So last Friday after work, we were finishing some things up around here when a man rode a bike into the shop. He starts off with something like, “Man I’m glad that I caught you guys, I got something for you…I owe some people some money, you want to buy my bike?..blah blah blah”. The dude is dead drunk or hop-ed up on something else. I look down at the bike and it was really really nice and you could tell it was really really stolen. The guy goes on about how he was trying to sell it for $140 bucks, but he would take $40 for it right then. Felicity started yelling at the guy, telling him to get out of the shop, that we didn’t want his stolen bike, but I kept thinking that Jason rides for Hunter and his bikes are super sweet too and that people that own these type of custom handmade bikes are semi-rare and that I might be able to track down the original owner of the bike, so I start haggling with the tweeker. I tell him that I’ll give him a twenty for the bike. He says $30. I say that I’ll give him a twenty and all the ones in my wallet. I ended up getting the bike for $24 dollars. The bike was a Steelman, handmade by Brett Steelman in Redwood City. I would guess that this bike sold for about $2000-$3000 new. Anyway, on Monday we posted an ad on craigslist, saying that we bought this stolen steelman and that we wanted to return it to the rightful owner. The posting is still running but we didn’t find the owner. We did get a few responses from owners of steelmans that were stoked that we were trying to find the rightful owner and they told us to call Steelman directly. We did and Katryn called us back about 3pm yesterday. I told her the story and gave her the serial number on the frame. Within an hour she had tracked down the owner. His name was Daniel.
Daniel bought the bike in Colorado about a year ago from the guy who original bought it from Steelman. So Daniel moved to the Bay Area to work for Greenpeace about 2 weeks ago. Within 5 days of living here, he parks his bike outside of the Uptown, stopping in for a brew. The bartender sees a guy busting off Daniel’s combo lock and yells out to the barroom that someone’s bike is getting stolen. Daniel runs out and chases the tweeker down Valencia street to no avail. I guess this is the part where I got involved. The Tweeker must have driven the bike directly over to our shop. Now, I’m not sure if buying the bike was the right thing to do because that just might make the tweeker steal more bikes, but I’m 100% sure that he would have sold it to someone else really quickly, and whether or not they would have returned it is a questions mark. When I called Katryn at Steelman she had told me that they have never received a call like this where someone had bought a bike that they knew was stolen only to return it. Well, I don’t know what to say but everyone here has a bike and maybe they aren’t the most expensive bikes in the world, but they are ours and that each and everyone of us would be upset if someone stolen it. All that aside, seeing how happy Daniel was when we returned his bike to him made this whole experience totally 100% fulfilling and even brought us ape do good’ers a little closer.

Daniel with freshly returned bike

and Daniel's dog is rad