Meet the Maker | Brandon Inglehart | Serendipity Cycles
- May 8
- 10 min read
Serendipity: a pleasant surprise.
Some words make sense immediately. Others take time.
Brandon Inglehart liked the word long before he ever needed it.
Before it became the name of Serendipity Cycles. Before frame building. Before an accident that would turn his life upside down and send him searching for what came next.
Before all of that, Brandon was a teacher.
He spent his days helping middle school students find their way through science. Ask what he loved most about the job and the answer still comes quick.
“Helping.”
He remembers an icebreaker question from a gathering during those teaching years.
If you could choose any job other than the one you have, what would it be?
Brandon’s answer was simple.
“I wouldn’t.”
It did not land with everyone. Not everyone gets to do exactly what they want to do. But Brandon has never been one to stay long in work that does not fit.
Then life changed the plan.
That day started like many others.
He was getting ready for a ride with his friend Bill, who was also the principal at the school where Brandon taught at the time. They met in Bill’s basement before heading out.
For Brandon, much of what happened next lives in other people’s memory.
He remembers Bill’s basement before the ride.
Then Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, Michigan.
Everything in between had to be pieced together later through the people who were there.
They had been hit from behind by a Toyota Tundra traveling around 55 miles per hour.
Bill was taken by ambulance to the hospital in Petoskey, Michigan.
Brandon was not.
He says he was later told first responders debated whether to load him into an ambulance or call in a helicopter to Traverse City.
As Brandon understands it, those calls are not only medical. They carry practical realities too. Cost. Availability. Odds. The kind of decisions made when the situation is serious and time matters.
A helicopter was called.
He woke up beat up. Road rash across his face. He figures he must have slid a long way on impact. One side of him had lost most of the skin on a butt cheek.
But those were the minor injuries.
Brandon had suffered a traumatic brain injury and two compressed vertebrae, T9 and T10.
Much of the hospital stay and the early days of recovery remain unclear to him. Memory from that time still comes in gaps.
His wife, Leigh, told the doctors that when he woke up he would do two things.
Ask where his bike was.
Tell them he was hungry.
That is exactly what happened.
What came next, Brandon says simply, was a lot of therapy.
Occupational. Physical. Mental.
He had to relearn how to walk, read. All of it.
Brandon credits the active lifestyle he had before the accident with helping him recover. A body used to movement can sometimes remember its way forward.
Before the crash, he says he knew little to nothing about traumatic brain injuries. Maybe did not even know what TBI meant.
Recovery introduced him to an entirely different world.
Along the way, he reached out to a professional cyclist who had written about his own traumatic brain injury. The rider called him back.
They talked.
Brandon says that conversation helped reassure him that life could still move forward. That things could still be okay.
Looking back now, and talking through it during our conversation, he kept returning to how many people helped carry him through that stretch and into the life that followed.
Therapists. Mentors. Family. Friends.
The kind of support that sometimes shows itself immediately, and other times arrives quietly, only revealing its weight later.
If you met him today without knowing the story, you likely would not know any of it happened.
Early on, one of his therapists gave Brandon and Leigh a hard truth.
The Brandon you knew is gone.
From this point on, you are working with a new person.
Painful as it was, Brandon says it also gave him something useful.
Permission to stop negotiating with the past.
The what-ifs no longer mattered.
There was only the work of moving forward.
People tell Brandon he did not lose his sense of humor.
He says, matter-of-factly, “That’s good.”
Some injuries are easier to measure than others. Bones heal. Skin closes. You can watch progress happen.
A traumatic brain injury does not always work that way.
Some symptoms stayed.
He remains highly sensitive to light and sound. Cognitive fatigue still follows him. He describes periods where the mind simply runs out before the day does.
For a time, he dealt with hyperacusis, a condition where damaged hair cells in the ear stop relaying sound properly, and the brain responds by turning the volume up.
There were darker days too.
He remembers vividly the couch in the basement of the house they were living in then. Laid up there, limited, wondering what life was going to look like.
What he remembers most clearly is knowing one thing.
He did not, and could not, spend the rest of his life in that state.
Exercise, he says, is his drug. More specifically, outdoor recreation.
Before the accident, Brandon had saved up for a brand new mountain bike. It was still sitting in that same basement, unridden.
So he got on it.
He pedaled around down there and knew it was time to get the body back in shape.
Getting back on a bike was never really a question for Brandon after the accident. He figured delaying it would only make things harder.
He eventually worked himself back into shape to return to the classroom.
It did not happen alone.
Brandon credits Cindy Banner, a physical therapist in Boyne City, as one of the people who helped get him back from those injuries.
At times early on, after spending the day trying to teach, he would arrive for treatment so drained she had to wake him up on the table five minutes after starting to work on his back.
But after what Brandon remembers as maybe half a year back in the classroom, it became clear the job he loved was no longer possible.
The lights. The noise. The mental strain. The fatigue that could shut him down without warning.
He remembers falling asleep at his desk during a thirty-minute prep period.
For a man who once answered I wouldn’t when asked what job he would choose other than teaching, walking away carried its own weight.
He says he was grasping at straws trying to figure out what came next.
Then he saw an ad in the paper for a workshop in Boyne City on how to build your own bicycle wheels.
“And I was like, that sounds like something I’d really like to do.”
That was where he met John McClorey of Bike Fix Cycling Center.
Brandon was upfront from the start.
“I got hit by this car. I had a traumatic brain injury. I get super tired. My memory sucks.”
John worked with him anyway.
“I told him many times over the years, it was never formal, he was my mentor.”
What John gave him was more than a class.
He gave him room to learn where Brandon was, not where he used to be.
As John taught, Brandon took photos of every step. Then he went home, paired those photos with handwritten notes, and built organized documents on the computer.
He still uses those notes today.
The teacher had not disappeared.
He had simply changed rooms.
Wheel building led to repairs. Repairs led to assembling bikes. More time around the shop. Covering things when John was away.
Over time, Brandon had become a skilled bike mechanic, the kind built piece by piece, binder by binder, through repetition, curiosity, and doing the work.
Looking back, Brandon can see that working with his hands may have started long before Bike Fix.
“My parents didn’t grow up with a lot of money, and my dad always built stuff,” Brandon says. “Especially woodworking. He built a house, he’d add on to a house. You name it, he did it.”
His grandfather was much the same.
Brandon remembers being maybe ten years old when his grandfather showed him a cart he had built for hauling a canoe between lakes. What stayed with him was the explanation of what the spokes on the wheels actually did.
At the time, it surprised him.
Now he ponders it.
“Oh my gosh, was that like a tiny seed that got planted way back when? Who knows.”
His father worked in wood.
Brandon likes that his own version of the family craft ended up in metal.
During that time working with John in Boyne City, and much like the wheel-building class that first brought him into the shop, Brandon found himself drawn to another opportunity. This time, Doug Fattic’s frame-building school in Niles, Michigan.
He went.
The course was two intense weeks.
He approached it the same way he had at Bike Fix. Notes. Pictures. Learn everything he could.
And when fatigue hit, he adapted.
He would sneak away for short power naps, then come back to work.
When the course ended, the uncertainty that had followed him since leaving the classroom was gone.
He knew what came next.
The accident happened in 2007.
By 2009, he had declared a business.
Serendipity Cycles was born less than two years after everything had been turned upside down.
The name fit.
Serendipity. A pleasant surprise.
What came after the accident was not the life Brandon had planned. But it was something real, something earned, and something he could build with his own two hands.
The first year was slow.
That did not seem to bother him much.
By 2012, the business really started to take off.
What Brandon builds now is not assembly-line work.
Each frame is made one at a time. Measured to the rider. Built to fit the body that will spend hours on it. Riding style, proportions, feel, purpose. None of it is one-size-fits-all.
He works strictly with steel and builds through either fillet brazing or lugs, depending on the frame and the rider.
He hand-selects the tubing for each build, choosing combinations to achieve the desired feel of the bike once it is on the road, trail, or wherever it is meant to be ridden.
For Brandon, feel matters as much as fit.
When building through fillet brazing, steel tubes are joined by heating the joint and flowing molten filler metal into the connection by hand. The excess is then filed and shaped until the transition is smooth and seamless, with no visible weld bead.
That means there is little to hide behind.
Alignment has to be right. Heat has to be controlled. Symmetry matters. So does patience.
There are faster ways to build frames. Easier ways too.
But methods like fillet brazing remain respected because, when done well, they create a frame that is strong, clean, and the product of highly skilled hands.
In Michigan, there are not many still building this way.
In the shop, Brandon can control the things that made the classroom difficult. The light. The noise. The pace.
If he needs twenty minutes to shut his eyes and reset, he can take it.
When the season allows, one of his favorite things to do is open the garage door and work by natural light.
For someone whose mind and body struggled with fluorescent light, noise, and overstimulation, that matters.
The kind of craft many riders may never fully notice, and the kind others recognize immediately.
Brandon understands both.
Not everyone is going to appreciate the art of fillet brazing. Those who know, know. Those who do not can still appreciate what matters most once they swing a leg over the bike.
The fit.
That is where all the unseen hours reveal themselves.
“It’s my favorite moment, by far, when a customer gets on the bike, pedals it around a little bit, then comes back,” Brandon says.
He asks what they think.
He remembers one rider in particular taking a long pause, trying to find the words.
Then finally saying:
“It just fits me right.”
“That’s it,” Brandon says. “That was the goal.”
He compares it to the difference between an off-the-rack suit and one tailored for you.
He selects tubing not just for strength, but for feel. How a bike responds under load. How it tracks. How it climbs. How it carries a rider over long miles.
The goal is not simply to make something beautiful.
It is to make something right.
Part of that mindset was built long before the shop.
As a teacher, Brandon kept detailed notes and organized binders on his lessons. What worked. What did not. What needed to change the next time around. It was how he became the best teacher he could be.
After the accident, organization became more than a strength. It became a necessity.
That same discipline followed him into bike work.
Photos of procedures. Notes from wheel building classes. Step-by-step systems for repairs. References he still uses years later so he can continue being the best he can be.
The teacher did not disappear.
He simply found a different subject.
Brandon has never seemed especially motivated by money, not in teaching and not now.
What matters to him is helping people end up on the best fitting bike he can provide.
He says when someone comes knocking, his job is not simply to sell them a custom frame.
The first question is why.
Why custom?
Sometimes the answer is simple.
They have never had a proper bike fit.
If that is the real problem, that is where he starts first.
A bike fitting might be a $100 job.
Not a $10,000 custom build.
That tells you plenty about how Brandon sees the work.
Custom work means solving different problems every time. Different bodies. Different expectations. Different uses. Road, gravel, mountain, long-distance, daily rider.
Each one asks a new question.
Brandon seems to enjoy that part as much as the torch work itself.
He is also honest about the economics of handmade work.
If he were paid by the hour, he says, he would be making pennies.
There is no bitterness in the line. Just the reality of doing things the slow way, the careful way, the one-at-a-time way.
Joints get filed smooth. Measurements checked again. Problems solved one at a time.
That is the pace of doing it right.
There are easier ways to make money than building custom steel bicycles by hand.
That has never seemed to be the point.
The Serendipity Cycles name is front and center, but traces of the accident remain in subtler places too.
Brandon’s compressed T9 and T10 vertebrae have found their way into his work. On shirts, placed where they sit in the spine. On some bikes, worked into the meeting point of frame and bars.
A mark carried forward rather than hidden.
Today, you will find Brandon doing a little of everything that brought him here.
You will find him in his Harbor Springs, Michigan shop at Serendipity Cycles, building custom frames one at a time.
You will find him doing repairs and maintenance too, work that became a meaningful part of the business over the years. The practical jobs that keep people riding.
You will also find him back in the classroom, this time on terms he can manage.
As a tutor, he still gets to do what first drew him to teaching.
Helping.
And when he is not in the shop or working with students, there is a good chance he is where he has long felt most like himself.
On a bike.
Outside.
To learn more about Brandon, his work, or to connect with him directly, visit Serendipity Cycles online. https://www.serendipitycycles.com/