In a two-story, cinder-block garage on Broome Street, designer Josh Hadar flipped down his protective face mask, fired up a blowtorch, and went to work on a 3-foot piece of metal pipe. When the pipe glowed a vibrant orange, Mr. Hadar used his gloved hand to force the metal into a gentle curve, then dislodged the pipe from its vise and brought it to the bathroom sink, where he plunged it under running water. He popped his head out, smiling through the smoke.

Mr. Hadar, 39, uses this and other hand techniques to create artistic bicycles of unusual shapes and sizes. These 12-foot-long, custom rides — some powered by foot pedals, some powered by a hybrid of gas and electricity — start at about $25,000. It’s a far cry from Mr. Hadar’s previous work at Studio 54, where he was proprietor during the nightclub’s post-Steve Rubell incarnation as a cabaret lounge and hall. In the past year, Mr. Hadar left behind the nightclub life, where he worked for seven years, and decided to learn the art of metal-working, a lifelong interest he had never pursued.

“I was decent at the bar business,” he said, “but I’ve never been confused with Ian Shrager or André Balazs.”

Mr. Hadar quickly found a 10-class course at the Educational Alliance Downtown Community Center on the Lower East Side. With a handful of classes under his belt, Mr. Hadar purchased the basics — a welding setup and some pneumatic tools — with which he focused on making furniture, mostly cabinets and table-and-chair sets. It wasn’t until a chance encounter with a garbage heap that Mr. Hadar decided to focus on bicycles.

One evening, while he and his wife were walking home from dinner at Blue Ribbon Bakery, Mr. Hadar noticed that the storage room of a nearby building had been cleared out, leaving behind a pile of discarded bikes. “I thought, ‘Look at all this fine metal,'” Mr. Hadar said. “I jumped into the Dumpster and waded through the garbage, trying to drag the bikes out.” He and his wife hauled the bikes back to his shop, where he spent the next few days disassembling them.

He then produced his first bike, made of bicycle scraps, steel pipe, and a 50-cubic-centimeter gas-powered engine. The key to his designs, however, came through a discovery made in his original shop, a storefront on Lafayette Street. Mr. Hadar was interested in the transformative properties of metal — from rough scrap into smooth, organic shapes — but wasn’t ready to invest in hydraulic pipebending equipment. He found, though, that he could bend the metal by hand without any heat or electric equipment — by wedging pieces of it between a plumbing pipe and a support beam that were nestled close together. He could then pull the metal around the beam to create a curve. “I’m 6’–6″, so I can get a lot of leverage on this stuff,” he explained.

Once he realized he could bend the metal entirely by hand, he began looking for ways to refine the process, searching for items of varying diameter around which he could wrap the pipes.

“I started doing it around signposts and things on the street. I’d go out and look for trees in Tompkins Square Park that had a particular width so that I could make a particular shape,” he said. “The process became the art.”

With the bending technique, Mr. Hadar crafted designs such as “Youn Jeung,” a minimalist, pedal-powered bike that boasts gleaming nickel-coated rolled steel. “Youn Jeung” is named for Mr. Hadar’s wife.

Eventually, though, Mr. Hadar’s designs and technical skills advanced to the point that he could pursue making hybrid bikes, for which he envisioned glass, rather than metal, gas tanks.

To make his designs happen, he learned how to blow glass.

Mr. Hadar then created a three-part series of animalistic bikes inspired by a recent African safari. “Alpha Male,” made of polished black nickel-coated steel, and “Mother Heart” have metal “rib-cages” surrounding ruby-colored glass gas tanks that evoke a beating heart. “Little Cub” is powered by a 36-volt electric motor with a rechargeable battery. The bikes usually require three to four months of work.

“Alpha Male” and “Mother Heart” were recently purchased by the founder of Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Chelsea, John Johnson. “They’re this great combination of punk and rock-‘n’- roll and D.I.Y.,” Mr. Johnson, using the shorthand for “do it yourself,” said of the bikes. Mr. Johnson happened upon Mr. Hadar’s shop just over a year ago, and kept up contact with the artist while he developed his work. Though Mr. Hadar brings in extra work by creating custom furniture, car parts, and other objects, his emphasis is on the perfection of these beautiful rides, which he continues to tweak by adding details like handspun aluminum wheels.

Indeed, on most days, while Mr. Hadar works on the bikes in his garage, a steady stream of tourists and neighborhood shopkeepers populates the doorway. On a recent blustery afternoon, a group of German tourists, three deliverymen, and two teenage boys lingered while Mr. Hadar showed a visitor his latest creation, a gas-electric hybrid with a steel-plated frame.

After a few minutes, one commented on Mr. Hadar’s personal ride of choice, a standard-issue Huffy bike propped against the doorway. “Know how long it took me to make this one?” Mr. Hadar said with a grin. “Twenty minutes — a trip to Kmart.”

Hadar Metal Designs (432 Broome St., between Broadway and Crosby streets).