I have always loved to develop and build something myself.
From the time of my first training at the School of Arts and Crafts in Lucerne not only various attempts to revolutionize the bicycle date (!)...
...but also ridable unicycles, which brought me over detours years later to the idea of bottom bracket shifting for bicycles.
1983-84 I undertake an extensive journey through South America. For this purposeI build a robust motorcycle, the OPTIBRUMM.
Picture right: On the way to the port of shipment Le Havre.
A formative journey in many ways!
On this trip I realize, after having supposedly further developed the hot air engine (Stirling system) in Bolivia, that I still have to acquire engineering knowledge in order to realize my ideas and projects.
Fig. right: A pendulum machine from the time at Lucerne Academy of Fine Arts.
The subsequent training as a mechanical engineer is on the one hand a hard time, as it is not very creative, but on the other hand it gives me the tools to tackle projects that require knowledge in many respects.
During the last semester break the prototype of the mountain-drive bottom bracket gear is developed.
After only a short guest appearance as a freshly qualified engineer in a large industrial company, I started my own business in 1988, at the beginning with a focus on the development of special machines. Due to increasing demand, after a short period of time I was largely working to capacity with my own products.
Although the serial production of products is commercially interesting, it also prevents creative processes that are the salt of life for me because of the amount of time absorbed.
So it is a positive twist of fate when a German industrial company is interested in taking over the bicycle transmission production in 2011.
Fig. right: Many interesting contacts scattered all over the world resulted from twenty years of involvement with bottom bracket gears.
The time gained allows me to realize an old dream: To develop a machine that may look like a grandfather clock, but does not want to measure time in the usual sense of hours and minutes.
Its sole purpose is to give the room the special ambience that a pendulum with its harmonious oscillation and fine tick-tock sound is able to give.
I therefore also call the machines "time machines" so as not to place them in the environment of apparatuses made for simple measuring time by themselves.
Years later, in collaboration with my partner Renata Mauriello, the wheel continues to turn towards art.
We found r&f arte gmbh, where we realize our ideas in the field of kinetic art and much more.
