It was almost a year ago, at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Portland, that Richard Sachs debuted the Desmond Horsfield film about his life and his career as a bicycle maker. Imperfection is Perfection tells the story of a man’s passion for the art and craft of frame building, and the unlikely events that led him to choose it as his career.

Richard Sachs is well-known among serious roadies in New England. His is a household name within the cyclocross community. But despite more than 30 years of frame building, and thousands of bicycles on the road that bear his name, Sachs has gone largely unnoticed in the mass market, where riders’ attention has been captured over the years by aluminum, then titanium, then carbon fiber.

Richard Sachs works only in steel. And he doesn’t exhibit at Interbike.

The growing success of NAHBS has gone a long way to challenging contemporary thinking about the utility of steel, and with it, the notoreity of Richard Sachs. Riders on the West Coast are beginning to understand just how talented the man is – and how influential his work has been on frame design all across America.

One measure of his influence is the prevalence of his lug sets. Again, this is not something immediately noticed by most riders. But amongst custom builders, Sachs lugs are in demand for their artistry and their dependability. Another measure of is his popularity is his backlog. A $400 deposit will secure one’s place in line, without guarantee of a delivery date or a price-tag. The wait for a Richard Sachs custom-made bicycle is now well beyond four years.

Watching the film, one begins to understand why. Sachs works alone without an assistant. His shop is in the basement of his Connecticut home. In the course of this 30-minute biography, we are taken to the craftsman’s bench and shown the processes that result in a finished Sachs bicycle. Richard provides a narrative so engaging the frame-building serves fades into the background, textured backdrop to the story he tells.

If you are hoping for a film documentary on the process of custom frame building, you won’t find it here. What filmmaker Desmond Horsfield has delivered instead is a portrait of the life of a man who loves making bicycles, filmed in a decidedly artistic style, where jigs, saw blades, files, and the acetylene torch tell a story of their own. Theirs is the story of the brute force that’s required to cut and bend and bond hardened steel.

Imperfection is Perfection is the story about Sachs’ quest to make those story-lines meet and take form in the perfect bicycle. More than 30 years in pursuit of it has led him to conclude that it is an unworkable end; the commercial aspects of his art simply do not allow for it. The best he can do when the material or the process are railing against his perfect machine is to keep the struggle from affecting the integrity of the bicycle, to arrest it before it becomes part of the finished design.

“The highlight of it all,” he says, “is working at the bench, feeling the metal in my hands, taking the torch, doing the brazing … especially in the winter, when there is a chill in the room, your face gets warm. I love all the senses. I just love it all.”

If you love hand-crafted, steel bicycles, Imperfection is Perfection is a film you’ll enjoy seeing. Unless you have held a torch in your hand and built a frame yourself, chances are you will never have seen images like these before.

If you have already put your money down and are in line for a frame that’s handmade just for you by Richard, this is a film you will want to own and watch whenever you do the math in your head to figure how much longer you have to wait for your bicycle, and remind yourself why the waiting is worth it.

The film is available as a DVD from Sach’s Web site. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

Tags: Custom bicycles, NAHBS, Richard Sachs

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