Ryfranck

Jean-Pierre Ryffranck was born in Eeklo, Belgium. He moved to Montreal in 1955. By trade, he was a tool & die maker, a machinist, and a welder.

He was very interested in cycling. During the 1970s he started reading about how to braze frames. For his first frame, he drove to Vermont to buy a Reynolds 531 tubeset from Bill Vetter, who was a small builder. After it was complete, he showed it to Bill, who was blown away; he couldn’t believe J-P made it himself. It took him 2 years to build the 1st frame, because he made all his fixtures and jigs himself, along with some of his taps and dies.

Ryffranck moved to Sherbrook, Quebec, and started building frames as a hobby. He began selling them in 1984, as a side job. At age 58 he left his tool making job to pursue framebuilding full time, which he did out of his garage. With his background as a master tool maker, he was known for his precision; it would take him approximately 30 hours to build a frameset.

He mostly used Reynolds and Columbus tubing, along with Henry James and Cinelli lugs. Ryffranck was a certified Reynolds 753 builder, and only silver brazed his frames (regardless of the tubing selected) and hand filed his miters. Most of his frames were painted by Cycles Marinoni in Montreal. His frames are known for their fastback seatstay clusters. When building full bikes, he was infamous for only equipping his frames with Campagnolo components; many of his frames featured a Campagnolo oval decal between the shifter bosses.

Ryffranck retired from framebuilding in 2011; he built a total of about 600 frames. He still resides in Quebec.

His “shop” was a favorite gathering place for the local cycling club members. He was quoted as saying, “When you put stuff together, its creation to me. That’s the big kick. It’s not the money, I barely scratch by”.

Brian Ignatin