A handwritten sandwich board sign outside the door to the basement of the General Store reads “CK Bikes moving 4.3 miles to 3 Taylor Street, Littleton.” One look inside at the small workspace and the rows of bikes waiting to be worked on, and it was easy to understand the reason for the move. “There’s just no place to store things or to work properly,” said owner Craig Kilmer last week.
Kilmer has been operating CK Bikes in Harvard center since 2014. He said he is very thankful to Harvard residents; the community has been tremendously supportive and business has steadily increased. “I never expected it to take off like it has,” he said. Last year Kilmer had 1,200 customers from Harvard and surrounding towns in every direction. In addition to servicing regular cyclists, the shop has been a perfect place for parents to bring their kids for bike tune-ups. Kilmer has made road bike rentals available for riders in the annual Bravehearts Friends of Dylan Connelly Memorial Ride who want to upgrade from a mountain bike for the 25- or 50-mile fundraising event in Harvard.
Before coming to Harvard, Kilmer had a shop in Bolton, which was also in a basement. “I’ve been underground for nine years,” he laughed, “and the ironic thing is I grew up in a funeral home.” His new location is definitely above ground, sited on an incline at the intersection of Oak Hill and Littleton roads, across from the old Littleton railroad depot. Built in the early 1900s, the building used to be a general store and most recently housed Fallon’s liquor store.
Kilmer said the Littleton site is a good location as it’s on the route of a lot of bikers going to Harvard and beyond. It also gets traffic from people going to Market Basket and other stores at The Point. He said he wanted to stay in a rural spot, and he believes his established reputation will bring people to the new shop. The sign spread over the front of the new store will be far more eye-catching than signage he had previously.
Craig Kilmer outside the new street-level location of CK Bikes at 3 Taylor Street in Littleton. (Courtesy photo)
The interior will also be eye-catching. Unlike a lot of shops that have tiled ceilings and try to hide the workspace, his shop will be an open floor plan and have more of a modern industrial look, with lots of steel. Already he has taken down the ceiling tiles to expose the boards, which he has painted black. The long walls will be painted in vivid colors, one tangerine and the other blue. Bikes will hang on brackets along the walls, and steel shelving will provide a lot of storage space.
Kilmer said 80% of his work is tuning up bikes. He does custom assembly and also installs electronic shifting, which he says is great for travel because you can remove the handle bars without worrying about the shift cables. He doesn’t bring in a lot of inventory, a good decision for which he credits his mentor, Toby Stanton from Hot Tubes in Shirley, who told him, “If you want to be successful, just tune things up.” That was nine years ago when he was just starting out in Bolton and was “very coachable.”
Before opening a bike shop Kilmer was a manufacturing engineer for more than 20 years. When his kids were through college, he was ready to give up “banging elbows on a table” working at computers. For a while he continued in his job while also working at the bike shop in Bolton. He said he had been a bike enthusiast for years, riding bikes but not fixing them. He was happy when Stanton told him about the space at the General, where he could be right in the middle of cyclists, not out of sight as he was in Bolton.
Kilmer said he has a website and a presence on social media, but most of his business comes by word of mouth. He takes pride in his good customer service. He said he is thankful for the “continuous support” of the Harvard community for something he never imagined could happen. Kilmer plans to open at his new location in mid-March.
General Store owner Scott Hayward said he is ready to immediately expand the store kitchen into the space Kilmer is vacating. He’ll move the dishwasher down there and put in freezers and refrigerators. People working down there will be able to spread out rather than being “all jammed up.” But he said he is really sad to see Kilmer go and that his leaving is “a huge loss to the economic vitality in the center.”
