Meet the locals: Chris Robinson the bike recycler

Mr Robinson is fighting the fast-fashion mentality one salvaged bike at a time, and not only sharing his life-long love of bicycles, but his passion for sustainable living as well.

For years he has been collecting huge volumes of rejected bikes all over the Macleay, giving them a new life.

Mr Robinson now has hundreds of bicycles on his property. In every room of his home, spilling out into the front yard and carport, a garage full, and a work space constantly in use.

Growing up, Mr Robinson always looked after his own bicycles and, with a background in mechanical engineering, he has the knowledge to not only repair vintage and modern bikes, but to build his own using "the best of both worlds".

Mr Robinson says he started his business after becoming "appalled at the huge volume of discarded bikes based on cheap imports".

"For an entire generation we have been saturated with cheap imports meaning that... when something doesn't work properly or breaks down we just throw it away and get another one," he said.

"Bicycles are classic for that, particularly for children... if they leave their cheap bicycle out in the rain it goes rusty and they go, 'Aw dad I want a new one for my birthday' or something like that and they get a new bike for not looking after they're old bike. It's almost like an incentive to not look after your bike."

Mr Robinson says that when he was a kid, bicycles were "quite expensive" so people took better care of them.

" A bike back in the '70s would cost one week's wage of an apprentice... now you can buy a bike for $100. So this disparity between wages and prices has just gone berserk, to the point where people don't care so much about them.

"When I was a child you looked after your bikes. They cost you a lot of money, you kept them in the shed, you did whatever servicing you could or you took them to the bike shop and got them serviced there."

Mr Robinson reminisces about the "kind of personal meeting" you'd have with the person in the bike shop and believes "all that is lost with buying a cheap bike".

Which is why he's hand-made, painted and erected a 'Bike Shoppe' sign. His says the word 'Shoppe' is old-worldly and nostalgic.

"The name implies old world charm and service. You don't get the charm but you get the service."

Mr Robinson is in fact full of charm.

Very nearly sharing a name with Christopher Robin of Winnie the Pooh, Mr Chris Robinson shares the child-like imagination and playfulness.

Adding gimmick horns, tassels to handlebars, colourful beads to spokes, and interesting baskets to his bicycles for the joy of it.

Mr Robinson is very pleased with his find of a double-headed chicken basket at an op-shop.

"This basket is just to make people smile".

He even has an experiment underway, tinkering with an exercise bike to make it moveable.

"I think it would be funny to ride an exercise bike to the shops," he said.

Timber work and blue and white paint is Mr Robinson's signature making his bicycles recognisable around town.

Mr Robinson has a fleet of bikes for hire, vintage bikes on show and various styles for sale. His shop has a constant flow of well-loved bikes under repair and custom bikes in the making.

Mr Robinson repairs bikes and rebuilds them in a way that is more appropriate for our area.

"Because we don't have hills here we don't need gears for example," he said.

"What I do is go back to the vintage style, single speed backpedal brake... the bike doesn't have to have any cables, no break levers, no gears, it's really simple really reliable."

Mr Robinson believes the advantage of the vintage era is that they were built well, kept simple and they lasted.

"As long as you kept the bike out of the weather and serviced it occasionally it would keep on going 50 years later."

However, he says, the one thing that the vintage bike is not good for is their narrow tires.

"In this area, there's sand. As soon as you're off the road you're on sand, and when you're on the road it's pretty rough anyways, so what we need here, one thing the modern bikes have, is the wider tires."

So he creates his own bikes using a blend of vintage and modern bikes.

"It's what I feel is the best of both worlds."

Mr Robinson says this is were his engineering background comes into play. Dismantling bikes and rebuilding them with salvaged components.

"I'll look at something and I don't just repair it...I strip it down, simplify it, paint it...the bike looks nothing like how it came in."

As a restorer of vintage bikes, Mr Robinson's home and showroom is somewhat of a museum.

In the corner of his living room sits a 1980's vintage Super Elliot made in Adelaide with a rare Australian made symbol.

"That just doesn't happen anymore," he says.

The oldest bike he owns dates back to mid-1940's

"Right at the very end of the second world war...[it]reminds me of my grandmother."

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