“I’m 49 and realized I’m halfway done,” my former boss Tom Ritchey told me wistfully at Interbike. “What am I going to do with the second half of my life?”

His answer is Project Rwanda (www.projectrwanda.org), a development project designed to assist in lifting Rwandans out of the devastating financial conditions they find themselves in after their devastating 1994 civil war marked by tribal genocide and the deaths of nearly a million Rwandans in 100 days. At the heart of Ritchey’s involvement is a new bicycle he is designing from the ground up to make transportation in general and transport of coffee beans in particular more attainable.

Ritchey just returned from leading a delegation to Rwanda in mid-September for the Wooden Bicycle Classic, a celebration of the ingenuity of Rwandans in answering their transportation needs by building solid wooden bicycles. Among others, former Tour de France riders Jacques Boyer and Alex Stieda joined Ritchey in the long trip to deepest Africa.

Steel bikes are often customized to carry more

Among the events at the Wooden Bicycle Classic was a race on solid, hand-hewn wooden bicycles and another on single-speed race on steel bikes. The wooden bicycles have solid wooden wheels with pieces of car-tire tread nailed to them and more strips of car tires employed to provide suspension of the front end.

“They don’t build these wooden bikes because they don’t have bikes,” says Ritchey. “They build them because they are so much stronger (for hauling heavy loads) than the steel bikes they have.”

The single-speeds in the race were normal steel bikes, but of technology not seen in this country for half a century. Many of the participants rode barefoot on pedals sans cages, which had broken off, leaving only the spindle. Nonetheless, riders went fast, riding tires with umpteen patches and relying on old-school linkage brakes to slow them down.

“The single-speed race was four laps, and I almost got lapped,” says the always-fit Ritchey, who spends hours every day riding the roads and off-roads of northern California.

Bikes by the cord

Race participants had stripped off the huge racks they use to transport goods with which to feed their families in order to make them “race ready,” making more visible the seatposts that had been welded to put the riders in a more forward position. But that’s not for ergonomic efficiency or to facilitate running after riding like a triathlete.

“They do that to get their body out of the way so they can pile more stuff on the back of the bike,” says Ritchey.

The winner, according to Project Rwanda co-founder Gary Boulanger, had old Look pedals that he had somehow managed to attach to steel cottered cranks (despite different pedal threads).

“I don’t know how he did it, but he had gotten them on there somehow,” says an incredulous Boulanger.

Race Day - The single-speeds mass to the line

“The first time I came to Rwanda, I was amazed at the cycling talent I saw there and thought that these guys could be great bike racers,” Ritchey said admiringly. “One guy hauled 220 pounds of water on each three-kilometer trip (and then rode back three kilometers with empty containers). He did 15 trips a day. That’s 90 kilometers a day (carrying 220 pounds of weight for half of those). And he rode barefoot on bare pedal spindles.”

Noting that the riders he had met in Rwanda, “didn’t even know the mountain bike had been invented,” Ritchey set out to come up with a bicycle-based, sustainable way for Rwandans to earn more and improve their standard of living. “All of Africa is on technology that doesn’t exist in the first world. And they’ll just stay there without business-driven, incentivized programs.”

Noticing that one of the glimmers of hope in the country is the coffee harvest, Ritchey’s personal project is to develop a bicycle painted and assembled in Rwanda that will haul coffee beans.

“Rwanda used to be penalized by the international coffee market for the low quality of its coffee,” the framebuilder laments. “But over the last five years the quality has come way up through investment in training the growers on how to plant, when to harvest, and an infrastructure of centralized washing stations for the beans.”

...and are nearly lapped by the day's winner.

Much of the credit for this remarkable turnaround can be attributed to the work of the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda though Linkages, or Project PEARL (www.pearl.org.rw/), whose director, Texas A&M professor Dr. Tim Schilling, has found American buyers who have agreed to purchase many tons of coffee from PEARL-initiated cooperatives like the Abahuzamugambi Ba Kawa cooperative in Rusenyi, Rwanda.

According to Ritchey, “If they could get the coffee from the pick to the washing stations in two hours and not 12, the increase in the price they would receive for the (higher quality) coffee would allow them to buy the bikes.”

He has set an optimistic time frame of coffee-picking time next year, namely March 1, 2007, to get 1,000 bikes into Rwanda. But these are not normal bikes.

“You really need to see the bikes they have over there and the way they maintain them to understand that you just can’t bring them bikes like we have here,” says Ritchey. “Every bike has pieces of (steel) rebar welded to the frame to make it stiffer. The cranks are cottered steel cranks that are all twisted from the stress, and they have rebar welded to them to stiffen them up as well. They are incredibly ingenious at fixing these bikes, but there is no infrastructure for repairing modern bikes. If you brought in a bike with aluminum cranks, they would try to weld them and would ruin them. If they had V-brakes, when the pads wore out, they would have no brakes.”

So, Ritchey is designing this bike from the ground up, to the point of even making a steel, integrated-spindle/external-bearing crank.

“The crank is one of the first things to blow up, and the best crank in that country would be a one-piece BMX crank,” he says. “But the bikes there don’t have the right (large-diameter threadless Ashtabula) bottom bracket shells. The one thing they have there that is standard on our bikes is the English-threaded bottom bracket.” Ritchey’s new crank has a one-piece left arm and spindle with loose-bearing external bearings that can be serviced with a pipe wrench.

The bike’s frame has a very long rear end and has a special extruded-aluminum rear rack that holds giant coffee baskets and locks down tighter the heavier the baskets are laden.

“It’s like the early mountain bike days,” Ritchey grinned. “I had to design everything then and I have to again now.” The look of the frame and the long rear end is indeed reminiscent of those early Ritchey mountain bikes, which, 25 years ago, I used to grind and sand the fillet brazed joints smooth on while living in Ritchey’s house above Palo Alto. Let’s hope he is successful with Project Rwanda bikes as he was with mountain bikes.