INTERVIEW BY MATT COOK / HELLOMATTCOOK.COM PHOTOS BY DUNCAN ELLIOTT / DUNCANELLIOTT.NET
Pittsburgh-based Michael Brown doesn’t just build frames for people who love riding bikes, he builds them for people who can’t ride bikes. Handmade frames have always held a special mystique, the feeling that they can draw out a different kind of ride, different kind of rider. But inside the Maestro Frameworks workshop this is more than just a feeling. Since 2011 Mike Brown has been welding two extremes of the cycling world together. As well as making mountain bike pioneer Keith Bontrager’s favourite handmade bike, he’s made headlines with builds for riders who usually find it impossible to find a bike that works for them. When he was a boy Mike Brown didn’t especially like bikes. He was active and athletic, but they “just weren’t for him”. He went rock climbing and skateboarding instead, and “spent a lot of time in the ocean”. And it might have stayed that way if he hadn’t suffered a bad rock climbing fall at the age of 23. The injury kept him on solid ground and encouraged him to
re-evaluate his relationship with the bicycle. What followed was a remarkable transformation. Relocating to Pennsylvania he took up road racing, then steered towards the still fledgling sport of mountain biking. (He’s proud to have been owner of one of the first mountain bikes on the east coast.) He also became more than a little handy with a wrench and eventually opened up his own bike shop. It was here that he acquired his nickname, courtesy of “a gentleman who raced on the Puerto Rican Olympic team”. That gentleman was Edwin Torres, who competed in the 1968 Mexico Olympics. “I built him a set of wheels and he called me the master mechanic. The Maestro.” And so the Maestro was born. But not too long afterwards, the Maestro went dormant, when Mike took a full time engineering job in the natural gas industry. Then, in 2009, he quit. “I just wanted something to do,” he says. “So I decided to build bikes.” He makes it sound so simple. (There is, in fact, a beautifully simplistic logic to everything Mike tells me. A kind of undulating rhythm, like cycling in oral form.) 55
