A new life for old bikes

When Vincent Erickson was eight years old, he and a few friends had an old bike they wanted to fix up. The friends eventually abandoned the project, but Erickson ended up with all the parts and finished it. Then he started work on another bike, and another bike.

If he was going to work on bikes, he decided he needed a shop.

“It was hard to work on a dirt floor,” the 18-year-old Columbia falls High School senior said last week. “Drop a greasy bearing and it’s covered with dirt. Then you have to clean it and repack it all over again.”

So he built a plywood floor. Then he got tired of being rained on so he built a lean-to, a bench and a stand to hold bike frames.

Today, the place looks a little bit like a bicycle graveyard, with rims and frames and forks stacked all over the place — nearly all of it donated.

“I don’t usually buy parts,” Erickson said.

He doesn’t need to, really. People just drop off bikes at the house. Great Northern Cyclery in Whitefish also gives him parts.

Lately, Erickson’s been restoring classic bikes for customers. He recently finished a 1949 Super Cruiser, adding fancy wood inlay, a bike rack and even a couple of lights for the rear end.

It’s a beautiful bike.

“But it’s heavy,” he explained. “It has one gear, and it must weigh 50 pounds. Whoever rode it had huge legs.”

Erickson does a lot of the work in the high school’s wood and metal shop, where he spends four periods of his school day.

One of the more interesting bikes he’s built has a motor.

Just pedal the bike a couple of cranks and a two-cycle engine starts up, and away he goes. He bought the kit online for $150, but Erickson hand-crafted a gas tank for the bicycle.

“It will hit 40 mph,” he said with a smile. “I got pulled over.”

While it’s not considered a motorcycle, riders have to obey the speed limit and stop signs, Erickson was informed by a friendly police officer.

He’s built quite a few other things as well — including a table out of old gang saws from Plum Creek and a wood-splitter.

If the world were to come to an end tomorrow, Erickson would be one of those post-apocalyptic survivors seen in movies rebuilding civilization from scraps.

But he has a far more cheerful vision.

When he graduates from high school, he plans to attend the United Bicycle Institute in Oregon, where he’ll study bicycle mechanics.

“I’d like to start my own shop someday,” he said.