Renegade Cyclist

Jamie Swan has done and seen it all for cycling on Long Island and isn’t hitting the brakes

Words: Casey Dooley | Photos: Matt Furman

Brazed steel. It’s the easiest type of bike frame to build. A common building toolkit is simply an oxy acetylene torch, a solid work bench with a vice, some files (like 6 well chosen), a hacksaw and an electric drill. Whether it’s the best material or not is a matter of endless debate and misses the point. The means are bare-bones and beyond tools the only necessity is some knowledge and the desire to gain more. So what did Jamie Swan learn from building his first steel frame?

Jamie Swan talking the history of Long Island cycling from his shop.

“The biggest lesson: learn how to fucking braze,” he laughed. Brazing—adhering steel together using a melted alloy—it turns out, is a key step in building a brazed steel bike. But Swan also learned that if you want to start building bikes, just start building and you can gain a tremendous amount of knowledge. “Learn the skills without fancy tools, those you can add over time.”

Swan belongs to that dying breed of the self-made journeyman for whom experience and passion exceeds classroom hours and grades. Where spit, grit, and do-it-yourselfedness is the far superior mentor. Swan’s passion just so happened to reside in the world’s most efficient means of travel: the bicycle.

The cycling fates aligned for Swan in the early 70s; just as the 10-speed bike explosion hit, Swan landed his first job—working at a bike shop in Farmingdale. “This was before I had my driver’s license [and] that really opened my eyes, working at the bike shop and visiting other shops” It was a true testament to his bourgeoning passion that Swan pursued bike racing, a fringe sport at the time. “Racing has always been kinda underground…when I started racing, you’d go into a deli with your funny shorts and your clip clop shoes, you were likely to get beat up, people were like ‘who is this fucking freak,’ ... you were menaced on a regular basis.” But persistence pays off.

Around the same time he was racing, Swan also began his lucrative wheel building empire. He’d show up to races, his car brimming with laced hoops and he would sling them like a hot dog vendor at Wrigley. There have been some serious wins on wheels built by Jamie Swan—a few state and national championships, by Swan’s estimation, and he’s pretty sure US Bicycle Hall of Famer Mike McCarthy won a world criterium championship on rims he built (he’ll have to ask next time he sees him.) And while he thinks George Hincapie road on a pair in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, he’s positive that the national champ of Poland did.

*Jamie's hand built wheels hang in his shop.*

Wheel building was such a cash cow for Swan, that in 1981, he was able to plop down near forty grand cash for his Northport home and backyard studio where he currently resides and tinkers. He’s never had a mortgage.

Around the same time, Swan also was engaged in track racing. But the bike he was riding was too small. And besides, Swan also needed a bike to suit the, let’s say, unique features of Queens’ Kissena track in the early 80s.

“It’s a shitty track,” Swan said of the early velodrome. And they say necessity is the mother of invention. (Swan did add that it’s a great place to start track racing now, with a wonderful, welcoming grassroots program.)

“Track bikes built for really good tracks don’t work well there, so this bike, I knew enough to design it for that track, so it worked really well … I would call [what I did to the bike] like detuning,” Swan explained. Regular track bikes tend to have a very short wheelbase with very stiff, steep angles, higher bottom brackets and stiff tubing. “[So] the thing is like a fucking board— you step on it and it goes and the handling is very, very twitchy.”

“Racing has always been kinda underground...when I started racing, you’d go into a deli with your funny shorts and your clip clop shoes, you were likely to get beat up, people were like ‘who is this fucking freak,’... you were menaced on a regular basis”

But at Kissena, you want to soften all those things: “ You want to make the bottom bracket a little lower, the chain stays a little longer, the angles a little softer...it gets closer to a traditional road racing bike… [with my bike] my ability to place or win went up dramatically, so I could be where I wanted to be in the field and I’m not fighting the track.” It was the first bike frame Swan had built.

And when he wasn’t battling the velodrome banks and bumps in Flushing, in the 90s he was engaging skirmishes in basements and board rooms across Long Island for the right to ride in the woods. Swan is one of the founding members of CLIMB, Long Island’s first and only mountain biking club.

At the time there was a significant legal threat to cyclists riding on trails. The best tactic was a show of camaraderie “We made friends with other user groups: Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference, Nassau-Suffolk Horsemen’s Association,” said Swan. “I started a thing called Long Island Trails Coalition, meeting once a month to talk about each park [with] the Parks Department, NY State Department, different land management agencies...all of them were getting phone calls about ‘getting those fucking bikers off the trails.’”

*One of Jamie's older builds hanging around the shop.*

The battle eventually made it all the way to the Senate (well sort of) where, surprisingly, cooler heads prevailed. “I was talking to the head of the DEC [Dept. of Environmental Conservation], Senator Owen Johnson, trying to get Rocky Point [Pine Barrens State Forest].” During the conversation, the senator, who was at the time a leading figure in the DEC stopped and said, “Wait, are you guys telling me that all you want do is ride bicycles around in the woods? I thought you were from a motorcycle organization…Let me make a phone call.” The rest is history and there are now 18 official trails open.

These days (besides lending technical support to and teaching at a local trade college), Swan’s attention is focused on randonneuring or “rando” riding, what he affectionately refers to as a “scene for old guys like me.” It’s long-distance unsupported light touring and actually dates back to turn-of-the-century Italian day-long sport races (though the name is French). Put it another way, if gravel grinding is the new kid on the block, then rando is it’s godfather (and cyclocross is an uncle or something.) In fact, often the difference between the two comes down to fenders and well-placed bike racks.

Swan’s most recent bike build was a rando frame purpose built to run in the Deerfield Dirt Field Randonnee bike ride, an 116-mile, dirt-road loop in the hilltowns of Franklin County, MA. “They’re designed to carry a little bit of weight...but you can’t go on a camping trip with a rando bike… you can got motel touring, though. Randos are built for weight up front. You lift this bike up and it feels like a lump of shit, but handles light and fast…this bike is really set up for that event.” It’s easy on the eyes too, having recently won at the North American Bike Show against some of the best randos in the world. It was only his 19th frame built.

*Jamie's most recent build, a rando bike built to handle the Deerfield Dirt Field Randonee.*

Swan constructs about one bicycle a year, ten of which have been for customers, the rest were personal use. It’s a not a large volume by any means, but what he lacks in output he’s made up for with wisdom gained by drawing on decades of experience as a bike repairman and racer, and from old-fashioned tinkering in his home work space.

And Swan’s skill and respect amongst the building community go way beyond the frames he’s built. He’s always stayed actively engaged and has a group of about 80 New York-area builders, mostly hobbyists and newbies, that he meets with at his work studio about once a month. Free lessons are offered and mainly it’s shop talk and bullshitting, like Fight Club for frame makers, but no one gets pummeled and it’s most definitely not a public offering. The secret password? “Have you built a bike frame?” Answer: “Yes.” Response: “Okay, You’re in.” (Though you also need to know the list server and, sorry, it’s not Swan.)

And just how does Swan choose the bike projects he does work on, when he’s not building for himself? “Its gonna be hard to articulate without me sounding like an asshole…it’s like I have to kinda dig the person and where they’re at. I get a lot of requests from people who don’t know a thing about bikes, and I don’t know, I just can’t get into it. You need to really, really know, like most of the people I build bikes for have been in it as long as I have and they really, really understand it, and they’re coming to me over another frame builder for a reason. It takes months ...and you have to spend a long time with these people.”

Swan will usually ask potential customers one question: Why are you coming to me?

It’s not about judgement but respect, and not for him, but for the process. He’s been at the bike game more than 40 years, so it’s more than mere hobby by now, it’s a way of life. You have to approach the process with a reverence or at the very least an honest enthusiasm tempered withsome hard-earned knowledge.

It was clear without asking that I wouldn’t be getting a Jamie Swan original anytime soon; maybe 10-20 years down the road when I’ve gained just a bit more knowledge and experience in the bike saddle. I’m not worried, I’m sure he’ll still be at it; maybe he’ll have even moved on to building with carbon fiber by then. But I doubt it.

For more on Jamie Swan please check his website jamieswan.net