From SCRATCH

This story starts with a bang, or perhaps with a break. Just a few months after moving to New York City, Max Hazan had a bad one in an enduro race. Sentenced to six months of going nowhere fast, he started heading out to his parents’ shop on Long Island during the weekends. The first bike he tried building, just as a project to keep himself busy, was a glorified moped—50cc pushing a beach-cruiser bicycle. It worked out OK. He built a second one. Then a third.

“I was just learning to walk again,” Hazan recalls, “and [the bikes] would go 60 to 70 mph, which was pretty sketchy, so I thought, ? It was something