Our Mission: Serving the community while
inspiring people to learn the art of bicycle repair.
Quick Answers
Location: 2566 Leghorn St. Mountain View, CA MAP
Volunteer workdays are 10am to 3pm on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of January-October. See the event calendar for November and December volunteer days.
Donate bicycles and parts after 11am during our volunteer workdays.
The Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange is a Section 501c(3) non-profit organization.
Info: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
More Contact info
What's New
Help Us Find a New Home
- Details
- Written by Jack Miller Jack Miller
- Published: 08 April 2018 08 April 2018
Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange: Relocation Needs
Situation
For 25 years, the non-profit Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange has been repairing used bicycles and donating them to social service agencies for their clients. A property situation may now require us to find a new home. We need an operating space (details within) to support our skill-sharing alternate-Saturday volunteer events. We're open to shared-use facilities (business, school, church etc.)
Contact Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or (650) 691-5989.
What’s Needed
An operating space, available by July 2018. This could be a parking lot, or raw land, or unused garage or workshop space. SVBE has resources to procure and erect workshop and storage facilities as needed.
Watch a quick 1-minute video
about the Bicycle Exchange
Space Needs
Currently Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange (SVBE) has 2,500 sq. ft. of workshop, shipping container, and tented storage space behind an automotive garage, expanding into an additional 3000 sq. ft. of back parking lot to host 50-100 volunteers during weekend volunteer events.
Rental Objectives
An ideal future landlord has a shared interest in community service and education, and can provide space at below market rates. With a long-term lease, SVBE can invest in infrastructure including work and storage spaces. SVBE wants to hear from property owners, schools, churches, or businesses who have such space. Space used by SVBE may be exempt from property tax.
Fundraising Bike Sale May 5
- Details
- Written by Dave Geraghty Dave Geraghty
- Published: 07 April 2018 07 April 2018
Saturday May 5, 2018
10am to 2pm
2566 Leghorn St. Mountain View, CA
Our shop is overflowing, so we are selling some bikes and parts in good used condition. All proceeds will go to the operating expenses of the Bicycle Exchange.
For sale we'll have:
Complete Ready to Ride Bikes starting at $150 and ...
Project Bikes, Wheels, Bags, Shoes, Clothes, Trainers, Clipless Pedals, Forks, Bars, Lights, Bells, Bottle Cages, Frame Pumps, Bar Ends, Racks, Baskets, Car Racks …
If you want it, we’ve got it!
Everything EXCEPT kids' bikes. They all get donated to our clients.
Help us to spread the word! Tell your friends. Post a link to bikex.org from your favorite social media venue. Or click the poster to download a full-page PDF of the poster, which you can print and post PAPER to your favorite bulletin board. Quarter page flyer for handouts.
Volunteer of the Month: Lucy
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 05 April 2018 05 April 2018
Lucy has been volunteering with the Bike Exchange for 3-4 years and is the person to go to if you need help with adjusting brakes or truing wheels. Her favorite ride is a Trek road bike which she rides 100 miles a week for exercise and running errands between our local cities. She grew up here in the Bay Area and worked as an electrical engineer until she retired. Lucy volunteers in environmental education in the local K-8 schools teaching a garden-based curriculum. She also enjoys traveling internationally, recently from a cruise starting here and going down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Volunteer of the Month: Greg
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 March 2018 01 March 2018
Greg has been volunteering with the Bicycle Exchange for about a year and provides a lot of guidance to new volunteers (especially since recovering from an ice hockey injury). He loves to work on the kids bikes because he knows that it is going to go to someone who really appreciates it and will smile. He also enjoys working on the bigger bikes because they are more complex. Another challenge is working on derailleurs and getting them to shift smoothly, Greg looks forward to working on hydraulic brake systems. Formerly a Chemical Engineering professor at San Jose State, he enjoys hiking, surfing, rock climbing, camping, playing ice hockey, and riding bikes - mostly around the neighborhood and on errands.
Open Volunteer Positions
- Details
- Written by Carol Mattsson Carol Mattsson
- Published: 23 February 2018 23 February 2018
Bicycle Exchange has several open volunteer positions. In many of these positions you'd be part of a small team to share the responsibilities. To learn more or to volunteer, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.:
- Inner tube patching
- Craigslist sales
- Grant writing
- Contracting
- Annual analysis report
- Corporate event organizer
- Workday manager
- Receipt uploader
- Workday QA
- Board Member with finance, legal and accounting experience
- Front desk (see article elsewhere on this page)
Call for Front Desk Volunteer
- Details
- Written by Carol Mattsson Carol Mattsson
- Published: 12 February 2018 12 February 2018
Bicycle Exchange would like another person or two to join the front desk team.
The Front Desk role is perfect for someone who is enthusiastic about getting bikes repaired but prefers tasks that have a more predictable result. The main task is to accept donations of bicycles throughout the workday, so our donors feel appreciated and our volunteer mechanics can stay focused on their projects. Other duties include:
- Help volunteers sign in at the beginning of the workday
- Recruit a volunteer to collect lunch money and fetch the pizza
- Record the occasional sale of a bicycle or a part
- Greet other visitors to the workday and answer questions or introduce the visitor to someone who can help
Volunteer of the Month: Gordon
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 02 February 2018 02 February 2018
Gordon and I have known each other since I first started volunteering at the Bike Exchange about 5 years ago. I have known him as a quiet, somewhat reserved individual who is always there when something needs to be done and is a dedicated member of the team. He serves on the board of directors and, among other things, is our designated eBay seller and sale bike Pricer. As he frequently says, “we have fun and we make the world a better place”. There is much more to this remarkable man though.
Born in Southern California, Gordon has had a lifelong association with bicycles. During high school he was an avid cyclist, often riding 30 miles to the beach with his friends. In 1978, with the LA Wheelmen, he did a double century (200 miles) ride in record time. When he came north to attend UC Berkeley, he became a founding member of the Berkeley Bike Club. Over the years he has done extensive touring, including from Portland, Oregon to Washington, D.C. on the Trans-America Bike Trail.
Gordon Eventually received a Ph.D. from Berkeley in Computer Science and settled in the South Bay working for various startups. While working for Adobe Systems in 1993, he discovered the recently founded Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange and has been a volunteer here ever since.
Volunteer of the Month: Doug
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 January 2018 01 January 2018
Doug has been volunteering for the Bicycle Exchange for over 15 years. He often works behind the scenes checking our inventory of bike parts and purchasing parts from different suppliers to keep what we need on hand to fix the bikes. You'll also see him fixing bikes on our workdays and sometimes doing checkout in an yellow vest. Doug likes to ride his Rivendell road bike and has another for camping, packing his tent, sleeping bag, etc... in panniers and hitting the road for the northern coast. He also builds bikes on his own for friends who have a hard time finding bikes small enough to fit well. And his talents extend to making guitars. He currently making one of walnut, African blackwood, cherry, lapis, and turquoise. Next time you see him at the Bicycle Exchange, ask to see his photos - you will be amazed at how he takes pieces of wood and materials to form such a beautiful instrument.
Volunteers of the Month - Taiwanese American Professionals
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 29 November 2017 29 November 2017
What a great bunch of volunteers! Jessica Ken and her horde of 20 volunteers from the Taiwanese American Professionals group descended on our humble facility once again to help us fix bikes. They volunteer twice a year as part of their commitment to community service. “TAP has been around forever,” she remarked, with a commitment to professional development, community service, and building community. They also like having fun, and helping us with bike fixing fits right in with their program.Jessica says that some of her members were intimidated at first but our volunteer mentors proved to be very helpful and made everything easier for them, guiding them through whatever repair they were attempting, Many of her members liked it enough to come back repeatedly, and some even have been volunteering with us on a regular basis, citing their sense of accomplishment after a job well done as a great motivator.
Volunteer of the Month: Rao
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 05 November 2017 05 November 2017
Looking around for my next person to interview I couldn’t help noticing Rao hard at work on a bike. He has been volunteering since April this year at the Bike Exchange.
A resident of Palo Alto, he is a member of the Western Wheelers cycling club, a group favored by many here.
He originally started riding bikes back in 1982 to meet people and rides his Cannondale around town frequently. On weekends you will find him in the saddle doing 50 mile rides. He loves his Trek 1200 best though.
Asked if he has had any memorable rides, he cited cross country tours from here to Boston and here to Chicago. I think that qualifies him as a pretty serious enthusiast. I bet he met a lot of folks on those two epic journeys and has some interesting stories to tell. You should ask him about them!
Volunteer of the month: Rachel
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 October 2017 01 October 2017
Rachel started volunteering at the Bicycle Exchange in May and is excited to earn her work apron on her fifth volunteer day soon. She enjoys working on the adult bikes because she learns repair techniques that she can apply to her own bike. Her specialty is tuning the derailleurs. The one thing she wished she could do is turn the spokes the right way the first time when truing a wheel! She enjoys ballroom and contra dancing. As a southern California native, she enjoyed a white Christmas last year while spending the holidays in North Pole, Alaska. She took a side trip above the arctic circle where the sun does not crest the horizon for 4 months during the year.
Volunteer of the Month: Cap'n Jonny
- Details
- Written by Cap'n Jonny Cap'n Jonny
- Published: 31 August 2017 31 August 2017
Your ace reporter fell off his bike (in front of his house standing still) and broke his hip earlier this August and has been mostly house bound so has not been able to interview anyone for September’s Person of the month.
So instead, I am interviewing myself.
I grew up at a time when English racers were exotic. My gang all rode heavy weight single speed balloon tired Huffy’s and Schwinn’s. My first 10 speed was a 1962 Flandria that some kid bought and didn’t like. I was 14 years old and that candy orange beauty was my pride and joy. I kept it in my room so I could gaze on it every night before I went to sleep. I rode it everywhere.
Volunteer of the month: Calvin
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 August 2017 01 August 2017
Calvin started working at the bicycle exchange in 2014 and was promoted to QA about 6 months ago, so you'll see him wearing the yellow/green vest making sure that bikes are fixed to the specifications before donation. He found the Bicycle Exchange as he was looking for bike parts on Yelp to fix his own bike. Calvin finds truing wheels some of the hardest work on a bike, but also the most satisfying when done right. He grew up in Connecticut then Minnesota and went to college in Atlanta before coming to Stanford for graduate school in Biology. Calvin also enjoys making videos, taking photos, and cooking.
Volunteers of the Month: Kim & Jeff
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 July 2017 01 July 2017
Today we meet up with Kim and his son Jeff. Kim introduced his other son Alex to the Bike Exchange some time ago and figured that his son Jeff could also benefit from the experience, so today they are here with us working together on a bike. He and Jeff both enjoy riding their mountain bikes around the neighborhood in the Los Altos/Mountain View area, for exercise.
They especially appreciate the friendly and knowledgeable volunteers at the Bike Exchange who are there to answer questions and help out when they need a hand, and also like having access to all the tools and supplies necessary to complete their projects.
Volunteer of the Month: Mark A
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 June 2017 01 June 2017
Usually, the Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange (SVBE) donates quantities of bikes to our partner agencies, not knowing the stories of the people who actually get them. Most of our volunteers don't get to see their hard work in action. On rare occasions, an agency will refer a specific individual or family for bikes. In this instance, a family of six needed transportation – bicycles for all. Due to prior commitments, SVBE didn’t have extra bikes for them.
Mark A., a hands-on volunteer mechanic for SVBE, who usually takes home a steady stream of bikes to work on for SVBE, had a good idea of what they needed and asked them to come back in two weeks. Mark then took a few bikes home with him and fixed them up before the next workday.
Volunteer of the Month: Patrick S
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 03 May 2017 03 May 2017
Patrick is a true coastie, born in beautiful San Luis Obispo, California. His family moved to Livermore in 1953, where he grew up in what then was a beautiful rural part of California with miles of cattle ranches and not so many people.Like many others he served in Viet Nam. In his case it was flying helicopters for the army from 1971 to 1972. Returning after his tour, he enrolled at San Jose State and got a degree in Geology and then went to work for the U.S.G.S. He later moved to Mountain View where he worked for defense contractor Watkins/Johnson and eventually became a manufacturer's representative in electronics sales.
Now Retired, Patrick has time to indulge his hobbies, which include surfing and classic bicycles. His main rides are a 1984 Serrota and a 1974 Holdsworth. He also is a VW bus guy who has owned a few, including a 1989 Westphalia camper. He knows Colleen and others in the group and started volunteering regularly this year. Welcome to the family Patrick!
Volunteer of the Month: Dave Z
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 01 April 2017 01 April 2017
Dave Z has been working at the Bicycle Exchange for 2 years fixing bikes. You may see him riding around on his Rivendell road bike - he's logged 100,000 miles on it. He used to go on bike tours through France, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria, but his favorite was New Zealand. He feels like he learns a lot by working on so many different kinds of bikes through the Bicycle Exchange. He's a native to the area, born in the east bay in a city called Alvarado which is now Union City. Dave is a retired electrical engineer and is a curious sort who likes to read all kinds of books. He also enjoys photography and riding with and editing for the Western Wheelers bike club.
Volunteer of the Month: Jonny T
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 06 March 2017 06 March 2017
Jonny grew up in the North beach neighborhood in San Francisco, and remembers the "Summer of Love" and his Black Panther neighbors among many "only in San Francisco" people and places in the City by the Bay. After graduating From Galileo High School he attended CCSF, taking courses to be a Machinist. He then went on to a variety of construction jobs doing carpentry, electrical work, etc. Today he works for PG&E where he has been employed for the last 36 years. Currently he works testing Smart Meters. He hooked up with the Bike Exchange when he went into Evolution Bikes in Cupertino 5 years ago and saw our flyer. The rest is history. Jonny is one of our most stalwart volunteers. He is always the first person on site on work days. He opens the shop and selects bikes to be worked on. Then (usually with John F's help) he pulls out the tool carts and starts putting out tables and shade canopies. When you see him, be sure to tell him thanks for everything he does!
Volunteer of the Month: Judy
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 23 January 2017 23 January 2017
Judy has been fixing bikes at the Bicycle Exchange for 3 years, has more recently joined the Steering Committee, and writes all of our thank you letters to donors. She enjoys fixing the adult bikes and especially 3-speeds, similar to her own Raleigh vintage bike. Judy loves long distance rides and has ridden in a lot of places including along the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico. She's originally from Illinois but moved out here because of the weather and mountains. Her business helps pre-med students navigate the process of getting into medical school. Judy rides with the Wetern Wheelers bike club and also volunteers for Turning Wheels for Kids where she joins 1,000 other volunteers to assemble new bikes for kids to ride.
Volunteer of the Month: Falguni
- Details
- Written by Lauren Z. Lauren Z.
- Published: 04 December 2016 04 December 2016
Falguni is one of the people behind the scenes at the Bicycle Exchange that helps keep things running smoothly. She volunteered at a workday after her colleague, Doreen, told her about it. She moved from bicycle fixer to accountant for the group because it better fit her schedule and professional training. Falguni loves to ride bikes, especially across the San Francisco golden gate bridge and on Angel Island where there is one awesome downhill ride right toward the ocean. She also loves reading books about start-ups and hiking Mission Peak, Rancho San Antonio, and Sunol.