Photos by Rob Ainsley
If you ride a cycle with custom-built wheels, they may have been made in York. The Cycle Campaign talks to wheelbuilder Dylan Thomas.
Do you know the cobbled Franklins Yard, off Fossgate? If you’ve visited on a weekday during working hours you’ll have seen cargo cycles coming and going. Look behind the double doors they emerge from and you might see Dylan Thomas at work.
Dylan is the founder and owner of Poetry in Motion Cycles (PiM). You might say he’s keeping the wheels of the cycling industry turning. He handbuilds cycle wheels of all kinds.
Dylan says:
“We have a small team working here keeping up with the demand of building wheels.
“We started out in 2009 focusing on wheel building in York as all the other shops had everything else covered. We soon moved into supplying wheel parts to the trade all over the UK and the EU.”
The PiM site says the company also offers framebuilding. Dylan explains how and why he changed the focus of his work.
“I started out doing some frame repairs and then moved into framebuilding as I found there was a demand for it in York.”
He soon discovered there was an even greater need for wheel building outside York. This is now the main focus. It proved a good business move.
“This has led us to be one of the leading custom wheel builders in the UK,” Dylan says.
He explains this means he gets “…lots of requests to build most things other shops think are too hard or do not have the staff that can build these wheels.”
How long does it take to build a wheel?
Dylan says, “An experienced wheelbuilder can build multiple wheels in an hour.” If you are considering having a go yourself, he has this advice: “A beginner should expect to spend at least several hours on the task. It is best not to try to do this all at one sitting, because you are likely to get frustrated at the slowness of the truing and tensioning process.”
It might surprise people to learn Dylan hasn’t always been in York, or had a bicycle business.
“I started out working as a chef. But after travelling the world, I found my home was York so I came back. Quite quickly I found I also had a love for cycling which developed into working in the trade.
Dylan says the name of his company was a nod to the famous Welsh poet whose name he shares.
There’s more about Dylan and cycling here:
in the Yorkshire Post
in York Press
and at Cycling UK
Get in touch with Poetry in Motion Cycles:
Tel: 07917698749 Mon-Fri 9-5,
Email: info@pimcycles.co.uk
York Cycle Campaign 
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