Rocking spandex and battling butterflies, road cyclists by the hundreds will gather in Windsor on April 25 for the 17th edition of Levi’s GranFondo, featuring seven routes of varying difficulty.
Clustered at the front of the bunch—the pointy end of the peloton, in velo-speak—will be elite riders contesting the most daunting of those options, the mountainous, 138-mile sufferfest called “The Growler.” The men’s and women’s winners of that one-day road race will each collect a cool $25,000, courtesy of presenting sponsor Skipstone Winery, and a unique trophy created by a local artist who is also passionate about bicycles, although not in a Lycra-clad, leg-shaving kind of way.
You may not know Klaus Rappensperger’s name, but you’ve almost certainly seen some of his metal work, ubiquitous across the county, including the stainless steel logo with cedar background fronting the MacRostie Winery in Healdsburg, and the plump Northern cardinal atop a corked bottle outside Bird & The Bottle in Santa Rosa.
Those signs are a small fraction of his output, which ranges from sacred geometry tiles and candle pedestals to bath cabinets, sculptural metal sunshades, staircases, and conical flues for gas fireplaces.
Before he evolved into a full-time artist, steel fabricator, and designer specializing in custom-made pieces, Rappensperger went through a “clunker” bicycle phase. A founding member of the now defunct Whiskeydrunk Cycles, a Santa Rosa-based group of bike aficionados, he earned local renown for his prowess at refurbishing vintage two-wheelers.
“I’ve had hundreds of frames,” says Rappensperger, who expressed a preference for pre-World War II Schwinns while guiding a visitor on a tour of his industrial studio, Schnitzkraft Metal Artistry, on Guerneville Road where Santa Rosa’s landscape transitions from urban to rural.
Outside the studio, the tour takes him past a pair of slanted concrete ramps. Art installations, perhaps?
“That’s my skatepark,” explains Rappensperger, who turns 50 in November but still drops in on those ramps, especially on Mondays. “A lot of my buddies are skaters, so we come out Monday night. It’s evolved into a kind of men’s club.”
A certain brand of derring-do—fun, sometimes borderline-dangerous wheeled adventures shared with friends—runs like a leitmotif through Rappensperger’s life. Around 2011, he and other Whiskeydrunk members built the Whiskey-Drome, a steeply banked, 26-foot-wide wooden exhibition track, composed of 215 slats and inspired by early 20th-century photos of a similar contrivance, reminiscent of an oversized barrel. “Centrifugal force keeps you on the side of the wall,” he says.
A popular exhibit at public events, the drome made an appearance at an early Levi’s GranFondo, recalls Carlos Perez, the founder of Bike Monkey, which produces the annual cyclosportive. Long an admirer of Rappensperger’s work, Perez commissioned him in 2024 to make the trophies for the event. He was tapped to create this year’s awards, as well—though at press time the concept and design of those trophies had yet to make their way from his brain to his workbench.
Rappensperger made last year’s trophy from a burl—a gnarled growth from a redwood tree along the Growler course in Cazadero. Using computer-aided design (CAD), he superimposed the profile of the Growler’s highest climb onto the swirling grain of the burl, and with inlaid brass, turned the trophy into a representation of that ascent. Perez gravitates towards Rappensperger’s work, he says, because of the passion the artist pours into his pieces and how he gets “immersed in the little details.”
A career as an artist and metal fabricator is a singular niche, one that was influenced early on by Rappensperger’s father, also named Klaus, who owned a repair shop for high-end German cars. As a boy, Klaus the younger spent much time in the shop, “doing brake jobs from an early age.” His mechanical bent would manifest whenever he got a new bike. “The first thing I would do was go out to the garage, take it apart, and put it back together,” he recalls.
But Rappensperger gives the most credit for his creative success to his mother, Rebecca, whom he says gave him “the tools and space to be an artist and maker” and the encouragement “to think outside the box.”
He admits it took him a few years after his 1994 graduation from Montgomery High School to find his way, noting he was governed at times by “some rebellious blood.”
He worked early on as a carpenter and framer, then “fell into” land surveying for several years. Ready for something new, Rappensperger enrolled in an AutoCAD class at the College of the Redwoods. During this deep dive into 3D computer-aided design (which also found him devouring a yellow copy of “AutoCAD for Dummies”), he purchased his first welder.
“So I’m welding in my garage, I’m doing AutoCAD, and that kind of just morphed into what I do now,” he says.
On this particular day at the shop, a co-worker named Jason was busy finishing a six-foot gate Rappensperger had designed for a client.
While that gate looked finished to a layperson, Rappensberger explained it still awaited brass details and an aluminum insert with routed grooves to achieve a wainscoting effect.
This is where Rappensperger’s singular alchemy takes place. Whether he’s welding or simulating wainscoting or adding a satin patina to a fireplace panel—it looks, when finished, like molten gold—his work often crosses the line from metal fabrication to straight-up artistry.
After moving back to Santa Rosa in 2005, Rappensperger found an outlet for his creativity—and, eventually, a life partner—at a delightfully offbeat annual event called the Great Handcar Regatta.
One day each summer, from 2008 through 2011, Railroad Square was overtaken by revelers in antique costume—steampunk, it was called—cheering and racing fantastical, Seussical machines along the then-unused train tracks.
Rappensperger and the Whiskeydrunk crew hurled themselves into creating “art cars” for the regatta. They would then bring them to the after-school program at Chop’s Teen Club where Robin Stephani, a local architect and fellow regatta racer, was teaching a class on how to build and design a handcar for that quirky event.
Stephani, a former college soccer player who knew Rappensperger from pickup games in Santa Rosa, was struck by his generosity of spirit and creative energy. “I talked him into teaching a welding class, and it really put Chop’s on the map in terms of the summer artists program.”
Watching teens who didn’t consider themselves especially creative at the start of the program develop “and start thinking of themselves as artists,” recalls Stephani, “was such a cool thing. It was amazing.”
To help pay for students’ welding materials, Rappensperger and his Whiskeydrunk associates would throw “epic” bike-themed art shows on the top of parking garages in downtown Santa Rosa. Among the most popular was a mustache competition called “’Staches and Spokes.”
It was during this heady epoch of handcars and steampunk and ’staches that the two became a couple and eventually married. Despite his love of bikes, her husband has never taken the start at a Levi’s GranFondo.
“He’s a huge cyclist advocate,” says Stephani, “but less on the sporty side, more on the whimsical side.”