“I asked for a bike that could carry a week of groceries and still climb like it was angry. They built the Vello Citta around that sentence.”
M. Okonkwo, daily rider since 2022Home / About
A workshop, not a factory
Rivet & Road has been two benches, one jig and one paint booth since 2009. We build about a hundred frames a year and could build more, which is precisely why we do not.
How the shop works
Everything happens at 14 Foundry Lane: the cutting, the brazing, the filing, the paint, the fitting and the espresso. Nothing is sent away. When you ring the shop you are talking to the person who will hold the torch for your frame, which is either charming or terrifying depending on how you feel about accountability.
We publish the queue, the prices and the warranty in full, on the site and on the workshop wall. A shop that hides its prices is hiding something, and it is usually the price.
The name is literal. A rivet holds what it joins without asking for attention, and a road is just somewhere you have not been yet. Both felt right in 2009 and both still do.
The yearsSeventeen of them, briefly
- 2009
Two benches in a rented garage on Tannery Row. The first frame is a track bike that survives to this day, painted gold, hanging over the paint booth.
- 2013
The shop commissions its own frame jig. Alignment stops being a compromise and becomes a spec sheet.
- 2017
We move to 14 Foundry Lane, a former brass-casting works, and put the foundry crane to use hanging frames for cure.
- 2021
The paint lab opens: a spectrophotometer, a spray booth, and eleven stock enamels mixed in-house.
- 2026
Frame number 1,000 leaves the shop. It is a Strada Lunga, painted the exact red of our first poster.
Riders on the shop
“The fitting took three hours and a second espresso. The bike that came out of it is the only one I have ever kept past a decade.”
J. Harrow, Strada Lunga No. 214“They matched the paint of my grandfather's frame from a photograph taken in 1974. I cried in the workshop. No regrets.”
T. Vela, respray customerThe shop in numbers
17years at the bench
1,000frames built
~100frames a year, by choice
12house enamels
The whole thing is fictional
Rivet & Road does not exist. It is a portfolio design study: a complete, working website for a shop that could exist, built to show how a small maker presents itself online. Every name, price and story above is invented.
Read the shop standards