Ohio Builder Does it All

Rody Walter of Groovy Cycleworks, started building 18 years ago. He comes from a background building fixtures – the parts and pieces of the frame – in the Northeast and that experience taught him how machining and fabrication work.

Walter now builds all the parts he can at Groovy Bicycles: handlebars, seatposts, and custom cranks that work with a polygonal interface to maximize the contact with the crank arm.

Because he learned his craft through an apprenticeship of sorts, Walter now gives back to the community by taking on one young framebuilder a year. “The opportunity to do what I did just isn’t there anymore,” he said, because the market has forced bicycle building operations to become big factories or to reduce to one or two-man shops.

Rody Walter does it all, from paint to custom annealing his cranks, and his annual mentoring sessions teach his students any skills they wish to strengthen and master.