Thursday, October 19, 2006
Eric Farnsworth’s passion for bicycles began when he was eight and his father wouldn’t buy him one.
Photo by Ryan McGeeney
Eric Farnsworth of Lawrence has been creating unique bicycles since he was a young child. In recent years, his bicycles have served dozens of purposes beyond exercise, from a shopping cart to a burrito stand.
Instead, he built one using parts from two battered old bikes given to him by neighbors, then sent his sister for a test run down a hill. When she got to the bottom, the brakes failed. She flew off and gashed her ankle on a metal sprinkler in a neighbor’s yard.
Since that first failure, Farnsworth has succeeded in using scavenged bike parts to build irreplaceable creations that have made him known to friends and neighbors as the “mad scientist.” Farnsworth spends hours in his basement welding, sawing and measuring parts. You may have seen his wooden tricycle or lawnmower bike in the city’s annual Art Togeau Parade (pronounced art to-go). Perhaps you’ve seen his surfboard bike or shopping cart bike during a Red Balloon To Do Art Walk. He’s even made a pedal-powered wheat grinder, inspired by his own wheat crop. City commissioner and former mayor Dennis “Boog” Highberger rides one of his three-wheel recumbent bikes, which provides back support with a leaning back seat lower to the ground that also gives his legs more room to petal. Highberger said it changed his life. He couldn’t ride bikes for 20 years because of a physical disability.
You may have even seen Farnsworth pedaling his own front-wheel-drive bike to work, wearing his usual white button down shirt, jeans and pink converse tennis shoes. The man behind the wheels doesn’t consider himself a scientist. He’s self-taught, and he’ll be the first to tell you his designs aren’t that unique. His practical, do-it-yourself mentality and desire to have a minimal impact on the Earth are the driving force behind his bicycles and his lifestyle.
His current project involves an old exercise bike. He described it as a “bucking bronco exercise machine” because the seat moves up and down, a feature he plans to keep. He despises exercise bicycles because they don’t move, so he takes his revenge by attaching wheels.
“Exercise bikes need to get a life,” he explained.
The first bike frame he ever built was done out of practicality. After riding his mountain bicycle all day in the California Redwoods, he was bothered by soreness in his neck and shoulders.
Photo by Ryan McGeeney
Eric Farnsworth of Lawrence welds copper wire into the heart of a future bicycle, which incorporates a "Health Rider" stationary exercise machine, among other things. Farnsworth creates his bicycles in the basement of his home, known as the Farnsworth Bicycle Laboratory.
“I guess I was aware of recumbent bicycles, but I thought I should try one. So I looked around and found I had to spend $2,000 to get one. So I said, well that’s really stupid, I can build one for less.”
So he did. But not for much less by the time he got done buying welding kits, parts and tubing.
“Once I got a welding kit, I said hey, I can build another one a lot cheaper,” he said. “Eventually I just stopped buying new parts. Now I just use recycled stuff. There’s just so much bike junk lying around.”
Some of his “bike junk” moved with him during his migration east to Kansas in 1996. The open space and slower pace attracted Farnsworth to the Midwest. With the help of an inheritance from his mother, he bought 40 acres near Garnett. He always wanted to grow wheat, so he did.
In the process of learning how to grow, cut and grind wheat, he created a grain mill bicycle. Trying to grind hard grain with baseball bats and hand power just didn’t cut it, he said.
A rusted old 10-speed frame, and shiny new flywheels were combined to make the tool.
“I’ve been doing time studies,” he said. “The hopper will hold two pounds so it takes 45 minutes to grind the whole business.”
He moved to Lawrence five years ago after he met his wife Jean Burgess at a local barn dance. After getting married, Farnsworth and his bikes moved in with Jean and her daughter Emma in their east Lawrence home. Visitors walking up to their vine-covered front gate can see Farnsworth’s shopping-cart bicycle on the green lawn. He uses the cart, which is attached to the bike frame, to transport fruit from friends’ trees around town, haul bed frames for another project and to carry groceries. Up the stairs on their front porch are garden tools in one corner and more bicycles in the other. One is a 1970s blue 10-speed, Eric’s favorite, with an Art Togeau Parade ribbon hanging from the handlebar. Next to it is his front-wheel drive bicycle. It’s silver frame is shorter than the average bicycle so the rider’s feet can pedal gears attached to the front tire.
Even more bikes rest against the walls of their cozy living room. Downstairs in his shop, otherwise known as the “Farnsworth Bicycle Laboratory,” is his collection of bicycle parts. Bicycles large and small and frames hang from hooks on the ceiling. Boxes of gearshifts and brake pieces sit on a table, which is covered with more boxes. A large red toolbox with three open drawers holds tools. Leaning against the rock wall are six bed frames, scavenged in August when KU students were moving. Underneath the stairs is his 10-foot-long wooden workbench, covered by a sander, flame torch, tools and the bottom of a shopping cart. Above the stairs hang saws, metal rulers and levels. Underneath the workbench is a pile of tires and rims. His prized tool is a drill press he purchased at a garage sale. His pedaled grinder, dusted white with flour, sits in the basement next to two buckets of grain.
On this day, a path is cleared to the washing machine, something his wife Jean appreciates. She supports his artistic endeavors and accepts the bike clutter in the house, but said “sometimes it’s annoying when I can’t get to the washing machine.”
“I think a lot of guys are career driven and it’s nice Eric has a shop he can work in here,” she said. “It keeps him around and we can spend a lot of time together.”
She has gone with him to the Art Togeau parade since they met. It’s fun and silly, she said, recalling the time they tried to ride the wooden tricycle made completely from wood scraps. Unfortunately it couldn’t stop.
Jean said Farnsworth was not afraid to look silly and he’s not afraid to fail.
Her daughter Emma, a KU freshman, was 12 when Eric made her a “plain simple bike,” she said. She picked an Italian girls frame she liked from his stash of bike parts. She said it was slim and cute after he painted it and added handlebars.
“I’m too scared to ride his other bikes, but they are cool,” she said.
He gave two “cool” bikes to his neighbor Doug Bergstrom. Farnsworth offered the five-foot “tall bike” when the three-wheel bike he originally gave him was stolen a few years ago.
Bergstrom said he didn’t like to lock up his “Eric bikes,” because he wants people to try riding them and to be inspired. He figured if someone stole one it would be easy to spot around town. But the three-wheel bike was never found.
“Everyone loved it,” he said. “Kids clamored over the bike. At a certain point I realized three-wheel bikes were practical.”
He told Farnsworth they were marketable and could be sold for young children to ride, but he said Farnsworth wasn’t in it for the money. He would rather pedal than peddle his bikes.
Moving his muscles and being outdoors is what Farnsworth loves most about riding a bike. He recalls biking to and from work on a valley road in northern California, breathing in the balsam aroma from the Douglas Firs until a car zoomed by leaving behind an unpleasant odor of fumes.
He still bikes to and from his job at Horizon Systems, Inc., about a four and a half mile ride, and said it improved his mood after a bad day at work. After twenty minutes of riding home, he forgets what was bothering him.
“Riding my bike to work every day is not going to save the planet,” he said. “Even if everyone in this country rode their bicycles instead of driving cars it wouldn’t save the planet.”
But it’s an improvement in his eyes and if there’s something he can do, he’ll do it.
“I make them because I like to,” he said. “And once you get in the habit of something you can’t stop.”
Apparently he can’t stop thinking about them either. When Jean asks him what’s on his mind he’ll tell her: Bike parts.
Kansan staff writer Erin Castaneda can be contacted at ecastaneda@kansan.com.
— Edited by Travis Robinett
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