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Bike expo honoring Teesdale
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · January 22, 2015


The Iowa Bicycle Coalition will honor West Branch’s late bike maker Tom Teesdale this weekend with the creation of a new Teesdale Hand Built Bike Show.


The event is part of the 2015 Iowa Bike Expo Saturday at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines.

Teesdale died July 21, 2014, while riding on the second day of the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. The 62-year-old owner of TET Cycles, who worked out of a shop at 403 S. Maple, developed an international reputation for hand-built bicycles and is considered a pioneer in mountain bike design.

“Tom Teesdale was highly regarded as a local frame building legend in addition to being considered one of the most prolific custom frame builders among the international biking community,” Iowa Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Mark Wyatt wrote in a statement.

The idea for the show, which the Iowa Bicycle Coalition wants to make an annual event, came out of conversations between Wyatt, University of Iowa’s Interim Director of the School of Art and Art History Steve McGuire, and Iowa State University industrial design graduate research and teaching assistant Mark Kargol.

All three knew Teesdale and his work, and McGuire and Kargol said industrial design, like building bicycles, is considered an art form. And they want their expected 6,000 visitors to learn about the West Branch bike builder.

Kargol said he first visited Teesdale’s shop in 1997 when Kargol was an undergrad at Iowa. He commissioned Teesdale to build a mountain bike and, later, a triathalon bike.

“Being around Tom and other frame-builders really got me interested in the craft and hand-built bikes,” Kargol, who also owns Ventus Custom Cycles in Ames, said.

Kargol said he noticed that respected car shows draw special attention to hand-made cars, and thought the Iowa Bike Expo ought to do the same.

Teesdale also built road racing, cross bikes, tandem and many other styles, including custom-made bicycles for special olympians. He also taught frame building as an adjunct faculty member at Iowa.

“The expo is in honor of him,” McGuire said. “It is pretty important in terms of bringing attention to (Iowans) that this kind of legend was in their back yard. He was regarded as one of the best frame-builders in the United States.”

McGuire said Teesdale bicycles appear in the mountain bike Halls of Fame in both Europe and the United States, reflecting some of his nearly 40 years of building bicycle frames. And members of the Discovery Team, which competed in the Tour de France, rode Teesdale bicycles when relaxing between races.

“He was an innovator and a craftsman,” McGuire said.

Yet, he said, Teesdale did not make bicycles the center of his life.

“A lot of people don’t know how important his family was to him,” McGuire said. “In my mind, having this legacy of Tom Teesdale (recognized at the expo) is also a way to acknowledge his family.”

Wyatt said a section of the expo floor will be set aside for hand-built bicycle vendors marked with a banner above them. Each vendor will receive a ballot box as the show includes two trophies — a People’s Choice Award and an Exhibitor’s Choice Award — in an effort to recognize the skill and craftsmanship the bicycle world appreciated in Teesdale’s work, McGuire said.

This first year, the show will be small, Wyatt said, with seven or eight builders exhibiting, but he hopes it will grow.

“Tom was a legend and not a lot of people knew that … a famous bike builder could be so approachable,” Wyatt said.

Oddly enough, Kargol said, “Tom didn’t show off his work at shows.”

“He was not a guy that got out there in front of people,” he said. “He let his work speak for itself. He didn’t really market himself. … He just did great work that was almost a secret.”

Kargol noted that Teesdale’s bicycles sold for “extremely reasonable” prices, sometimes a third to a half of the price of other frame builders.

“He was very humble and did his work very well,” Kargol said. “He wasn’t out to gain a lot of notoriety for himself.”