THE STREAM
BY DEBBI HARVIE PHOTOS BY STEVE SMITH, VISIONFIRE STUDIOS
BELT IT OUT! Westville’s Daryl Ingram up-cycles old bikes to tread lightly on the earth
I
t doesn’t take much to see Daryl Ingram’s love of bicycles. The way his voice gets excited when he recounts tales of cycle tours is enough to get anyone interested to go for a spin. So it’s no wonder he’s spent the last seven years salvaging what he can of bicycles, diverting them from the landfill to create unique items and reclaimed bicycles. Bicycles have always held a certain mystique for Ingram, but it wasn’t until he was dropping something off at the landfill almost a decade ago, that he noticed a beautiful, old bicycle sitting there waiting to be destroyed. “I just thought, it was such a shame that these beautiful bikes were being discarded for new ones,” recalls Ingram.
The North Shore
He pulled it from the wreckage with the notion to restore it to its former glory so that someone else might enjoy it and get some use from it. “The idea was to build bicycles for comfort. I’ve always seen bicycles as a great means of transportation, a way to get people where they need to go in comfort,” he explains. “It’s a third option for people looking to buy a bicycle.” Ingram says the first option is to go to a “big box store” and purchase a cheap bicycle that might last a year or two and then be sent to the landfill. The second option is to go to a custom bike shop, but that can get very costly if you aren’t a serious cyclist. This third option, catered more to the commuter
or transportation cyclists, would be to have a reclaimed bicycle that has been stripped down to the frame and restored to almost new condition. What Ingram soon realized, however, is that while he was saving bicycles from the landfill, there were still so many parts of the bicycle that were being discarded. “It really amounted to only about 50% of the parts that were being saved and the rest were ending up back at the landfill,” he notes. That’s when Ingram’s business, Freelander Bicycles, really flourished. Ingram took some time to investigate and seek out different crafts made from bicycle parts. He first stumbled upon Picasso’s Bull’s Head from 1942,
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