the great purge!

Today Josh and I picked up the remainder of a large bike donation from Clarkston. It took two trips but it was worth it to get the bikes out of someone's back yard, as promised, and we got some more bikes are parts for the shop.

I then feverishly gathered every rusted wheel, every bent fork, and every road-unworthy bicycle and dragged them outside. I called a local scrap collector and he gladly carted away several hundred pounds of useless bike parts to be melted down or whatever a metal scrapper does. We now have a lot more room for decent bike parts and a lot of stuff was saved from being buried with trash.

(photo to be uploaded later)

I spent some time on the phone with some auto tire shops to see about recycling tires. Why recycling and environmentalism are not primary goals of Communicycle, we try to reuse and recycle everything we can. pounds of rubber, nylon, and metal in bicycle tires add up quickly in the dumpster. I got the number of a rubber recycling company and I await a call back. Most auto shops charge one to two dollars for each tire to recycle it, so I am hoping some company will do it for free or for a nominal charge. Any ideas folks?

Two guys from a nearby apartment complex came in later in the evening. Miguel and Jason had a very nice mid-1980s Japanese road bike with some problems. I trued the rear wheel, replaced the tubes, and replaced the Look pedals (requires special shoes and cleats to use, which Jason did not have) and got him back on the road. Jason gave me a nice donation to the shop for the work and parts and I was glad to help him.

We may have an event announcement coming soon, so stay tuned!

Jonathan

storage space updates

I finished the wall-bike hanging system the other day. We want to continue this across this whole wall to hang lots of bikes.

Natnael came again today to help with with some projects. We cleared the bike storage room of tarps and installed the hanging wheel system.

I responded to an ad on Craigslist today for some "free firewood." I had not idea he would unleash a 15-foot truckload of logs on me! The driver dropped this at the back parking lot of the church and drove off.

Natnael and I spent the next hour stacking this stuff for future use. My body aches all over.

September Mobile Shop success!

Communicycle offers it's services outside of the shop on a regular basis in what we call Mobile Shop. We collect all of our tools and many spare parts and set up an outdoor bike shop in a neighboring apartment complex for a Sunday afternoon. We announce the shop with fliers and community announcements about one week before the shop day. We were serving Mobile Shops every few months earlier this year, but from August until the end of the year, Mobile Shops will be held on a monthly basis until the end of the year, with plans to resume in the spring.

We held this month's Mobile Shop at Wynscape Apartments, about 1.5 mile from the shop. Over the course of four hours, we serviced twenty bicycles with the help of five mechanics and a half-dozen other volunteers. Many of the repairs were not mere flat tires, but major mechanical surgery: bottom bracket overhauls, derailleur resurrections, brake replacements, etc. Overall it was a great day. We met a lot of neighbors and potential "customers," served a lot of people, and had a fun time. The weather was hot but we had a perfect shade tree to cover us.

We are working on a time and place for next month's Mobile Shop on Sunday, October 10. Stay tuned!

pinkslip providence

Last night, I spent several hours in the apartment of some Eritrean refugees, chewing sorgum, listening to Tigrinya music and helping them with their citizenship class homework ("What is the Star Spangled Banner?"), and I realized the distance I have come along this tradgectory. Six months ago, I did not know where Eritrea was, let alone imagine I would be helping one of its former residents build a bicycle and eat food from his country in his own home. So I may ask myself, well, how did I get here?

When I was 12 years old, my family rented a house to live in for a summer. The landlords cleaned out the garage just before they got there and two bicycles were in the trash heap waiting to be picked up for the dump. (For those of you privy to literary devices, this is Foreshadowing!) I scavanged these bicycles out (also forshadowing for my many dumpster-diving ecapades) and managed to cobble together a single bicycle out of the two. It was a horrible, outdated beast of a BMX bike, but it rolled and that's all I cared about. I had a lot to learn about making a bicycle work, and I learned the hard way.

Fast foward a few years and you can skip middle school and riding around the neighborhood alone every day and trying to learn flatland riding with no outside knowledge of what I was doing. When I was a freshman in high school, my family moved from Wisconsin to Indianapolis. I hated the move, but it turned out that, out of the thousands of students at my high school, three were fellow BMX riders, and they all lived within spitting distance of my new house. There was an empty parking lot across the street from our house where I would spend countless hours riding my bike, alone, with headphones on, and a workbench in the garage where I probably spent even more hours working on and experimenting with my bike. Living in an urban area, unlike my former rural home, allowed me to explore street BMX riding with friends. Riding led me to become a photographer, which led me to college and a short career in Journalism. It also led me to my wife, whom I met when she sent me an IM to ask about bike parts.

In 2007, I got a job at a newspaper and worked there for a year honing my skills in interviewing, writing, and photography. This led to a better paying job editing a magazine, which allowed us to get out of debt quickly. Around that time, Kelly and I started exploring a future in international missions and pined a sign that read "August 2010 or bust" above our computer screen, indicating that we would be somewhere else, living intentionally by that date or we would be homeless. The best thing to happen to me at that job was being laid off. After only six months with a decent salary, a leisurely bus commute into downtown San Antonio, and good benefits, I lost all of it. We persevered to get out of debt and do something meaningful. I spent months agonizing over the lack of a "career" and explored dozens of routes with no success. Metaphoric doors were slammed in my face again and again as I tried careers and jobs. No one wanted to hire me, an honest, college educated, hard-working young man willing to work for peanuts to do just about anything. I always wanted to go back to working at a bike shop but I did not think anyone would hire me or pay me enough to stick with it.

In June 2009, a bike shop did hire me and I spent the subsequent year learning everything I could from some of the best wrenches in San Antonio. A friend who was working there helped me get my foot in the door and I was off! In fact, I learned a lot from the Best Mechanic in the Universe and another who's just a Big Deal.

I had taught myself a lot about fixing my own bike over the years, but most of my knowledge was limited to BMX bikes. With a year (hardly enough to be an expert) of experience under my belt, I was much better prepared for the next phase.

In January of this year, Kelly and I visited South Africa to minister to prisoners, squatter camp dwellers, and school kids for one week, leaving a dear friend behind to continue that work. We decided shortly after returning that we would return to Joburg to continue that work, but every door was slammed in our faces again. It seemed hopeless and unfair that passionate, energetic young people such as ourselves should have such a hard time being sent across the world as missionaries, but no one would budge. We decided to go back to my old standby, bicycles.

We have a notebook with all kinds of notes about pursuits in my life. One page was to be devoted to bicycle-related ministries. There are one or two organizations listed, then "Communicycle, Josh Feit." There are no further entries on that page because shortly after I wrote that, Kelly and I visited Atlanta and decided to move back here in August. So here we are are. I am back to pulling bikes out of the trash, spending whole days with my hands covered in grease and ground-up chromium molybdenum, instructing people to replace tubes and adjust derailleurs and admonishing them for the use of WD-40 on their bicycles. (WD-40 is not a lubricant! Stop using it on your bikes!)

We might not have ended up in South Africa or Northern Ireland (yet), but all those people from broken parts of the world have come to us, often with their bicycles, and I am able to serve God by serving them (or am I serving them by serving God?) I could not be more content with my situation now, and pray only that I live in such a way that is worthy of this kind of satisfaction.

Welcome to the Official Communicycle Blog

Welcome to the official blog of the Communicycle Co-op in Chamblee, GA. Check back often for our latest news, great stories, photo galleries, and other announcements.