Crossover
Published in Treadlie issue 25, October 2019
STEVE GARDNER OF VELOCRAFT (FORMERLY BIKES BY STEVE) BRINGS EXPERIENCE AND CRAFTSMANSHIP FROM HIS PREVIOUS LIFE AS AN AUTO PAINTER TO HIS CURRENT WORK WITH BIKE FRAMES.
For a city as bike-obsessed as Melbourne, where you can get anything from a custom carbon frame to a bespoke leather bike seat, there are surprisingly few options when it comes to custom paint jobs. Until recently, if you asked your local bike store where you could get a scratch repaired or a wild new colour scheme, you’d have been advised to take your ride apart and ship it to Queensland to the team at Paint My Bike.
Enter Steve Gardner, a classically trained automotive painter and avid cyclist from Upper Beaconsfield in Melbourne’s east. After painting a couple of bike frames for friends, they urged him to switch from cars to bikes full-time.
“I said: ‘How the hell am I going to paint bikes? I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got kids at school.’ And here we are, two-and-a-half years later,” Steve says.
Clearly Melbourne’s cycling community was desperate for a local alternative to sending their treadlies north, because business has been booming ever since. “I was handing out business cards at bike shops and one guy said to me, ‘You need to find yourself a frame builder’,” he says.
Steve started taking on paint job requests from legendary bike builders Bastion Cycles, and when Mark Hester of PROVA moved to Melbourne the three businesses pooled their resources and opened a workshop in Fairfield. “I’ve got two of the best frame builders in the world here, so it’s pretty cool.” He now also does all the custom paint work for Specialized, along with plenty of walk-ins looking for something special or a scratch repair.
As an auto painter working in smash repairs, Steve was trained to do the job right the first time and not take any shortcuts. As a working philosophy, it’s even more critical on a bike frame than on the Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris Steve used to work on.
“You see every part of the bike. You can’t hide anything,” he says. “Whereas on a car, if it was smashed and resprayed, you would look at the whole thing and go: ‘Wow, it looks great,’ because you wouldn’t notice a little bit of a run or a heavy edge. With a bike there’s nowhere to hide, and the sort of frames we’re working on are $10 000 or $20 000 so they want it done right.”
After several decades of working with spray paint Steve has seen all kinds of trends come and go. He tries to steer people away from fluoro – “Doesn’t matter who makes the paint, it’ll fade and look crap very, very quickly” – and the most popular colour is “red, red, red, red, red”, although he noticed a swing towards blue at the Handmade Bicycle Show Australia this year. One supplier is pushing glow-in-the-dark, but Steve isn’t quite sure yet how to sell the idea.
But he’s a technician at heart, dedicated to perfecting the surface finish no matter what the customer wants – which could be anything from hot pink with sprinkles to a design based on the waves and colours of sand dunes.
Originally branded Bikes By Steve after a dinner table conversation with his kids, the business recently rebranded as Velocraft. With the thirty-odd hooks in the workshops constantly occupied with frames waiting to be painted, Bikes By Steve was in need of some extra pairs of hands. The business is now a team of three and with that change, a new name felt right.
As for his own bike, Steve recently repainted it a dark, harlequin green after dinging the frame on Mount Hotham. He tries to ride it to work – 70 kilometres each way from Upper Beaconsfield to Fairfield and back – once or twice a week. “When the light hits it, it goes lime green and blue,” he says. “It turns heads.”
