KoolBikes.com
Title
Offering custom bike frames, custom wheel frames, custom airbrush painting, decal reproduction, and bicycle repair
Contact
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Description
PFEIFFER PFRAMES started as Geared for Cycling in August 1984 just after the Olympics in Los Angeles when Alexi Grewal beat Steve Bauer in a one on one sprint. Originally we started as a retail store in the small city of Longwood, FL. The store was called Geared for Cycling. We sold bikes, accessories and did basic repairs. When Mark and I met, Mark was an engineering student at the University of Central Florida and I owned the store. Mark and I both loved bicycles. We rode and raced bicycles and were training partners for 3 years before we got hitched.
How did we get in the frame building and painting business? This is a frequently asked question. Mark worked for a manufacturer as a Engineer and was helping them find some used equipment for their machine shop. I was already doing re-painting and a little bit of brazing at the time. Mark saw the need in the area for frame repair and custom frames. He had to twist my arm (he is such a salesman) for 2 weeks before I yielded to the purchase our first milling machine (he wouldn't have anything but a Bridgeport). Mark had worked as a machinist when he was in high school and loves machine tools. With that machine and a blazing fast computer (386/33 with a math co-processor I might add!) we began creating, on AutoCAD 10, jigs and fixtures for building our first custom frame. Our frame repair, painting, and building began to take off! After a particularly bad retail year we realized that the painting and frame repair business was carrying our little store. We also realized that we could do this out of our house and reduce our overhead significantly. We had our store for 10 years before we closed the doors. It felt like a great weight was lifted and our little shop emerged from its cocoon to become a beautiful butterfly!
We moved to upstate South Carolina in 1993 with 2 kids and another on the way (Konrad, Rushton and Maxwell - seen above, our best products yet!). We had to sell all of our machine tools in order to make the move...it was a sad day. Mark and I decided that after our third child that perhaps we could begin again and call ourselves PFEIFFER PFRAMES / PECO (Progressive Engineering Company) as the name of our business. We began attending local rides and advertising in the ECCC (Electric City Cycling Club) and other newsletters. Business started slowly as expected, but my first customer, Rick Hane, bit his lower lip and let me paint his beloved Viner frame. He trusted us based upon pictures of frames I had previously painted and built while in FL. We want to thank him for that. Once he showed off his beautifully painted bike and spread the word, our customer base grew. Last year we out grew our home garage shop and constructed the beautiful 1600 sq. ft. building we have today (Mark, again, had to twist my arm to get it and I am sure glad he did!). Come by and visit. Don't expect to browse for gloves or clothing though (other than Pfeiffer Pframe t-shirts of course). This is a working shop! Our Thanks goes to....I want to thank lots of people that have assisted us over the years, but my main thanks goes to my father and mother, Ken and Carole Hines for trusting me enough to invest in Geared for Cycling. Without that faith I would not have learned the skills and little bit of business sense that I have today. We also want to thank some of our first employees; Jim Helser, Greg Carter, Jeff Hartman and Mike Helmick, for their support and many times super human efforts to keep our little store going. Last, but not least, I want to thank our friends Fred and Barbara Gruber and my cousin, Michael Antos, for visiting frequently with us in SC and helping us to better understand our business.
