Building A Better Bike

Thomas Hosford built his first BMX bike in his senior year of high school, and he can describe the creation in one word: "heavy."

 

"It did everything I wanted to, but it was not a masterpiece," Hosford says.

 

Hosford started riding BMX at age 14, around the same time he began working summers in his father's machine shop, Hosford and Co.. Now 30, he's stepped into his father's shoes as shop manager at Hosford and Co. but he's also continued designing and building BMX and mountain bike frames through his side business, Ordnance Bikes.  

 

"Given the time frame, it's not very high-volume," Hosford says. "I've had years where I've done 20 frames over a summer, but I've been so busy running a machine shop that I've only done probably six the past few years."

 

After designing that first bike in 2001, Hosford returned to the craft in 2004, when bicycle company Atomlab sponsored him as a member of its pro riding team. Atomlab initially sought his input on a new frame, and then ended up asking him to design a couple of new mountain bike frames from scratch: the Trail King  and Trail King Slopestyle.

 

"I built all the frames myself in the prototyping stage," Hosford says. "I got a lot of interest from friends and cyclists in the area, so I started selling frames from there."

 

Hosford adopted the Ordnance name in 2007 and he estimates that he's since built around 100 bikes, partly out of his basement and partly at his father's shop. 

 

Although he attended business school at Indiana University for two years after high school, he left because he says he realized he didn't want to be behind a desk instead of "actually building stuff." His training in fabrication and design is based entirely on practical experience, particularly years of learning from his father.

 

"I started welding when I was 12," Hosford says. "I learned the hard way. I decided that I wanted to make a stand for one of my dirt bikes and my dad decided that if we were going to do it, we were going to do it right. So we made it out of diamond plate aluminum, which is one of the harder materials to work with."

 

The versatility Hosford learned at a young age serves him well now in his day job at Hosford and Co., where he oversees the fabrication of everything from machine parts to staircases to counter-tops. (The shop recently produced some of the interior architectural work for Aventura).

 

Since his father has taken more of a leadership role as the business' president, Hosford says he's started to steer the enterprise more toward computer-aided design and machining, allowing for slightly higher-quantity prototyping runs of certain items. But Hosford says bike fabrication will remain just a side project for him -- partly because custom mountain bikes sell for less than half the price of a custom road bike, and partly because Ann Arbor doesn't have very high demand for offroad bicycles.

 

"I hate to say it, but there's just not the money in it," he says. "It's a tough industry, particularly given what I'm doing."

 

But Hosford still loves riding himself, and he says he'll keep building what he knows best -- even if Ordnance remains a passion project.

 

"I'm going to continue building bikes for myself," he says. "I've got a lot of time and money wrapped up in designing and buying tooling for it. I figure if I'm going to keep making time to do it for myself, some of my best friends are people I've met through riding, so I might as well continue making bikes for other people too."

Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Metromode and Concentrate.

All photos by Doug Coombe

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