Pedjo Bikes and eBikes

Jobs.
Our focus now is on gathering together a core group of employees and contract workers to build the business. To this end, this page and the pages at the above header links are designed to let you know positions that are available and where this business is going.

Once the first bikes roll out, then we will supply workstations so that anyone anywhere can build the bikes.

The bike frames all share a single unifying concept: They use two small twin tubes instead of single large tubes characteristic of standard diamond frame bikes. The twin-tube bike design enables Makers and users alike to readily build, personalize, customize, and accessorize them.

The bikes can be conventional pedal bikes. Or, if the user chooses, they can be equipped with pedal-assist hub motors within the wheels. These eBikes can be charged either by plugging the bike to the wall socket or by solar charging to have completely off-the-grid transportation.

All systems, whether they be bike frames or electronics, are innovative and completely open source. The meeting point of practicality and innovative characterize the business. Electronics and software are key. The bikes will do what no bikes have done before and do it in a way that simplifies the user's life and hopefully make it more fun and enjoyable.

As for the aesthetics, the bikes are distinctive and lovely — something to be proud of whether you built the bike or whether you own it.

 

The Signet Bank Building.
Pedjo bought the Bank and two adjacent storefronts — a complete stand alone subsection separated from other buildings on the block, located at 1, 15, and 19 West Main Street, Pulaski, VA.

You can see the property with a Google Street-view perspective and navigate around it by clicking on the image or by clicking here.

The property is ideally suited for our purposes. A key reason that I like the building so much is because of its large lobby and attractive setting. The lobby is especially well suited to display bikes we design.

We will also use the lobby as a training area for hands-on seminars on how to easily make high quality bikes of our design here in the USA. And it is ideal for displaying our ever-growing collection of historically noteworthy bicycle frames, photos, and the like.

The building's 11,000 sq. ft. are perfect for our needs. As you see, it has a large parking lot. It can receive UPS and FedEx deliveries without disturbing neighbors. And, it is close to the Post Office for making rush shipments to customers. You can see an aerial view of the bank and the region by clicking here.

 

Tesla Electric Car Manufacturing Compared to Pedjo eBike Makers.
Tesla Motors' market capitalization is $35 billion; General Motors, $55 billion. Tesla’s capitalization is now 64% of GM.

That is one way a company can produce 22,400 units a year, as Tesla did in 2013.

There is another way to get the same volume of production. It is called "The Open-Source Maker."

Let me illustrate: Allowing for a normal work week and national holidays, there are 249.7 available work days. To make 22,400 units a year, given those available days would require that 89.7 units a day be built in Tesla's plants. That is conventional manufacturing.

Instead, with bicycles the same volume can be achieved with a tiny footprint using Open-Source Makers.

If a company like Pedjo (instead of using conventional manufacturing) supplies small workstations to 30 independent Makers throughout the United States (each averaging a modest production of 3 bike frames a day) then a Pedjo-like approach would result in 90 daily and 22,400 annually – the same unit volume that Tesla had.

In sum, large results using a small capital outlay and very modest space at each Maker town or city – in short, jobs and businesses throughout the country.

Indeed, no single conventional manufacturing facility of any kind anywhere.

This is how Makers differ from Manufacturers. In a fashion, Open-Source Makers resembles a Wikipedia-like approach – gathering the contributions of many to produce excellent results.

With the onset of Makers, changes are occurring at a wildly fast pace. So fast that those such as Jeremy Rifkin (a Wharton economist) believe that the maker movement is “as significant as the shift from agriculture to the early industrial era.” In any case, Pedjo will be there to see that innovative bikes are the norm, not the exception.

The following ad ran in the May 26, 2015 issue of the widely-read national magazine: Make. This quarter-page, understated, introductory ad is intended to ferret out people likely to participate in the company's performance.

The benefits to the consumer are huge. Fifty-one percent of commuters live within 10 miles of their workplace – a distance that can be easily covered in less than 31 minutes on a pedal-assisted eBike averaging 19.5 mph. Thirty percent of commuters are so close that they could commute in less than approximately 15 minutes.

You can plug it in anywhere, not just at special charging stations. It is plainly obvious that the footprint of a pedal-assisted eBike, ecologically and financially, is far, far less than an electric car.

A pedal-assist eBike operating at 17.3 watts per mile is twenty-two times more efficient than a 2013 Tesla Model S that averages 380 Watts per mile.

You can travel on an eBike with confidence that its adverse ecological influence is small relative to other common forms of transportation – even electric or hybrid cars.

The eBikes that we design are a fine place to start before jumping in and spending a huge amount of money either on a plug-in or hybrid car, or on a large solar/wind system. They provide proof of concept on a small scale, before considering bigger steps.

 

The Problem We Address.
For every 12 cars sold in the USA, 8 bicycles are sold. American bicycles face a huge problem. If you look closely at the majority of the bikes found in stores, they are cookie-cutter dull, completely uninteresting. Too many are sloppily built; too many are excessively heavy; too many have dimensions that are difficult for children to learn on; too many are unpleasant for adults to ride.

None are built in the USA. The higher quality ones mainly come from Taiwan; lower grade ones, mainly from China. The objective is for Pedjo to change this. Our designs make it possible for individuals to easily build high-quality bicycles anywhere with only a modest equipment outlay.

Pedjo's thrust is to design, test, and build small bicycle-making work stations. These stations have such a light impact on their surroundings that a committed hobbyist or small business person can use them to build high quality bikes — even in an apartment or home. The method is intended to be so simple and clean that it can be done anywhere — certainly not exclusively in Taiwan and China. In short, jobs near where bikes are actually used rather than jobs halfway around the world.

The reason Pedjo can make its advances is that it implements twin tube technology in a completely novel and unanticipated fashion. The implementation of this technology makes it possible for Americans to again produce bicycles — this time around, lovely, useful bikes that they can further personalize to their own tastes.

Bikes for folks.
Biking should be an activity, not always a sport.

The vast majority of bikes now available are based on the precept that if it is a good racing bike or a fine mountain bike, it should also be a good all-around bike that one can use for many purposes. But is that so?

Consider the family car. Does yours differ from a Grand Prix Race Car?

The analogy carries to the bicycle.

Mimicking special purpose racing bicycles or mountain bicycles deprives the common user of a huge number of opportunities. Just as there are family cars, we need family bikes – bikes designed to be the ultimate family machine ... innovative, functional, and fun for the family ... a normal part of daily life.

As our bikes roll out, I believe you too will agree. Indeed, we expect you will be perplexed that for too long, too many bikes were insufficiently fun and useful for the day-to-day user.

Take for example a delicate lady who is committed to pedaling, but does not want to make an excessively athletic exertion. Add a pedal-assist electric hub motor and she can outpace the fastest conventional bike and have a fine time scooting along.

The conventional bike user, such as myself, too is not left out. Pedjo frames and accessories are intended to leave their mark – with or without a motor.

At least that is what Pedjo intends to accomplish. That is why we are in business.

Health.
Treating biking as an activity rather than an endurance sport has a big payoff.

Low doses of exercise (fewer than 150 minutes a week, 21 minutes a day) can be quite enough. Evidence increasingly indicates that if the objective is to reduce all-cause mortality, high doses of exercise "are not only unnecessary but may also erode some of the remarkable longevity benefits conferred by lower doses."

This is made plain in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology's Copenhagen City Heart Study article and is reported in the popular press (Forbes and BBC).

On an eBike averaging 17.5 or 19 mph, less than six or seven miles a day can be sufficient to reach this upper limit.

Just normal shopping runs and visiting friends – not necessarily competitive biking – increasingly seems to be a reasonable way to get optimum health benefit.

Twin tube bikes.
The twin tube concept is proven, albeit not now well known.

In various iterations, it can be found in distinctive bikes from the 1880s to the present. It is well to remember twin tubes were a feature that helped to break the grip of the old high wheelers. From 1888-1896, some of the standouts were the 1891 Columbia Roadster, the 1888 Columbia Hard Tire Safety, the 1893 Columbia ‘Century’ Model 32, and the Columbia Model 39, c. 1893. These twin-tube bikes were mainstream products of the tycoon of the American bicycle industry, Pope Manufacturing. Twin-tube bikes more than one hundred and twenty years old can still be ridden, as this video shows. In the same era a chief competitor to Pope, the 1893-1893 Victor Model C, relied on twin tubes for both the down tube and on the seat tube.

Patented in 1926, the Moorson Twin Tube used both twin top tubes and twin down tubes. Several successful racers used it in England during the late 1920's -1930's.

The BSA Airborne is the most famous of all twin tube bikes. It folds and is suitable for parachuting. It has both twin top tubes and twin bottom tubes. It was used by paratroopers in WWII. It dropped with them from planes when they jumped. About 70,000 of these bikes were made and continued to be used throughout Europe long after the war. As Wikipedia points out: "BSA abandoned the traditional diamond design as too weak for the shock and made an elliptical frame of twin parallel tubes, one forming the top tube and seat stays and the other for the chainstay and down tube."

In every bike boom that I can identify, twin tubes have been an aesthetic leader: 1) In the 1888-1896 bicycle craze, Americans found bikes to be more popular and less costly than horses. The love affair with the bike was so great that the common price then for a new bike was $100, which adjusted for inflation is equivalent to $2,638 per bike in today’s currency. At the outset only the rich could afford them. They were selling by the millions. Manufacturers could hardly keep up. Columbia, Victor, and other brands used twin tubes on their bikes. 2) In the 1937-1940s period Elgin Twin Bar youth bike was the American trend setter. 3) In the 1960s the American multi-tube Spaceliner, Schwinn Sting Ray and similar youth bikes were the rage. Multi-tubes are so desirable, they were added just for style. And, 4) In the biggest bike boom of recent memory, more bicycles were sold than cars in the United States during the early 1970s. At that time French twin-tube mixtes for the first time gave American women a bike that could be ridden as aggressively as a man’s bike.

The multi-tube bike reached its apex with the Moulton Spaceframe. It is fast enough to win races and unique enough to be in the NYC Museum of Modern Art. The one pictured here is my Moulton TSR9. Twin tube bikes can also be found in exotic and expensive new titanium bikes.

Great "Finishers."
Because I admire the following, I include this section for your consideration:

From 1943 to 1946, ENIAC, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, was developed.

One of the key players was Jean Jennings Bartik. She correctly points out the importance of the “finisher.”

“We were given responsibility because we were good finishers. ... One thing I want to tell you. Why was I very successful; and Betty, very successful? And we were very successful …

"Well, I think, it’s because we were great finishers. … You know how most people like to do the fun part of a job. But then, for all these nasty little details, they don’t like to do them. …

“Well, Betty and I were great finishers. And when she finished a job, she had thought of everything, absolutely everything, and it was ready to go.”  (source)

In this video Jean Bartik is 80 years old. You can hear her making the same point in the video. But if you have the time and would like to hear her views from childhood through adulthood, they can be found in the full video here.

Her day-to-day, sunshine-or-rain approach made her life and work memorable and important.

Her vitality similarly comes through in the following poem she wrote.

Fortunately, it is also included in the Youtube video here.

The Technical Camelot

There once was a congenial spot
Where ideas flowed so free-i-ly
And designs were done so speed-i-ly
Where all of them forgot
Frontiers weren’t pierced so eas-i-ly
No one believed in Not
In Technical Camelot

Sure at Pedjo we start with what we feel are important designs and objectives, but it will always be the day-to-day Bartik variety of “finishing” that is the key to her and our Camelot.

A Pedjo derivation.
Ped refers to pedaling.
Jo is a Scot word for sweetheart, darling, or a beloved one.
In the 16th century its origin: joy
Also a nickname for "Josephine" or "Joseph".

Inferred combinations:
Pedaling Sweethearts, Joyfully Pedaling, or a combination of any of the above. A reminder that the objective is upbeat, special, memorable, friendly, joyful, and onward ...