Assembling 1,000 bikes in a single morning might sound like a daunting task, but it turns out that with enough people pitching in, it barely takes an hour.
Hundreds of community volunteers gathered in east Vancouver on Saturday morning to assemble bikes that had been donated to the Scott Campbell Christmas Promise, an annual event held by the charity organization Waste Connections in partnership with several other Clark County-area agencies and organizations.
“I brought my kids out so they could see what putting together the bikes looked like, and help spread the Christmas cheer,” said volunteer Shawna Wellman.
The bikes — each paired with a helmet — will be distributed to needy kids throughout Clark County in the coming weeks. The assembled fleet of bikes boasted a massive variety of colors and designs, with sizes all the way up to 24-inch bikes for teenagers.
Saturday marked the eighth edition of the Christmas Promise event, which was renamed this year to honor the memory of Scott Campbell, a former Waste Connections employee.
The number of donated bikes has risen each year, according to Waste Connections governmental and community affairs director Cyndi Holloway, and it quickly became apparent that the organization had far exceeded its goal of 700 bikes this time around.
“It gets better and better every year,” said Peter Van Tilburg, vice president of the partner organization Bike Clark County.
Bikes stolen
The record-breaking output came about in part due to an incident last week in which some of the not-yet-assembled bikes were stolen from a truck behind the Walmart at 192nd Ave. and Mill Plain Boulevard early Tuesday morning.
Waste Connections initially reported that about 200 of the 700 bikes had been stolen, although Vancouver police later stated that 16 bikes had been taken.
But the community response to the news of the theft was overwhelming, Holloway said, with hundreds of new donations pouring in, including both money and bikes. Due to the last-second influx, Holloway and other event coordinators were unable to give the exact number of bikes being assembled, but estimated it to be around 1,000.
“We were just overwhelmed by the outpouring of generosity. We’ve definitely never done this many bikes, ever,” Holloway said on Saturday. “We won’t have an actual count until we’re done.”
The community support also translated into a record number of volunteers who powered through the assembly process in a little more than an hour. Van Tillberg and Holloway estimated that 500 volunteers helped out over the course of the morning, and Wellman noted that the check-in line stretched out the door long before the event began.
Building bikes
The assembly event was held inside an 80,000 square foot industrial hall at the SEH Inc. facility in east Vancouver. Although the scene appeared to be a bit chaotic, the volunteer army was able to work at a fast pace thanks to a well-marked floor plan for the operation.
Volunteer lined up at a series of 24 workstations, each under the leadership of a mechanic who could direct the assembly process. The finished bikes were wheeled over to a testing area where dozens of other mechanics and bike shop workers were on hand to inflate the tires and inspect each bike.
“We probably did 20 to 25 bikes,” station leader Maurice Carrol said as the assembly phase wrapped up.
The quality check process took 10 to 20 minutes per bike, according to Bike Clark County member Chris Stekhuizen. The bigger bikes with multiple gears tended to be the most time consuming, he said, while the smaller bikes with coaster brakes (engaged by pedaling backward) were the fastest.
“There are a lot less moving parts, so it’s quicker,” he said.
After passing quality control, the bikes were sorted by size and design into a series of lineups by Boy Scout volunteers, who would often test ride them on the way. At a nearby workstation, other volunteers unpacked hundreds of helmets from a towering stack of boxes, checking each one for proper padding and construction before pairing them off with individual bikes in the lineup.
Over in one corner of the quality control area, volunteers and mechanics worked to tune up bikes that had been rejected due to missing components, manufacturing defects or improper assembly. A few bikes were beyond repair, but still had functional parts that could be salvaged to fix other bikes.
“These are the misfit bikes,” said volunteer Greg Johnson, who worked with his son Jeff to diagnose problems and test out alternate parts. The family started out the morning at one of the bike assembly stations, he said, but switched to the discarded bike area after noticing that a lot of the rejected bikes appeared to be fixable.
At the back end of the warehouse, a rotating team of volunteers worked to break down bike boxes into six-foot-high stacks on top of pallets, and to sort through a ever-growing pile of discarded plastic and cardboard wrappings to filter out all the recyclable materials.
“It’s really cool that people are sorting out the rubbish at the end,” said Sara Headley, a volunteer from the group Swift Racing Portland. “It seems like something that could have been overlooked.”
At 11:10 a.m., volunteers triumphantly announced that the last bike had been assembled and delivered to the lineup awaiting quality control testing.
Waste Connections will deliver all of the bikes during the coming week, Holloway said. Some of them will go directly to individual families, with most of the others going to partner organizations such as the Camas Fire Department, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services and the Vancouver and Evergreen School Districts, which will then distribute them to individual families.
