The Red Rim Experience.... Nothing Else comes close!


The obsession with starting at point A and ending at point B in the shortest amount of time brings to mind the “life is a journey not a destination” quote.


If you are out there to win races then by all means strap yourself to the lightest weight most uncomfortable collection of tubing you can get. Crouch forward, stare at the top tube, and take the straightest path to the finish line.


But if it is the journey that you seek, climb into the cockpit of a machine that lusts after curvy roads, can turn a parking lot into a grand prix race course, and brings back the pure joy that cycling gave you when you were a child.


So eat your vegetables because they are good for you and recycle because it’s good for the environment. But ride a Red Rim because you love it!!!




The All New C1 and C1-s


Road machines so elegantly designed and beautifully crafted that when you are not riding them you’ll just want to stare at them.

For as long as I can remember I have been dissecting mechanisms. As a child my toys were always stripped down to their component parts in an effort to learn how they were constructed. I built hundreds of model cars, planes, and boats. I can remember reading the sears tool catalogue for hours. My sanctuary was the basement of the family home. It was there that I designed, constructed, and tested what I was sure would someday be the worlds greatest inventions.

But perhaps the fondest memories I have are those of visiting my fathers business. He produced custom machines for high volume parts production. He had an impressive list of customers like Ford, John Deere, Tecumseh, Emerson Electric, and Chrysler just to name a few. The shop, as we called it, was for me heaven on earth. Rows of milling machines and lathes, huge grinders, a welding room, and assembly bays where the machines were put together. It was here that I truly learned how to make things. By the time I graduated high school I could run any machine in the shop, and hold tolerances that would rival 30 year veteran machinists. But then I had learned from the best, my dad and the old world craftsman he had working there like John Gallione and Casey Zmuda.

Then it was off to college to get a degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University. I worked summers for my dad who thought it would be best if I got experience in the engineering department. I spent the school year learning the theory and the summer applying it to real world applications. The experience of watching something that I had designed being manufactured and integrated into a piece of equipment produced for me a high that I can not duplicate any other way.

I graduated in 1984 and went to work for my dad full time. Within two years I was running the manufacturing portion of the business, placed in charge of the machine shop and assembly areas. The hardest task I faced was earning the respect of the long time workers that I now found myself in charge of, some of whom had worked for the company since before I was born. I introduced CNC machining centers and the CAM software to program them, as well as 2D and 3D CAD to the company. I believed it to be important that I knew how to use all of the equipment myself so I became proficient in using all the software and operating the machining centers.

In late 1987 I had an idea. I had an idea for a tricycle for adults, for me actually. Working 80 hours a week in the family business didn’t give me a whole lot of time to tinker with it, but I managed to knock out a couple of prototypes and began riding them. I spent the next several years building trike after trike watching my original vision morph into something that was very far away from what I had originally started with. Up to this point I had not even considered my trikes to be a viable product, they were a hobby and a passion, not business.

In the spring of 1994 I heard about an upcoming bike show in Chicago. The CABDA show, Chicago Area Bicycle Dealers Association show. I did some research and found out it was a trade show for bicycle dealers. On a whim I rented a booth and built a new prototype and went in the show. It was at this show that I first was exposed to the cycling world. People crowed the booth constantly, admiring the design and workmanship of my trike. Over the three days of the show, however, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of the bike shop owners did not take my trike, or any other recumbents for that matter, seriously. Although I had several people at the show want to order trikes most considered it to be a novelty , something really cool to look at, but not a seriously marketable product. I left the show thinking that perhaps they were right and maybe I should resign myself to building them only as a hobby. It took me until the late 1990’s, several more prototypes, and being stopped by a thousand people while riding to decide that regardless of what the cycling industry believes is or is not a good product, that I liked my trikes and I wanted to build them.

I began to try to market my trikes under the name Natalia-Florence Inc., which was a combination of my two grandmothers first names. After enduring problems with misspellings, pronunciation, and fitting the long name on the trikes, I also incorporated the name Red Rim. Red Rim was derived from the black and crimson Red Rim Butterfly that to me symbolized the change or metamorphosis of both the company and those that would be changed by riding a recumbent trike.

Between 1996 and 2007 I created the J, S, and M series trikes, each with multiple generations. I carried forward the best of my design innovations, deleted those I was unhappy with, and continued to refine the entire design. In June of 2007 I started a major redesign of the then current model M series trike. The design, prototype, and testing process took over a year, and in September of 2008 the first C series trike was released. The C1 and C1-s are the culmination of over 20 years of designing and riding recumbent trikes, and, if I may say so, they are amazing!

Now there are several recumbent trikes on the market. The internet has done a lot to give the small but dedicated group of trike building entrepreneurs a venue to showcase their ideas. Trikes are starting to be accepted as more mainstream than in the past and the demand for them continues to grow. The retail market, however, pales in comparison the rest of the cycling industry. I hope more of the retail cycling industry comes to see that although we are different we are all really members of the same family, and if given the right amount of attention the trike market could someday rival traditional bike sales. In the mean time I will continue to ride and build trikes and do my best to expose as many people as I can to the fabulous experience of riding a trike.

Craig Scholin