Bike Punks started in 2015 as part of Tweeddale Youth Action’s Climate Challenge Funded project to raise awareness and encourage behaviour change in young people in Tweeddale.

Through Bike Punks we taught young people how to repair and maintain bicycles as well as fixing up donated bikes which we gave out to the community.

As the project progressed, we gave some thought to the ever growing pile of redundant bike parts, and twisted frames that were beyond repair and with the addition of metal work tools and the know how of our Bike Punk lead, artist, sculptor and metal worker, Aegir Maciver, we started to produce toilet roll holders, trophies and small pieces of collectible art.

These niche items were clearly desirable and were stolen on a fairly regular basis, so we put some thought into how we could go about producing and selling them!

Further funding from LEADER and SEStran has allowed us to expand our workshop, including the provision of welding bays and our workshop regularly hosts young people on reduced school timetables throughout the school day as well as open access every Tuesday evening and a growing number of 16+’s who have developed some pretty nifty metalwork skills.

Our vision for the future is to continue supporting young people’s learning and development, to give them training and skills that are relevant and needed in our local area and to generate sufficient income to make this a sustainable social enterprise that will ultimately contribute towards supporting generic youth work in our local area.

Check out more about our Go E-bike hire, Bespoke Recycled Signs and Hand Crafted novelties!