Gecko Cycles was founded in 1983 in Santa Barbara, Ca. by Ken Beach ("KB"). It all began when I started racing downhill in 1979. I applied my skills as a fabricator to the bicycle industry, designing, building and repairing frames and components. I designed several products, including a long throw thumb shifter for Shimano, a chain tensioner for the Descender downhill bikes and tandems, double-ovalized stem, a one-piece bar stem combo, and a long cage front and rear derailleur.

 In 1981, I sold most everything I owned and gave up my drywall company of 30 employees to live on my bike. I toured all over the west coast, the Rockies, and Hawaii. While living on my bike, I had more ideas of bike geometries and bike components.

Still racing MTB's I decided to settle down in Santa Barbara in 1983 and start building my innovations. The models I built at that time were the Slickrock (light, fillet brazed and beautifully finished fillets), Survival ( a world tour bike ), Camuesa (Mtn. Tandem ), and the Lightfoot (beefy road bike). All of these early bikes were meticulously filed and finished.

Also in the early 1980’s, I worked for Chris King of King Headsets and Richard Cunningham of Mantis Bicycle Co. I learned a tremendous amount about machining, and frame building during that time. 

In 1987 I rented a shop in Santa Barbara and took the bicycle business to another level. At my shop I built over 250 frames and painted well over 500. I developed several bikes, 2 of which were the Y-File It, and the Genesis. The Genesis was Mountain Bike Action's most innovative bike of the year in both 1989 and 1991. The Genesis and Y-File were both fillet brazed, but not filed. I still produced the highly finished models, but most all were of the unfinished joint variety. I did have a go at hiring a few people, but the quality was too hard to maintain. No one lasted more than a week or two at the most. To this day I still do all the work my self and in house. The highest quality is assured when you get a product from Gecko Cycles.

In the early 1990’s my priorities changed from racing and full time bicycle production.  I got married in '90 and we had our first boy (Jason) in '91. In '92 I became Mr. Mom and bike production all but stopped. While raising my son Jason to be a full blown toddler, I produced only a few bikes.

In 1993 we moved to Boulder, Colorado and I started working for Zinn Cycles in Boulder early in '95. I moved all my machines and equipment to his shop and I produced a few Geckos out of his shop. After about a year he scaled back. I rented another space in Boulder and I took over his whole production, replacing all 6 employees in the shop. This kept me quite busy building lots of Zinn bikes but again only producing a few Geckos until early 2000.

In May of 2000, I stopped building Zinn's bikes. I found it to hard to produce Zinn's, take care of our second boy (Victor), build Geckos, and study to become a computer network engineer. Victor is now 3 and ready to go and play with the big toddlers and so I am now producing Geckos, building and repairing computers, setting up networks, building websites and hosting websites from my house. I have built a very nice shop at my home and am able to send the kids off to school and daycare while still being able to work at home and have the flexibility to be there for the kids during sick days, vacations and the like. 

My hopes are now to get some investors to help finance the prototype development and manufacturing costs of those new products, which include a new light, a trailer, baby seat, Full-Suspension bikes, shocks and various other components.

In Summary:

As Gecko Cycles, Inc. I build all types of custom bicycle frames and fabricates custom anything.  I’ve built check scanners, replicas of lunar rovers, and yes all kinds of bicycles.  I build custom bicycles for other companies as well. Gecko Cycles Inc. specializes in extremely high tolerance production and unique building techniques unmatched in the industry. I also do custom paint and bike repairs. Although all my bikes are made by hand, start to finish, just to keep up with the times, I have recently been building computers, networks for home and office, websites, and domain name hosting services.

I will talk to you anytime about ordering your own custom Gecko Cycles Frame or other custom built dream, remember my logo is “Art That Works”. 

Click on this photo to take you to my Sammy build site and  products being offered.

    

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