ABOUT GLEN
Glen Copus is passionate about bikes. It started early and hasn’t let up since. Here are some highlights from Glen’s life with bikes.
Age 13: Glen gets his first job at Wes’s BMX bike shop in Scotts Valley, California. With Wes Rodman’s busy mail-order business, Glen spends most of his time building 20″ wheels and assembling bikes for the sales floor.
Age 13-16: Glen mostly races BMX, and races road in a high school racing league. While riding in the woods one day, he stumbles across a cyclocross race. Within the week, his employer, Wes Rodman, helps Glen braze cantilever bosses onto an old Miyata road frame. He then saws the front cleats off his baseball shoes to make a rudimentary set of cyclocross shoes.
Age 17-19: Glen moves to Ashland, Oregon, where he starts college and gets hired at Siskiyou Cyclery . He continues to race road, cyclocross, and BMX…and starts racing mountain bikes. School soon falls out of the picture.
Age 19: Glen moves back to Santa Cruz, where he starts hanging around Keith Bontrager’s garage. Glen learns how to braze and becomes useful enough to be hired. BMX racing has dropped off in favor of racing road, mountain, and cyclocross. He also ventures over to the Hellyer Park velodrome a few times to race track, but cyclocross has become the favorite.
Age 22: Glen attends Bill Woodul’s first mechanics clinic at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. With plenty of experience and a whimsically free schedule, he is hired right away to work for the National team.
Age 22-23: Glen travels all over the US and Europe, supporting junior and senior national cycling teams. He works at two road world championships and two track championships.
Age 23: Glen is hired as the mechanic for the domestic professional women cycling team, Weight Watchers Frozen Foods.
Age 24-26: Glen talks his way into a job at Ben Serrota’s factory in New York, where he gets to work in all phases of manufacture. He gets to build quite a few TIG-welded frames for the Team USA project, and for the Russian National amateur squad, Locomotif.
Age 26-27: Glen returns to Santa Cruz and a growing Bontrager company, where he is the main welder and a Production Manager of sorts.
Age 27-28: Rocky Mountain Bicycles in Canada hires Glen to oversee the frame shop, Everest, and to phase in production of Easton aluminum frames.
Age 29: A little burned out on the bike industry, Glen moves to Spokane, and gets a job at a local machining and fabrication shop, Tipke Mfg. He continues to race in local road, cyclocross and mountain bike races, and in the occasional demolition derby. He also continues to build and repair frames for local cyclists.
In the last few years, Glen has wound back his schedule at Tipke to focus more on building bikes.
Locals recognize Elephant bikes as high-quality, high-value, great-fitting custom bikes. For a time, Glen was filling orders for tricked out fixed gear bikes, but his mainstay is building cyclocross bikes. Elephant bikes are well-represented at local cyclocross races and end up on the podium with regularity. Sharp-eyed cyclists in the Spokane area will also see the distinctive Elephant logo on commuters, touring bikes, 29’ers, and road bikes.
Now Glen wants to bring his distinctive bikes to the rest of the world. If you value high-quality steel bikes made by an experienced builder and rider in the USA for a steal-of-a-deal, take a look at Elephant bikes.