Editor's Note: This is an extended version of an interview first published in the October 2016 print edition of Bicycling. Subscribe now!
I told him that traditionally, there is an introduction at the start of a Q&A, wherein the writer pontificates about the subject of the interview and attempts to depict a lifetime of unknowable background and influences in a few hundred words, and also says what the person was wearing and if it was sunny or rainy when they talked and maybe what they had to eat. I told him that was not really my thing and I didn’t think it was his, either. I think I said, about it all, yuk. Or maybe ick. I said since this was Bicycling's special issue about cycling’s makers, maybe he and I could make the intro together. He said that sounded interesting. So I said, let’s start by telling people who you are. And he said: I am Richard Sachs.
I didn’t tell him I knew he was going to say that, but I knew he was going to say that. I told him it was a great answer. Because it is. Then I said: You’re going to leave it to me, then, to tell people that you have been putting a file or torch or both to bicycle frames for more than 40 years, that you are revered for your skill and dedication even among those other framebuilders who on their own are worth revering (most say you’re a master, all agree you’re an icon), that you, along with just a few others, essentially created the American hand-built frame culture in the 1970s, and that, among other innovations you developed your own steel tubing because you could not get exactly what you wanted, that the queue for one of your frames, with a price that starts at $5,000, is rumored to be closed and that even customers who’ve already ordered face a wait of up to eight years to get their bikes?
![Richard Sachs]()
Sachs first designed his own lugs in ’81, and now uses his own modern, oversize namesake tubing. Joe Pugliese
Richard Sachs kind of sighed without really doing so. He said: The wait—I haven’t said boo or made a public comment about the queue since 2008. But I know the internet conversations about it. The memes. I can’t control that and don’t engage even when asked about it in social media. I’m transparent with my clients, keep diligent notes about promises and deadlines, and send out emails when there are lemons that life serves me. In mid 2015 I wrote a message to every client to take their temperature regarding the wait, and to make sure they were still good to go when their name reached the top. I offered everyone the chance to cancel and get a deposit returned. That erased about 60 lines in my book, and I wrote checks for roughly $22,000. The overwhelming majority of clients elected to wait. These are things that the masses don’t… Well, they know now atmo. What I’d like people to consider, since I am being given the mic here, is that one can get a nice bicycle many places; I’m commissioned heavily (now) as a result of 40 years of work.
Atmo is a thing he says. It means “according to my opinion.” I kind of sighed without doing so, and told him I’d been hesitant to bring up the wait because it feels almost sensationalistic and in a way not germane to his story, but it’s the kind of fact that has to go into a piece like this. I told him I didn’t know why that was but it was. I told him I myself was more interested in truth than facts.
Then I asked, what’s the most significant thing I’m leaving out of this summary of your life? You got your first __bike when you were 17, an Atala Grand Prix that your mother bought you as consolation for not buying you a car. You’d made a list of things you wanted if you couldn’t have a car, and a __bike was on top because this kid named Jimmy Farmer, who is now an artist and playwright, used to ride around on a one-speed bike with a basket and despite the fact that bikes were uncool in your New Jersey neighborhood Jimmy had so much charisma and composure that you wanted some of what he was. You kept riding, eventually starting to ride not just around but like a studied cyclist, and after you graduated from the above-your-station prep school your mother had sent you to, in the downtime before going to the college that you’d been accepted to, you moved to Vermont to try to get a job at a bike shop that had advertised for a mechanic in the classifieds of the Village Voice. The job was filled by the time you got there. In spite or something like it, you went to the library and wrote letters to 30 European framebuilders—which to you was a way cooler occupation than bike mechanic and would show them—asking to apprentice, to sweep floors, to do anything to get in. While you waited to hear back, you hung around the shop, and by then you had a Hurlow and partly because they thought the bike was exotic, the people at the shop offered you a job. One company took up your offer, Witcomb, in England. You never made it to college. You went to London and they were surprised when you showed up and you had to remind them who you were, and for around 10 months you mostly swept floors and carried boxes in what you call—with affection now—a Dickensian factory. When an entrepreneur wanted to start Witcomb USA in Connecticut, you returned and began building frames for real. For about 15 bucks a week and free board in someone’s house. You began racing, and building bikes for racers, some of whom won national titles, and when Witcomb, in your words, “started to become, like, you know, a job,” you quit and started Richard Sachs Cycles in 1975.
In reply, Richard Sachs said, It occurred to me today while riding, and only since I haven’t written for my site in over a week: I unplanned my life. Serendipity would be an overused word to describe the path I was on. I’m the accidental bicycle maker. I didn’t want or plan to do any of this. But I became a bicycle maker once enough of the right mistakes were made.
It was sunny when we talked.
BILL STRICKLAND: The parts of your life covered in that introduction are worthy of their own separate story, but here it all serves as only a preamble to what I think is the most intriguing, inspiring, and, in many ways, hard to understand story in framebuilding today, and maybe ever. So there you were, one of the founders of American custom framebuilding, arguably the one with the most recognizable name because you were embedded in the racing scene, kicking out 120 to 140 frames a year on your own and people wanting more. You were more savvy than most about understanding the value of the media—you advertised in the biggest magazines—and had made connections with the supply chains overseas. There’s a path from there toward growing into a lucrative corporation the way that, say, Tom Ritchey or Gary Fisher would do later when they sprang from the birth of mountain biking. But you decided, at some point and on some level even you can’t define, to instead dedicate your life to this impossible, metaphysical task of making one frame that is literally perfect.
Richard Sachs: A path is one way to imagine a life. So is a puzzle. One of those square ones with the little squares you have to move around to try to make the picture that you know is there but is all scrambled up. Many get frustrated or tired or bored or run out of time and they stop when the picture is almost there but one or two squares are still out of place, when you can see the picture but it’s not complete. Other times I think I fell through an open window of circumstance and desire, although maybe the window was only circumstance and luck because, looking back after all these years, I can see that I always had this desire. Before I started my own business, back in the ’70s when I was still working at Witcomb USA, I remember reading in some book about how to use a file. I wasn’t reading because I didn’t know how to use a file. I wanted more information. The book was talking about how to choose a file, and it got to this part where it said you could know, because of the way the work transmits the energy from the surface to the tool then into your hands, that you had made the right choice. Or that you could have made a better choice. And that shit just resonated with me. There was so much romance to that. I had been making bikes for just three or four years at that point. But I wanted that metaphysical crap all over my work. I wanted to feel my tools and my intuition and the universe helping me make a frame. I wanted that experience.
BS: I can think of three incidents in your life that were instrumental in pushing—or leading—you to feed that desire. The first is that, after you went out on your own, you built a bike to an important customer’s specifications instead of doing it the way you wanted to.
RS: That happened in ’78, ’79. At that point I might have made 500, 600 bikes, which is more than a lot of people building today will make in their lifetimes but still felt to me like starting out. I’d gotten to a point that I could channel a belief that, okay, even if I don’t exactly know why I’m making this or this choice with this frame I’m certain that I should. Back then, the Tour de l’Avenir was the amateur version of the Tour de France, and this national team racer who was using my bikes got invited. Rudy. He was famous. His picture was in magazines. And he gave me this order for a bike that didn’t make sense to me. But I was like, This is the bike Rudy wants. I still consider myself new. And he’s Rudy. So I make the bike. He goes to Europe, and he lasts maybe four or five days. The team director, Mike Neel, an even more important figure than Rudy back in those days, he blames the bike and balls Rudy out for using it. He tells Rudy it is so poorly designed he never wants to see it again. And I knew it. So that was the last time. I said to myself, look, I don’t know everything. But if my name’s going to be on a bike I’ve got to own what it is.
BS: At around that same time, you’d gotten over to Italy and seen some of the framebuilding happening in the shops of the old masters.
RS: I started going to Italy in ’79, and went six or seven times. I always made sure I had an introduction from someone to someone else, so I could go to the places doing the best work and say, like, Hello, Mr. Tommasini, I’m here from America, I’m the one who makes bikes and asked to visit your shop. And the work I saw people doing—the rank and file, you know, not necessarily even the person with his name on the frame—I thought to myself, Jesus, this is nothing like the seven or eight years I’ve spent doing this. If you were working at the carousel in one of those Italian shops back then, you were brazing a hundred frames a day, maybe more. It was like you become the heat. I realized there was so much more. There were things happening there—there was something there—that I wished desperately I could know. But I realized I was never going to find it out, because by then there was no starting over for me, no going back in time to apprentice in Italy. I was already in the full throe of my own business. So I thought, well, if I can’t get what they have, maybe I can at least get to where they are—to the other side of this thing. I understood I would have to find my own way. It could have been a crushing moment—look, in ways it was—but I came away resolved that the only chance I had to get close to where they were was to believe, and really the only thing I had to believe in was my belief.
BS: The third big influence from that period is that you saw a televised series called Living Treasures of Japan, a documentary about nine artisans, from sword makers to doll makers, who were so revered that they were named by the country as national treasures.
RS: I came across it on PBS, and I was blown away. Here were people who had devoted their entire life to mastering something. Not to producing something. Not to making money by making something. Not even really to expressing themselves like artists would. But to the process of mastery itself. I kind of freaked out: This is exactly what I want! I want to be the framebuilder bicycle maker version of them.
BS: So these influences are rocking your life, but you haven’t fully abandoned traditional ideas about success. You’re still thinking maybe you should just figure out how to produce more frames and grow the business. At one point in this period, you even hired your one and only assistant for this purpose.
RS: That was in 1983. I hired a guy, and created this agenda and the idea was that he could do some of the prep work and I could take it from there and finish the bikes. And we were making bikes a lot faster, making a lot more. But now that I was doing that, it became clear to me that faster and more was not as important—to me—as these certain ways or certain ideas I had about how to create a lug or a dropout or a transition. How they should look, yes, but more how they should be created, and where the process of creating them should take me—and that the process of creating should take me somewhere at all, which is not, like, a business-plan kind of ideal. After three or four months, I knew I had to work alone.
BS: Then literally in one moment, all these powerful but not fully formed ideals and ambitions coalesce into a pursuit of perfection.
![Richard Sachs]()
The enduring RS logo enjoys the kind of iconic status many giant corporations only dream of. Joe Pugliese
RS: I had been struggling, from about ’79 to maybe the middle to the end of the ’80s, to understand what was going on, where I was going. When I should have been focused on the exponential—growth in numbers—I would instead always get more excited about the epiphanal—growth in my experience. Every time I did something more beautifully on a frame, I felt like it was a gift that fate or time had given me. And when that gift was given, that meant the next time I was doing the same thing I was a little more deliberate because I wanted to receive that gift again. I wanted to own it. Then it becomes, okay, I finally have this gift but to do it means I’m making five fewer bikes a year. After a couple of years of that, you realize, my bikes are so much better but I’m only making 80 of them a year now.
It was a problem, right? Where is this going?
Then one day I was listening to this radio station that I listen to all the time, WPKN, and one of the programs was talking about something and someone says the phrase “imperfection is perfection.” And time stopped for me. I have no idea what subject was being talked about, who was being interviewed, in what context those words came to me. But when they did, the previous eight or 10 years of my life made sense. I understood that perfection was always going to be on the other side of that line I was trying to get to, and that meant I was never going to get there—because when you really start to approach it, when you really get close, the line moves. I knew I was supposed to spend my life trying to get to the other side.
BS: Before we get into that, can you explain what you mean by a perfect frame? You and I just talked for 40 minutes about extremely technical details and specific aspects of the build that are too extensive to fit into this article. Your opinion of acceptability—let alone a bike that approaches perfection—is exacting beyond ordinary standards, but is there any way to summarize that?
RS: Making a bicycle—making anything by hand—is a collaboration. You have the materials. You have your tools. The commission. You have your own skill set, and workroom, and mood. The goal is to lure everything into a finished state that meets the standard you’ve set. On the best of days, you exceed the standard, and even consider that you’ve raised your own bar. On the average days, building to the standard is a gift unto itself. I’m talking about when a tube has the slightest bow, or an interference fit is a tad tight or loose. But when you get close, if you get close, savor the moment. Because you start from zero the next day.
BS: To be clear here, the level of mistake that makes a bike imperfect in your view is nothing a rider would notice. You are talking about flaws so infinitesimal that they are imperceptible—beyond the capability of human sense to detect, right?
RS: The only way you would know what I know is if you could become me while I was making the frame. Once the frames are painted and they get the Richard Sachs labels and get built up, nobody will notice anything at all.
BS: As far as I’ve been able to tell, the rider is not going to experience the imperfection—everyone I’ve talked to who rides your bikes says they’re exquisite. And the imperfections are not even something other highly skilled builders notice easily or at all. There’s no practical reason to try to exceed that.
RS: Yeah, the thing about it is... it doesn’t matter at all.
BS: Right—and you also cannot succeed at what you’re trying to do. You go into it knowing you’re going to fail, so—
RS: Well, when you start, every time you start, you have a chance. You also know you won’t do it. Both things exist for you at that moment. And for some time as the heat and the metal and the human element interface, both possibilities stay alive, and that is... Look, ultimately, yes, you get to some point where you concede, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t... you know... you...
BS: But, I mean, why?
RS: So that’s kind of like a flake factor that I don’t really talk about too much.
BS: Sure. Okay. You can start to sound real ridiculous real quick when you talk about this. We probably already do.
RS: At this point I don’t even care. You can say whatever you want about this, or interpret my words however you want or change them around or even change them or make my story into anything you want and I don’t care. I’m not afraid of what anyone thinks. It’s just that, as certain as I am about where I want to go, it is hard to explain. It’s not... a lot of people think a bike is only a thing, and believe me, it is a thing. But the building of it is a thing, which is a stupid way of saying it.
BS: That’s about as clear as it gets, I guess. I have to say that some people think you’re full of crap. Pretentious. Or that all of this is just really clever branding.
RS: I’m aware of that. It’s because I’ve shared it. My feeling is that you can brand an appliance company because you need to sell dishwashers and refrigerators, but when you have one person who makes one thing at one time for one other person who has been waiting a long time to get it, there’s nothing in that worth branding, which is a commercial exercise. I make a living. I have an IRA. But there’s no exponential commerciality for me to capitalize on by extending my brand. The reason I started talking about it at all is that if you stand around and let everyone else talk about you then what they say becomes a brand.
Hear Sachs discuss the delicate balance of custom design and fit:
BS: Speaking of brands—there probably are perfect bikes being made. Right now. By the thousands and thousands. Given the computer work and the machinery, I think the biggest and best bike companies have the ability to make frames that are technically perfect even by your standards.
RS: Yeah, they do! How can they not be perfect? There’s not a human hand that touches them except to maybe create the art file. Yes, they can make the perfect frame for like $1,200. I think I’m one of the only people in my space who speaks up for industrial-made bikes.
BS: This is important—I think it will help people understand you, because you’re not trying to lay claim to any kind of greater purity or love for bikes than the people at big companies. I’m going to use Specialized as an example because they’re a huge, worldwide corporation, but I know a lot of the engineers and marketers and other people who work there, and they all are crazy for bikes. They’re not the enemy of the love of bicycles, or even beauty or, god help me, soul.
RS: They make beautiful bikes. I don’t know much about Specialized in particular so I’m talking about all the best of those big companies. When I look at their Tour de France bikes, or, especially, their ’cross bikes—the more evolved industrial-made bikes like the Focuses or the Cannondales—they are beautiful. I wouldn’t want to make them, and I couldn’t even imagine making them, but they’re stunning and aesthetically completely dialed.
BS: So the point isn’t to make a perfect bike but to be a human and to make a perfect bike? Or is the inevitable imperfection itself the perfect part, because it represents that struggle, the human part?
RS: This is the point where we are beyond reason. And probably beyond answers.
BS: Why should a buyer care about your struggle? Why not just go out and buy the perfect bike?
RS: I can only make one file cut and once that cut is made, I can’t put the material back. That’s what people are paying for. I think that makes a bicycle more beautiful.
BS: People are paying for when you make the right cut, or when you don’t and the material is gone?
RS: The possibility of both. The possibilities are beautiful.
BS: So you’d have to say that the mistakes are part of the beauty of the bikes?
RS: They better be—because for me there’s no going back.
BS: This reminds me of something Thelonious Monk said. He basically blew jazz apart in the ’40s and ’50s. His stuff was so hard to play and understand that even the greatest musicians of the time had trouble with it, and one day he was listening to some of them and is supposed to have said, You’re making the wrong mistakes.
RS: That’s great.
BS: Monk wanted and expected mistakes in his pieces, but only the ones that made the music better. Part of the beauty of the music he was creating was that there was almost no way anyone could play it. You’ve set your standard beyond reach.
RS: The right mistakes... yeah. And, you know, how can I have this conversation in the presence of people who are actually building frames? There’s a builder I like. He’s a really nice guy. He studied with... It doesn’t matter. He probably should have studied more because I think they all should. I should have. I would have given my left nut to learn what the rank-and-file brazer at those Italian carousels knew. Anyway, the point is, this guy I like makes really nice bikes now. But when he asks for some advice, how do I tell the guy, look you have at least 10 years and a lot of rudimentary drills to get through before you can even start making the right mistakes.
![Richard Sachs]()
One of his guiding principles: “Technology is a poor substitute for experience.” Joe Pugliese
BS: We talked before about these sort of sudden moments of insight and inspiration that shifted your life—from the Japanese documentary to hearing “imperfection is perfection” on the radio—but there’s also, for all of us, long-term, steady, ongoing influences. You have been with Debra Paulson, your wife, for more than twenty years, and I know you credit her with shaping who you are, but a lot of your founding ideals took hold earlier in your life so I’m curious to understand her role in all this.
RS: In contrast to me and my life, Deb is naturally interested in almost everything. She has been a counterpoint to my life and my points of view since day one. I didn’t turn into her, I won’t turn into her, but she has taken me out of this myopic, self-absorbed shell I lived in and would (I think contentedly) live in. I joke about framebuilders living in the margins because they have no other choice, but I truly was in the margins. It’s not like I was one step away from being left at the dog track, but I didn’t play anybody’s game. Anybody’s. Before I met her, I lived alone, I’d been raised as an only child, and I worked alone. I had this solitary life. The friends I had were part of the racing and trade community I would see when I left town. In my daily life, I was basically a loner. That changed when I met someone who had a wider view of the world, of life. There’s this story we tell about the beginning of our relationship: When we were courting, she’d come by and—you know back then someone would just drive by and chuck the new phone books onto your lawn when they got produced—there’d be three or four phone books lying outside that she’d pick up. I’d never gone far enough out of my framebuilding focus to even go out and get them.
BS: So it’s not like she shows up in the shape of your lug design, but more that she actually helped shape you—give you a life outside the workshop and off the bike?
RS: Right on. I think I would have been the same framebuilder on my own, but I am a completely different human being thanks to her. It’s hard to know, of course, but if we just talk about the physical act of framebuilding, the craft, the process, I think I was on that path the moment I got off whatever path I was on in those Witcomb days. I might still be the framebuilder I am, but without Deb, the minute I left the bench I’d have been someone I can’t even... I think before she came into my life I was on the way to never being an adult. I have a pretty adolescent world view. I’m basically self-centered and immature at the core. I don’t think that’s a character flaw; it’s just me. I was on my way to doing what I do—but it would have occurred in obscurity and, probably, within some degree of loneliness. And in a less-rich world. I’m not that... I don’t tell people this but I basically consider myself illiterate, or at least under-educated. In one of the first exchanges we had, you said to me about something that, “you can only take the sword out of the stone once,” and I’m embarrassed to say I had to ask Deb what that meant. You know that movie, Chocolat, when Juliet Binoche comes into that little French town, they use a metaphor that she’s the north wind—at least I think they did—and she makes everybody stand up and take notice and get out of their own skin and think differently and more widely. That wind in my life is Deb.
BS: You don’t read much. She’s a writer and illustrator. That’s an interesting contrast. Does that in particular somehow feed your creativity?
RS: I don’t think that overlap is as important as the fact that she’s incredibly prolific with her passions, and thus brings a lot of influences to bear. She seems to go in cycles of immersion, then can leave what she’s doing behind. Remember how long I’ve known her. In that time, just to start the list, she has gained national renown as a hand weaver and a basket maker, became a licensed massage therapist, and while currently working as a writer also reviews books full time for Kirkus. She can get to a point with some pursuits and say, “Okay, I’ve done that. What’s next.” It’s nice for me to know that people can do that! It makes the world wider and bigger to know people can do wonderful things and move on. I’d like to let go like you can’t believe. I’m unable to. I’m still trying to get to that one frame where I feel I’m finally done.
BS: I have it somewhere in my research that, in all these years, you feel like you got close to perfect with fewer than 10 frames.
RS: Yeah.
BS: So you remember the times you were closest? You remember the frames.
RS: Oh yeah.
BS: What did you do when you were done with them?
RS: I sent them on their way. I got paid.
BS: You just let them go.
RS: Yeah.
BS: Because they’re not the point, right?
RS: Yeah.
BS: You don’t really want to talk about this too much for some reason?
RS: . . .
BS: What would you do if you made the perfect bike?
RS: One day on NPR I heard Jennifer Ludden interviewing Eva Zeisel. She’s a ceramicist. She lived to be 101, died maybe five years ago. Jennifer Ludden says to Eva, look at that cup over there that you designed, that handle is just perfect. So Eva Zeisel says, oh no, that’s not perfect. And she starts explaining, like, see, what I wanted to do here is this, where you’re looking at it this way now look at it this way now that I have explained it to you. And Eva Zeisel finished by saying that if she ever did something that came out perfect she would stop. She would never try again. While these are her words, they are my life as far as metal, heat, material, angles, measurements. If you reach the point of perfection, there’s no longer any point to go past. After that, you’d just be trying to do the same thing again, to exactly repeat the same thing because there’s no way you can do it any better, and at that point you become about production instead of process. You become a production line.
BS: Are you still getting closer to that point? I ask because you’re 63, and that has to make things harder. You’ve been influenced by all kinds of people from watchmakers to luthiers to a few other framebuilders. I won’t say the name or what discipline he worked within because I know you don’t want to disrespect someone who is so important to you, but you once got your hands on a thing created by a master later on in that person’s life, and you were disappointed.
RS: It was someone who I thought, my god, if I [did what that person does] for a hundred years I could not produce such a level of work. He was the guy that I thought, if I take myself to the absolute end of my imagination of what my ability might become, the next step beyond that would be where that person began. When I got the [thing], relative to my expectations it was so poorly... I don’t tell this story. I feel like I’m almost at the point now that I can do masterful work. But I’m also at the time in my life when, because of hand-eye coordination and eyesight and, you know, energy or something, I might be entering a period where I need to start over again. In other words, I might have to start incorporating what my motor skills allow me to do now. But I find that exciting.
BS: Because it means you have a whole other set of potential imperfections in your process now? A fresh challenge you’ve never faced?
RS: Yeah, yeah! And, you know, I need to get comfortable with the fact that maybe, without abandoning everything I have learned—I’m not saying that when I say start over—maybe I need to forget how I did it, and forget how I’m doing it, and start doing it. You know?
BS: No.
RS: When Jimi Hendrix lights his guitar on fire. Ever seen that, that video?
BS: Yes.
RS: He’s not really like playing it or trying to destroy his guitar. It’s theater. But when he sets his guitar down and he gets down beside it and he lights the fire, there’s a few seconds there where he’s on his knees, and he does this thing where he’s trying to will the heat to the places on the guitar where he wants it.
BS: . . .
RS: I don’t mean to be crazy about it. Because it’s just theater that he has or you think he has control of that fire. It’s just theater. I think.
BS: Maybe...
RS: And maybe not.
Disclosure: Our imperfect conversation was edited and distilled for sense and beauty.
