Mark Rhomberg has got "the right stuff." Like the air force test pilots in the writer Tom Wolfe's account, who flew new and experimental jet fighters to the limits of the earth's atmosphere and of their own endurance, Rhomberg pushes his speed chariots to the limit.
But he rarely gets much higher in the air than his hometown of Boulder, Colorado, which sits at around a mile, or 1,600 meters, above sea level.
A lifelong bicycling enthusiast, Rhomberg today is one of a small breed of bicycle test pilots, putting new bicycles and bike components through rigorous tests on the road and in laboratories to gauge their endurance, reliability and safety. His clients are the legion of specialty bicycle parts makers catering to the high-end bike market.
There are no engines on Rhomberg's bikes, but boy, does he have fun.
"Basically, I go into the lab and break stuff and make sure it's safe," Rhomberg said by telephone from Boulder. And then he goes out on the road and tests it again.
Rhomberg began his love affair with the bicycle when, as a teenager, he and his family moved across town and he had to bike to school.
Soon he was training at the United States' cycling training center in Boulder. With an undergraduate degree in science, he spent four years, to his parents' chagrin, working in a bicycle shop. He moved on to work for a local laboratory company, extracting traditional medicine supplements from buckets of pigs' gall bladders. Gagging on the offal, Rhomberg wangled a job in the company's testing and measuring laboratory.
One day in 1994, a friend passed him a help-wanted advertisement from the Boulder Daily Camera. Schwinn, the Chicago-based bike maker that had been bought by the maverick financier Sam Zell, had moved to Boulder and was looking for an engineer to test its bicycles.
As a biking enthusiast with a background in laboratory testing, Rhomberg was an ideal fit for the job, and it was a dream come true.
"I would set up and run mechanical tests, and I'd write reports," Rhomberg recalled, "but I'd also go out riding with the guys, and we'd try new products."
With his love of biking and a keen technical mind, Rhomberg's reports reflected how bikers actually used their cycles, helping engineers perfect lighter and more reliable designs for bike parts from frames to gear shifters.
"It was," he said with the flat understatement native to the high Rockies, "a good job."
Along with testing bicycles on test tracks, in the nearby Rocky Mountains and in a laboratory equipped with the latest testing machinery, Rhomberg helped organize Schwinn teams to join the Race Across America, an annual bicycle relay marathon that marries the thrill of the Tour de France with the legend of the Pony Express.
The work at Schwinn helped in the development of a host of new technologies for bicycles; it also put American-made bikes back on the map and helped Schwinn ride the 1990s boom in offroad bikes.
But by 2002, Schwinn had been sold to a new group of investors that had failed to turn a profit. With the company virtually bankrupt, the owners decided to trim costs and sell, leaving Rhomberg out of a job. He invested some savings in real estate but realized that he would need a steady income.
"I thought I'd do what I'd been trained to do all those years and test bikes," he said. Like many laid-off workers, he simply took his old job private. Using the contacts he had built up from years of attending bike shows and meeting everyone in the bicycle business, Rhomberg went to trade shows and started collecting clients. The larger bike makers were reluctant to outsource their materials and product testing, largely to avoid product liability lawsuits, but Rhomberg found a market among the small makers of high-end bike parts.
This year, Rhomberg, now 39, founded his own firm, named Bike Testing.
"My clients are the smaller companies starting out with newer products, designers or engineers who maybe are new to the bike industry or don't have testing equipment," Rhomberg said.
Those clients have included small companies like Moots Cycles, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a maker of bicycle frames; Boulder-based Paketa Cycles International, which makes lightweight magnesium-frame bicycles; or Rockymounts, a Boulder company that makes car racks for bicycles.
He now sits on a committee of the American Society for Testing and Materials, devising tests and standards for bicycle parts.
To buy his own testing equipment, much of which has to be custom-made for the bike industry, Rhomberg took advantage of the same globalization forces that eventually moved most of Schwinn's manufacturing to Asia. A maker of forks, the swiveling metal piece that holds the front wheel to a bike's frame, was moving the plant to Asia and sold Rhomberg $80,000 of testing equipment for $2,000
Today, he said, most bike parts are made in China, where costs are low and quality can be uneven. That means business for Rhomberg.
"You want to make sure they work in the field," he said. "A lot of people will just go to a big fat friend and see if it works. I kind of provide a little support in that way."
Rhomberg has just signed a lease for about 1,000 square feet, or 90 square meters, of space and has a new deal testing products for Velo News, a magazine for bike builders and enthusiasts.
The shift from a steady job to entrepreneurship has been smooth but hardly lucrative. His gross income is up two-thirds from what Schwinn paid, but after health insurance, retirement savings, and overhead, Rhomberg said, "it's a wash."
Velo News recently asked him to rate top brands of forks, crankshafts and cycling shoes, and Rhomberg hopes his independent work will help a new generation of bike enthusiasts and tinkerers take the technology of bikes to yet a higher level.
"If I can pull it off," Rhomberg said, "it will be a really great thing. At Schwinn, I moved things forward and made a big difference as far as testing went, and I'd like to be able to do the same with my own business."