“The little tricycles they sell now with those dinky little front wheels, a kid can pedal as fast as he likes and still they only crawl.  You know what that makes a kid want to do?  Something else.  But this is the Fast Trike.”

Hearing my flow of words let up for a moment the bike shop fellow echoed, “The Fast Trike?”

“It’s a big hit in the neighborhood.  Once you learn how to sit it, how to lean it, it zips right along.  A kid can actually be a menace to people on this trike.  They love that!”

That earned me a chuckle.  “Well, but I don’t think I can find your wheel, even online,” he said, by way of preparing me for disappointment.

“Oh, yes; you aren’t going to find that wheel.  My grandfather got that trike at Western Auto in Augusta fifty-five years ago.  They made them for decades, but you’re right.  Nowadays, they sell wheels like those six inches across, but these ones are ten inches.  I know what you’re saying.”

Having cleared that piece of ground, I looked him in the eye.  “I didn’t come here to have you order a part, anyway.  I expect something from a bike shop.  The Wright brothers ran a bike shop!  What I came for is to find someone willing to improvise.  

“I need two wheels for the back.  They can be ten inches, twelve, anything along that size range.  Now that axle is just a rod, and it’s pretty narrow, but a bike shop ought to be able to put some kind of sleeve in there if the hub on those new wheels is too big for it.  If putting in some other kind of axle is better, I’m willing to go see a friend of mine who does welding.  See?  It’s tacked in there, three places.  He could put a larger rod on there if we need one.”

“There’s only so many kinds of spoked wheels, though, and those are solid rubber tires.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”  The dude was still tied to the wheels that were on there.  He still wanted to buy a part somewhere, man.  Orville, he wasn’t.  “Solid wheels, spokes, metal, plastic, inflated tires, butyl, plastic-- wood, even.  Would it help if I take these old wheels off, so you don’t have to see them?  They seem to be limiting your imagination, here.  I’m not trying to re-create a period trike, for people to look at.  I’m trying to get wheels on this that’ll hold the back of it up off the ground a little, so that the kids can go fast on it.”

I looked around the shop. “You got trailers here, small bikes.  There are wheelbarrow wheels, dolly wheels, lawnmower wheels.  I got a grandchild!  He keeps looking at this thing, and I keep having to tell him no, it’s broken.  That’s why I came to a bike shop.”

“The Wright brothers.”

“Hey– you got into a profession with a rep, dude.”

I was running this particular number on a man down in Bar Harbor, on Cottage Street, better than fifty miles from home.  It’s the fourth bike shop I’ve been to, and that doesn’t count all the hardware places.  I’ve already left the Trike with three other shops, only to be told, “I can’t find your part.”  I was sounding a bit strident, even to myself, but I couldn’t seem to lift their eyes or open their minds.  What was needed here was improvisation!  

Most of the problem was that the hardware stores, who have the wheels, don’t work on tricycles, while the people who do work on them don’t have a wide variety of different wheels to pick from.  Bikes just don’t use ten- or twelve-inch wheels.  My difficulty crossed a boundary between categories.

“It could get really expensive,” he said, “if it’s an antique part like this.”

I gave him a look, over the top of the bifocals, but I stayed cool and started over.  “Those trailer wheels over there, are they ten inches, do you think?”

We determined they were only eight inches.  Finally, some light began to dawn.  “The hubs on those trailer wheels,” he told me, “Have the axle built into them, on ball bearings.  You couldn’t thread them on an axle like this.”

“What about lawnmower wheels?  I’ve seen people with big wheels in the back, even spoked ones.”

“Those are drive wheels, on self-propelled mowers.  They wouldn’t thread onto a plain axle, either.”

Now this was progress.  I finally had someone imagining some other sort of wheel on the thing.  He considered a while, then sent me up the street to Paradis, which is a hardware store, also on Cottage Street.  “He’s got wheels for hand trucks, wheelbarrows, things like that, and he would have catalogs to get sleeves if the hubs are bigger diameter.  Take it to Paradis, and if he doesn’t have something, come on back and I might be able to find something online.”

Perhaps something I'd said or my manner of saying it suggested it to him, but the solution was an obscure website called Tricycle Fetish.  I wouldn’t have found it without Peter at the Bar Harbor bike shop.

And today, I have received and installed new wheels.  The Fast Trike is finally ready to endanger pedestrians and skin knees once again.