Bike shop gives classics new life

    SANDPOINT – There are people of a certain age who grew up with bicycles as a means of transportation and as the vehicle that could transport them to other realms.

    After watching Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy on Saturday morning, they’d swing their leg over the bike frame in a jaunty arc, grab the handlebars like reins and ride off in search of bad guys.

    On weekday afternoons, after the Adventures of Superman, a red towel clasped at the neck with a safety pin would lift and flutter as they rode hands-free and arms outstretched, flying above the sidewalk like the Man of Steel himself.

    Got a baseball card and a clothespin? Boom – you’re Marlon Brando roaring along on a motorcycle, t-shirt clinging to your muscled torso and Levi’s rolled up at the cuff.

    Odds are, Dan Shook was one of those kids. These days, he surrounds himself with the battered frames and seized-up gears of yesteryear and brings them back to life in a new business called Bonner County Bicycles. Best known as an artist and retired Sandpoint High School art instructor, Shook opened the shop with business partner Tim Piehl as a way to take bikes that other people see as lost causes and return them to classic rides.

    In the bargain, he has also popped the top on a floodtide of recollections for the people who happen by the converted garage just behind the Edward Jones office on Fourth Avenue.

    “Folks stop by and say, ‘This is like memory lane,’” Shook said. “Then they tell you about every bike they ever owned.”

    Not that he minds the reminiscing – the bike lover in him latches on to tales of great old Schwinns, Raleighs and Roadmasters. He began restoring cruiser bikes in the late-1980s, but was tinkering on his own rides long before that, as a kid who was curious to know how these contraptions were put together.

    “I probably had something like a J.C. Higgins or a Western Flyer,” said Shook. “I always liked Schwinns, but my dad was too cheap to buy me one. Now I get to play with them all the time.”

    The artist is likely one of the few people in the annals of biking who has the distinction of having hauled a barely recognizable Schwinn Phantom frame out of the dump and restored it to its rightful magnificence – fork, tank with built-in horn, front fender bullet light, whitewall balloon tires, two-tone custom paint job and all.

    That’s the fun part of the job, he shared – the act of taking a neglected hunk of metal and refashioning a smooth-running machine.

    At Bonner County Bicycles, the transformation is not a terribly expensive proposition. Most of the time, the same people who share stories of the one that got away mention that they still have a bike that’s been sitting in storage for decades, such as an early model mountain bike that no longer suits their age bracket, shall we say.

    “We’ve got a lot of folks who haven’t ridden a bike in years and have decided it’s a good way to get exercise and get around cheaply,” Shook said. “We’ll take their old bike and put on higher handle bars, comfy seats and cool tires and it’s $100 for the package – that includes a tune-up.”

    The shop also makes it affordable to buy one of the many used bikes it keeps in stock. All of them have a salvation story of one kind or another, according to the mechanic.

    “Like this one,” Shook said as he touched up a chipped spot of white paint on a vintage Peugeot 10-speed. “This bike was sitting out in someone’s field for 20 or 30 years. I took it completely apart, removed the rust and touched up all the nastiness.

    “I had to cut off the pedals and crank because they were so rusty,” he continued as he shined up a replacement crank on a bowling ball polisher that has been repurposed as a buffing tool. “I put on new handlebars and cleaned up the bearings and I still have to true the wheels and put on new tires. This one is going to be more than a hundred bucks, though.”

    Well, how much more? (Brace yourself.)

    “I don’t know,” Shook replied, looking thoughtful as he dabbed on a finishing spot of paint. “Probably $175.”

    Used bike prices range from as low as $50 to high-end options at around $500, all depending on the quality of the original bicycle and the amount of work that goes into repair.

    Standing outside the shop, with its display of used bikes lined up in the driveway, it’s easily imagine these frames lying in heaps, languishing behind some old barn or sitting idle in the back corner of a dark garage. In many cases, that’s where they started their journey back to usefulness.

    “Tim and I buy old bikes at auctions, yard sales – wherever – then we fix ‘em up and sell ‘em,” Shook said. “We’re trying to keep prices very reasonable, so people can afford to ride.”

    A sign above the garage door advertises the business as “a bicycle cooperative” – a vestige of the business partners’ preliminary vision of selling bikes on consignment and running the place as a non-profit co-op. Licensing and tax considerations proved too complex to go that route, so they formed an LLC and took a more traditional retail approach. The concept is still “collaborative,” Shook noted, since the owners have set the shop up to allow bicyclists to use the space for repairs.

    “We make it available for people to come in and work on their own bikes,” he said. “We provide the expertise, the tools and the parts.”

    And they have plenty of parts. Hard-to-find parts, as it turns out, since most of the classic bikes are long out of production, along with any replacement parts designed for them.

    “A lot of bike shops don’t even keep old parts, they just throw them out,” said Shook.

    “I not only keep ‘em, I collect em,” he added proudly, one hand atop a gleaming mound of sprockets, brackets, cranks and pedal shafts. “When you’re fixing old bikes, it’s nice to have a junk pile to look through.”

    Shook and Piehl recently hitched a car trailer to the back of a pickup truck for a trip to Pinehurst, where they replenished their inventory of bicycle parts.

    “We found a guy down there who was selling out his bike shop,” said Shook. “We had so much stuff coming back that it was hard to get over the pass.”

    Some of that stuff already has been reassembled and rolled out front for sale. The rest of it hangs on bike hooks or sits piled on workbenches, waiting to make the shift from forgotten junker to restored gem.

    Bonner County Bicycles is located at 521 N. Fourth Avenue, immediately across from the south side of Sandpoint Super Drug. The shop’s summer hours are 9-5, Monday through Saturday. During the off-season, Shook said, the business will keep “regularly irregular hours.”

    For information, call (208) 597-5339 or (208) 304 7868