History
Michael Hartley discovered his life-long passion for the bicycle in 1964, when, at the tender age of seven, he began learning how to overhaul and repair bicycles from his father. Michael Hartley Wheelworks began as Mike’s Bikes in 1971, when Michael was only 14, offering general bicycle repairs. In those years, in Toronto, Mike was riding the wave of the renewed interest in the bicycle as a means of transportation and recreation. Mike’s Bikes developed quickly, to building frames and wheels, engineering and designing frame components such as lugs, making complete bicycles, repairing and repainting frames, designing tools, and the importing of bicycle components.
Today, Michael Hartley Wheelworks offers an even wider range of services, but our main focus is on wheel building and restoration. We encourage you to explore all our current products and services. But first, a bit more of the back story on how Michael Hartley Wheelworks came to be.
Mike built his first frame when he was fifteen, using Prugnat lugs, Campagnolo forkends and Reynolds ‘531’ double-butted steel tubing.
One specialty of Mike’s Bikes, that developed early and carries over to this day with Michael Hartley Wheelworks, was to design and build bicycles to accomplish unique requirements of the customer. The unique requirement of the bicycle shown below is ergonomical, and it was designed and built to allow shorter adults to ride a bicycle with two, equal-sized 700C wheels.
This customer’s unique height was accommodated utilizing a sloping top tube, an extra-short head tube, a custom-engineered and hand-made head tube lug, and integrated top and down tubes.
Mike painted this innovative frame using a gravity-fed spray gun (a ‘first’ at that time in Toronto), made by ‘Aerospray Engineering, of Birmingham, England, and ideal for painting beautiful finishes on bicycle frames. In Toronto in the early ‘seventies, these kinds of guns were virtually unknown and unobtainable through the local supply chain. It had to be sourced overseas (there was no internet in the nineteen-seventies!). A small detail perhaps, but another indication of the lengths to which we will go, to step outside the usual to engineer, design, and manufacture innovative bicycles, tools, and services for commuters, couriers, cargo delivery, and touring.
Decades before the ‘built-where-it’s-sold’ movement became fashionable and topical, Mike’s Bikes utilized local manufacturers to transform designs prepared in-house into finished products, beginning with our first engineered tool: a shop bicycle stand (still being used, forty-eight years later!).
Our latest development is a set of spoke tools for the mechanic! Based on decades of shop experience repairing and building wheels, we have invented and engineered two tools that make it easier for the mechanic to replace spoke nipples, lubricate spoke threads, and to build bicycle wheels.
Michael’s spoke tool in action!
