When I was a kid living in Milwaukee, I woke up to a Persian-orange sunrise every morning. The picture window of the townhouse we rented in the late ’60s looked out over a sea of orange Allis-Chalmers tractors parked in the field next to the train tracks. The track spur served the Ryerson Steel warehouse we lived next to and as a loading dock for Allis-Chalmers.
So when planning my latest bikepacking route from Watersmeet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I made a point of including a stop at the town park in Trout Creek to see the old Allis-Chalmers-built steam engine. Originally used to operate flour mills in Minneapolis, the engine was moved to power a local sawmill that operated from 1921-1968. The engine used the Reynolds-Corliss design, which was patented in 1849 by American engineering pioneer Edwin Reynolds in Milwaukee.
I still have a soft spot for industrial era history because I grew up in Milwaukee just as it was losing its title as the “Machine Shop to the World.” In fact, in 1962, the year I was born, if you bought an Allis-Chalmers tractor anywhere in the United States, the company flew you to Milwaukee for tours of the huge plant I lived near. The video below can give you a pretty good feel for the pride all the well-paid blue-collar factory workers who were my neighbors exuded.
Even when I was in middle school in the 70s, our economics teacher taught a lesson about how the kids in our class who planned to go to college would not earn as much in their lives as the kids who went to work in area factories with their parents. That economics teacher wasn’t paying attention to global trends, because by the time I graduated from high school, almost all those factories were closed. The good-paying jobs that only required a high-school diploma were all overseas before I even went to my first class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Orange is still my favorite color!
Almost everyone on my block at 86th Street and Adler Street worked at a Milwaukee factory and made enough money to own a home. Many of them had muscle cars parked in the driveway. The kids’ favorite neighbor was knicknamed “Carol Camaro,” a single woman down the block who worked a factory job at A.O., lived in a duplex. She earned enough to drive a red 1968 Camaro SS 327 with white paint panels on the hood and trunk.
My dad was an auto mechanic at Frascona Buick who worked weekends at a Goodyear tire shop to earn enough for us to rent a townhouse while my mom went back to school to become a medical technician. We drove a used brown Corvair, LOL! By the time I was in high school, my mom had a job at a hospital, and my dad got me a summer job at Frascona that paid enough for me to buy an Austin Healey for $350! I totaled that car racing a friend home one night from a meeting of the Muskego Astronomical Society, but that is another story.
But I fear our country is on the wrong track with global tariffs that will do more harm than good in the long term. Rene Herse recently published a well-written post highlighting how some bike products like forged cranks were never made in the US, are economically too expensive to onshore, and if things continue down the tariff track, might no longer be available.
In the image above, the rows of storage buildings with orange doors were not there then, and tractors were parked in that lot. Central Steel at the left was Ryerson, and what is now the Hank Aaron State Trail was a very busy rail line that served Ryerson Steel (now Central Steel) and the Allis Chalmers parking lot. The factor was a few miles east down the rail line at 76th Street and Greenfield Avenue.
Because of those childhood memories of the family-supporting wages US manufacturing provided, I still try to buy MUSA products whenever I can. That said, the economic conditions that shifted manufacturing were complicated, and I don’t think the decades of overseas investments can be reversed with sledgehammer policies. I would love it if our current government policies had a chance of making it easier for more working-class Americans to earn family-supporting wages.
On-shoring production today would be difficult and not cost effective. The U.S. has never made high-end bicycle tires or square-taper cranks. Existing manufacturers do not have the specialized tooling and know-how to make these parts. Below is the forging hammer that makes Rene Herse cranks. Note the size of the two workers that are feeding aluminum into the orange pre-warming oven and taking the finished forgings out of the hammer. Machines like this exist only in a few places, and they need to run almost around the clock to be amortized. There is a reason why no forged aluminum bike parts are made in the United States.
When Rene Herse was re-born, and we looked into making cranks and brakes, we wanted to source our products locally. Seattle and Washington is home to much of the American aerospace industry, with dozens of companies making parts for Boeing and others. When we approached them, the answer invariably was: “Sorry, we don’t make those kinds of things. You need to find somebody who knows about making bike parts.”
So, as much as I would LOVE to see Milwaukee Forge, which is still hammering out metal parts in my hometown, start making square taper crank arms for Rene Herse, it is very unlikely to happen. What is more likely if tariffs stick around is that prices will increase to the point that Rene Herse can no longer sell their cranks and will stop production. Fingers crossed the tariff issues are resolved before that happens.
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