birthday gift for his 8 year-old daughter.
(Photos © J. Maus)
Everyone in the handmade bike industry must wonder where framebuilding phenom Sacha White gets the inspiration for his always impressive bicycles.
Judging from his famous tricycle that won Best of Show at the 2006 NAHBS (and is currently in a museum exhibit in San Francisco), and the poster he unveiled last year, my guess is that the answer lies very close to home — his two young daugthers Cybelle and Delilah.
Sacha told me he she had outgrown sitting on the back of her mom’s Xtracycle and that it was time “to make her a piece of real transportation.”
For a Vanilla, the bike seems pretty basic. Sacha says he was tempted to “really pour a lot of ideas into it” but he held back. “I wanted to keep it simple” he said, “not only so she could feel secure locking it up every day at school, but so she could work on it herself.”
A carfree family, Sacha and his girls ride everywhere in their Southeast Portland neighborhood. “Cybelle’s awesome,” he said with a daddy’s smile, “my favorite times with her are when we’re riding. Sometimes I’ll look over and she’ll be racing me up the hill.”