This is time consuming and it probably triples the cost of my assembly, but this process makes bikes run smoother and makes them totally resistant to wear. The rider will thus enjoy more riding time and the components will need almost no adjusting and repair. The owner will save enough over the life of the bike to pay for the bike.

I thus can create what I consider to be a hand built craft piece out of each bike. I do make one of a kind custom bikes, but not many people can afford them. I would love to sell hundreds of custom bikes, but by re-buiIding every bike like it was a custom, I am able to, in effect, make hundreds of hand made bikes each year. It is a pleasure to work this way, actually. The skill required to do this work is lost if one does not do the work often, so I can keep my skills honed and be quicker than if I were only doing it once or twice a month. Employees at most other bike shops never get to make even one hand made bike. They mostly are underpaid and are often poorly motivated and most of them do not know what they are missing.

The best thing about being a one person store is that I no longer have to work among a group of men with bad attitudes. Bike shops tend to be staffed by smokers and burnouts. I have not been around people like this for over 25 years.

This is so much better for my passion for work. This business is then able to communicate a passion for quality to the customer. In businesses that are staffed by people who own and invest in the business, the customer will have a better experience. An owner operator such as myself can motivate customers to desire quality and hence spend more and see it as a much better investment.

I believe that my shop is seen as a place that values fine arts and crafts and that I have a desire to connect to the historical traditions of folks who make fine craft products like, for example, jewelry, fine machines, clock works, pianos and furniture and other things that last for generations. I really believe that a hand made bike will similarly last for a hundred years or more.