Tony Pereira - Breadwinner Cycles from the ENVE Builder Round Up

This week we sit down with Tony Pereira of Breadwinner Cycles to learn more about this Portland, OR based custom builder. Tony was part of the 2021 ENVE Builder Round Up in Ogden, UT. This week's podcast is generously sponsored by ENVE. Breadwinner Cycles Support the podcast The Ridership Automated Transcription (Please excuse the typos): Breadwinner Craig Dalton: [00:00:00] Tony, welcome to the show. [00:00:01]Tony Pereira: [00:00:01] Thanks for having me, Craig. [00:00:02] Craig Dalton: [00:00:02] It's great to see you virtually from your office there. [00:00:05]Tony Pereira: [00:00:05] It's funny now that we're all accustomed to this it's it makes it really easy. [00:00:08] Craig Dalton: [00:00:08] Yeah. It really is. If you don't have your setup dialed at this point, I don't think you ever will. [00:00:13]Tony Pereira: [00:00:13] Yeah. Right. [00:00:15] Craig Dalton: [00:00:15] So let's start off a little bit by getting to know you and what led you to becoming a frame builder [00:00:21] Transcribing... [00:00:22] Tony Pereira: [00:00:22] It's been a while now. [00:00:23]I worked in, I started out in the outdoor, your industry, I started working in ski shops when I was 16, which was in 1985 and grew up working in ski shops. And then in college, I started working in a bike shop and after college, I moved to Utah and skied and rode and worked in bike shops there. [00:00:44] And I got really active. Like community when I lived in salt lake did that for quite a while. Eventually got bored of being a bike mechanic, just hit my limit on that and what I've always been a tinkerer. Playing around in the garage, working on cars and motorcycles and of course, bicycles. [00:01:01]I learned how to breeze a little and weld a little bit from a friend of mine. And then just brought all those things together. And I was a fan of the old mountain bikes, the, IBUs and salsa. And of course the Richie's, the Richie has always had those beautiful, huge fillets. [00:01:18] And and I'm like, I knew how to braise. So I'm like, I wonder if I could make a mountain bike and, it was, that was two, this was 2002 or so, so almost 20 years ago. The internet was there. We were using all like listserv type communication. But there's a pretty active frame, builder listserv. [00:01:37] It's still exists. But I got on there and started figuring it out, build a couple of mountain bikes and I, after building one, I was like, oh man, I gotta do this. Bringing my love of bikes together with making things and And I just, I was hooked for sure. Riding that first bike is such a joyous, [00:01:54]it's gotta be an amazing feeling to ride something that we've actually made super gratifying. [00:01:59] It sounds like you and I came up in the same era, which was that period of time where there was a lot of great mountain bike, frame builders and custom steel bikes. Every state seemed to have a builder of some notoriety. Yup. Yup. So how did you teach yourself? Was it really through, obviously you had a little bit of hands-on experience from your father's friend to teach you how to weld and, know what equipment was needed. [00:02:25]Craig Dalton: [00:02:25] Were you able to glean some of the basic fundamentals from that list? Serve and ask questions? [00:02:31] Tony Pereira: [00:02:31] Yeah. Yeah, it was great. I know I, Richard Sachs is one of the. More professional frame builders that was on there. And he's always been really generous with his time. And there were a number of others as well, but I remember him in particular, but yeah, there was a great group of people that, that I, you know, some of them I'm still friends with. [00:02:49] Remember Steve from Coconino was getting started exactly the same time. And the two of us were like bouncing things off of each other. And just getting our feet wet, but I, I'm fortunate to have, I have a natural aptitude for using tools and problem solving and, figuring things out. [00:03:08] So yeah, I was able to teach myself, with the help of that listserv, obviously how to make it all come together. And, I look back on those early frames and I still have a couple of them and they were pretty bad. The first there's 20 or so that I built for me and my friends. So they were pretty rough, I should say rough. [00:03:25]They weren't, the finish was rough. They worked fine. But I started building bikes for customers after about the first 20 or so bikes mostly worked, went to my friends and. And they were starting to get pretty good by that. [00:03:36] Craig Dalton: [00:03:36] And did that just happen via word of mouth with the 20 out there, people would see it and say, where did you get that thing? [00:03:42] I had some, I had a core group of friends in salt lake that worked in the bike shop with me, or were associated with the bike shop called wild rose. It was a, early mountain bike scene, mouth bike shop. And two of my friends, Alex and Jeff. They were all, they were 100% on board with me. ...