Once again, Core77 is pleased to be the media partner for the Bike Cult Show, which will once again bring the very best custom framebuilders in the Northeast region to New York City this month. Set to take place on August 16–17 at the Knockdown Center in Queens, the second annual Bike Cult Show promises be bigger and better than before. In anticipation of the event, Bryan Hollingsworth of Royal H Cycles shared his story.
Text and images courtesy of Bryan Hollingsworth.
I grew up riding on the beautiful roads of northwestern New Jersey. No one believes me when I tell them this, but it’s true. My first bike-related memories involve riding up and down our dirt road on an old Raleigh Rampar coaster-brake-equipped “BMX" bike. I wasn’t a daredevil, though, so I was happy when I upgraded to another hand-me-down, my mom’s 10 speed Super Grand Prix, so I could focus on getting places. I definitely inherited my love of bikes from my family—I did my first century with my parents and uncle on my 14th birthday, and my mom and sister have biked cross-country. Barring a brief lapse from riding after I got my driver’s license, I’ve been riding with my family for as long as I can remember.
I studied to be an engineer, but had a hard time finding the right job. The pay was good, but the work was divorced from practical applications and [the results were] anything but beautiful. I saw an ad for the United Bicycle Institute and put it together that perhaps it was possible to build the machines I’d found so beautiful my whole life. I kind of assumed that bikes were either built by ancient Italian men or made in factories overseas up until that point, and though it seems obvious now, it opened my eyes to a lot of custom American builders who were doing interesting things with steel. It was a bit of a risk, but I enrolled and headed out to Oregon.
Long story short, I loved the course, crashed my car and decided to go car-free, gave up eating animal products after long talks in the dorms with Jordan Hufnagel (we were in the same UBI class, along with Taylor Sizemore), and came back changed and ready to live the bike-building lifestyle. I was an outsider to the industry though, so I applied incessantly to Independent Fabrications and Seven Cycles, and ended up landing a job at the latter.
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