NORTHAMPTON — Middle-schooler Lucian Viruet trailed along behind a fit man with thinning, curly hair, who not long ago was playing bassoon in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but this late afternoon was delivering a newly refurbished mountain bike.
Lucian, 13, could not help himself. His wide mouth spread slowly into a grin as Rick Ranti, the bassoonist turned volunteer bike mechanic, neared a red Subaru wagon then hoisted the Huffy bicycle into the rear of the car.
Lucian, who for months had been pedaling a model too small for him, now owned a bicycle that fit his frame. It cost him nothing.
The bike was no gift. Instead, the used bicycle was another item in the line of exchanges that Bikes For All has been processing in its quiet way for the past six years. Without fanfare and little advertisement, the group has given away approximately 700 bicycles since 2020, according to one of the group’s organizers.
The word about free bikes mostly gets passed on in conversation. That’s how Lucian’s mother Valkyrie Viruet, 30, found out about Bikes For All. She had been searching with little success for a bigger bicycle for her growing son. Then a friend alerted her to Bikes For All.
“It really is cool,” said Valkyrie. “I didn’t realize this was a program.”
Program might be too ambitious a word for what occurs on the red-brick backside of the former Pro Brush building on Nonotuck Street. Next to an antique dealer and across the driveway from YUP Coffee Roasters, a band of bike enthusiasts spends three hours each Wednesday afternoon relubing and rebuilding old bicycles into ones they give away.
It’s the giveaway part that astonishes some, yet it’s instrumental to what various members of the group say it intends: inverting a too-expensive-for-some economy by allowing anyone who can balance on two wheels access to a bicycle that works.
Howard Moore, a retired lawyer who spends long stretches in his retirement either bicycling or volunteering, gave his take on the Bikes For All model, calling it an “enthusiasm economy,” not an “extortion economy.”
George Kohout, the organizer who envisioned Bikes For All six years ago, allowed as the Northampton economic model is unique in that no one demands community work or money in exchange for the bikes, as some other programs in Massachusetts do.
Bikes For All does accept $40 donations for a bike if the recipient can afford it. That money goes to keeping the $6,000 budget in the black.
Mostly, though, the system “is a little glimpse of the world with no (financial) transactions,” said Kohout, who chairs the city’s Planning Board.
As an example: In a two-hour stretch on a late September Wednesday, six people came looking for bicycles. All of them left with a ridable two-wheeler. No money was exchanged.
Nick Luchetti walked through the open Bikes For All door not knowing what to expect. He found Moore, Ranti and four other bike mechanics cleaning gear clusters, fishing out brake cables and trying to figure out why derailleurs weren’t operating.
Ranti spotted Luchetti quickly. The 69-year-old man took up considerable space in the white-brick room with a high ceiling but a squeezed square footage, where the old bikes are both stored and repaired.
After quickly sizing him up, Ranti knew just the bicycle for Luchetti — a mountain bike with a large enough frame for a tall man.
Ranti wheeled it outside for a test ride in the parking lot next to the Mill River. Luchetti mounted the bike slowly, unsure of his next move. “It’s been a very long time,” he said.
Ranti made some quick adjustments to extend the handlebars, while Luchetti played with the levers at his fingertips, figuring out how to shift the gears. He said he wanted to start riding a bicycle so he could do errands and get a bit more fit.
As for the zero-dollar price tag, “that made it do-able.”
Before Luchetti could pedal away, Ranti stopped him. “I have to give you a lecture,” said Ranti, 64, who moved to Northampton in 2021 just before retiring from the Boston Symphony.
Ranti explained the safety rules for bicycles, chief among them: do not weave in and out of traffic and announce your presence when passing on the bike path.
He then gave both Luchetti and Emma Larsen, a senior at Smith College, helmets and small flashing lights to attach to the front and back of their bikes. Ranti would have given both Larsen and Luchetti locks, but Bikes For All had run out.
Ranti had given Larsen what he called a “theft-proof” model, a Dynamax with an old-style shifter on the frame and swept-back handlebars that was easily older than Larsen and nearing Ranti’s age. Larsen did not complain about the bike being so old no one would bother stealing it. “Yeah, I mean it’s free, so.”
While students and families comprise a sizable percentage of the Bikes For All customers, the local homeless population also uses the group’s services.
Jaqueline Ortiz, 19, said she lives in a “place in the woods” in Northampton, and she needed a bicycle to help her get around. In a zip-up black hoodie, Ortiz sat uneasily on a mountain bike outside the repair shop.
Cate Dollard, a recently retired Northampton High School science teacher and now a Bikes For All volunteer, coached Ortiz, instructing her to first coast on the bike, testing her balance without pedaling.
“Ooh, it’s been a while,” said Ortiz, as she pointed her bike down the slight incline. She took to it quickly, pedaling out of sight before returning.
Ortiz said she had not been on a bike since she was 12 years old. That personal tidbit from Ortiz compelled Dollard to think about why she has ridden bicycles most of her life and why, in retirement, she spends so much time repairing and giving away bicycles.
“To me, it’s freedom,” said Dollard.
Ortiz then pedaled off, disappearing around the corner of the rambling mill building with her friends Destynee Todd and JD Johnson.
Bike giveaway shops do not exist in every city, in part, because not every place has the social ingredients necessary.
Northampton has, according to Kohout, a bubbling spirit of volunteerism, a strong bicycling subculture and a ready supply of able, retired people.
Those volunteers must know their way around the cogs on a cluster of gears. That’s clearly the case at Bikes For All, where retired engineers, lawyers and teachers sit on 5-gallon buckets as they restore bikes to working order.
Craig Smith is a retired engineer from Connecticut. Ray Fontaine is a retired community college professor. They work next to the bassoonist, the high school teacher, another engineer and the former lawyer.
Ask them how they ended up in a little room with no windows lubing chains, more often than not the answer is Kohout, the board president of Friends of Northampton Trails.
When asked about the group’s founder, Smith smiled and called Kohout “a terrible mechanic” but a supremely talented organizer.
Fontaine, 75, spent a year early in his career fixing bicycles for a living in Greenfield. Now, after decades teaching at Springfield Technical Community College, Fontaine said the repair shop offers him mental puzzles to solve and social engagement.
“It’s good for my head to come and be challenged,” said Fontaine, of Westhampton. “Plus, it feels really good that (customers) are happy with (the bikes.)”
In the cramped room where six people must nestle themselves into small spaces, the steep Bikes For All growth is a concern. Yes, they want to make available as many bicycles as they can to as many people as possible.
But, there’s a joy in the quirky way it works now.
“Without fail” mechanics arrive at 3 p.m. on Wednesdays, said Moore. No emails. No texts. People just know, and want, to show up.
“It’s been brilliantly funny,” said Moore. “We have no scheduling.”
And the account between people wanting bikes and the bicycles available has so far balanced. The more people find out that they can get a bike for free on the backside of the old mill building on Nonotuck Street, though, the higher demand grows.
Since 2020, when the group gave away 25 bikes, with this year being the strongest yet. They have given away close to 180 of them.
All of that makes Kohout wonder if Bikes For All needs a larger space and a bigger budget. He said he dreams of a workshop next to Northampton’s Rail Trail system and a budget of $10,000.
Before moving to a new workshop or increasing the budget, what the group urgently needs, said its mechanics, is more bicycles to meet current demand.
When Smith rides around town now, he finds himself looking at garages and wondering about the forgotten bikes hidden away. “You just know there are so many people with bikes sitting around.”
