Shirley, You Must Be Cycling | High-end bikes built one at a time at Phoenix Park
WBJournal.com Exclusive: Video Feature
Check out this 360-view of the Hot Tubes workshop:
Toby Stanton, owner of Hot Tubes in Shirley, MA, discusses how long it takes to build a custom bicycle:
Many area manufacturers can crank out huge amounts of product at blinding speed, but sometimes it’s nice to come across one that painstakingly hand-makes its products one at a time.
Such is the case with Hot Tubes, a two-employee custom bicycle frame manufacturer and painter in Phoenix Park in Shirley. For Toby Stanton, the company’s owner, blinding speed means building and painting one bicycle frame a week. The cost? Just under $2,000 and up.
In fact, the busiest year the company has had since its founding in 1991 was one in which it cranked out 50 complete frames. That feat is possible, Stanton said, but very difficult.
“You could do more, but it would be really draining,” he said. “It’s not like making Pintos. It requires a lot of thought.” A lot of that thought has to do with the measurements, ability and preferences of the riders for whom each frame is being made.
Hot Tubes makes bicycle frames of steel, carbon fiber or a combination of the two. Not including paint, a frame can be made in a day, Stanton said.
And Hot Tubes does a fair amount of business making prototype frames for large, well-known bicycle manufacturers. Stanton said the shop also does custom painting for bicycle manufacturers, most notably Cervelo, a Toronto-based manufacturer of high-end bikes. Hot Tubes is the only company authorized to repaint Cervelo frames under warranty.
Team Effort
But painting and welding aren’t the only things Hot Tubes is up to.
The company offers a weeklong bicycle frame manufacturing class in which students learn how to build bicycle frames. The class is expensive, but when it’s over, students leave with a bicycle they’ve custom-made for themselves.
Stanton was a competitive cyclist for a time, but now runs Hot Tubes’ own cycling team, which happens to be the top-ranked team of 17- and 18-year-olds in North America. The Hot Tubes team has amassed 90 national championships and two world championships in the last 17 years.
In that time, Stanton has seen interest in cycling increase and has noticed that there are more cyclists “at the elite level” than he’s seen in a long time. Also, “there are more guys in international competition now than I think we’ve ever had.”
And Stanton ought to know. He’s been in cycling for nearly his entire life and he worked for years as a mechanic at Bicycle Alley on Main Street.
There are 36 tenants at Phoenix Park, and I figured Hot Tubes, with the increased interest in cycling, the recent Olympic games and Tour de France, would be a good one to feature. Others include Cool Dog, the makers of ice cream hot dogs found for sale at Fenway Park and other venues and Focused Laser Solutions LLC, which does laser engraving. Probably everyone is familiar with their work. All the numbers, letters and symbols on your computer keyboard are laser engraved. Laser engraving is also used for certain bar codes, part identification, logos and graphics. FLS can even use lasers to engrave on wood.
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