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Vulture Cycles
Howdy, I am Wade Beauchamp (beechum) , my nickname is “Vulture” and so my bike frame company is called Vulture Cycles. Simply put I got the nickname Vulture from liking and being like a Vulture, not so pretty on the ground, but graceful at soaring. I know there are people who will not buy a bike from a company named Vulture, for instance, a local Air life pilot thought there might be some political ramifications from riding to work and having a Vulture in the hanger…I built my first frame in November 1996 in Flagstaff Az. I was working at a great bike shop pretending to be interested in college. Along the way my boss had built a couple of frames so he loaned me his tanks and torch and I built a frame. It was crooked and weird, and somehow rode great no hands. I wasn’t internet savvy at the time so I just solved my own problems and created some more. The tubing was Phil Wood oval tandem tubing for top and down tube and I brazed it all with flux coated rod. I filed off as much brass as I put on many times over but I was hooked and figured if I learned how to fabricate I could always get a good job. I build a couple more frames in Flagstaff and off I went to the Navajo Reservation where my then girlfriend was a teacher. We lived in teacher housing which was like mobile apartments so I used the spare bedroom as a bike shop mitering zone and brazed some of the frame in the bathroom because it had a vent fan and linoleum floor. One year on the Rez was enough so we moved to Bend OR in 1998 and here I still am. I scored a cool job at a racecar fuel tank manufacturer, and in a week had work to do on a lathe, mill and tig welder. My job was cool there because I was the in between guy who just made the non production parts to fill quick and weird orders, I got to use all of the tools everyday and had some great teachers, people who could build anything they wanted and expected me to do the same. I built fixtures and frames there and would work all night long on bikes and bike frame building tools. I moved down the street and got a job as a CNC operator for rock climbing equipment. There was lots of cool equipment to build bikes with but operating 6 CNC machines making millions of little parts was hellish for me, luckily I was laid off in February of 2003. Garro was at my place building some of his first frames when I got let go and helped me get my stuff out of work. Yes, piles of Vultured metal. Along this time I got married, bought a house and my son was born. In the summer of 2003 I went to UBI for Ti frame class and a fillet brazing class, both experiences were really cool. This was Vulture Cycles first full time gig although I was separated and on my way to divorce. I had equal divided custody (still do) of my son and there were some challenges to raising a 1 year old and starting a bike company. In January of 2004 a friend and I bought out a tandem company located in Bend and instantly grew too fast. It cost my friend what his grandparents had left him and all of what I got from selling my house from the divorce. My friend had painted at another frame company in Oregon and was a talented painter but the way we built bikes was just crazy. We had multiple lathes and welders and mills and even a multi head frame mitering machine that cut both ends of the tube at once and drilled the water bottle holes for down tubes or top tubes. In 2005 we broke up and I moved what I had left to my garage, he still painted some frames for me but moved away not long after. I moved my shop to my grandfather’s garage in a rural area outside of Bend and it is still there. From Aug of 2006 to October of 2008 I had a job tig welding cromoly aircraft frames and parts. I really liked that job, great people and excellent skills improvement and welding knowledge, but when the economy crashed well, I was back in the shop building bikes, and that brings us to now. My kid is 8 and Vulture Cycles is 14. I am 39 and throughout this adventure I have had some successes and failures. People have been on the podium and I have burned bridges. I wish I could say that every client was happy but I cannot, I have built steel frames that have broken, some were my fault some weren’t but nobody got hurt and they all were fixed or replaced, even when I was working for someone else. In business I have robbed Peter to pay Paul, but I always paid Peter back and I have only had one customer who had to wait for more than a year from deposit, but that turned into a feature. I am proud that I built all of my own tooling and am lucky to have great friends and family that have helped me all along the way.
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Originally Posted by vulture
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