This is the first bicycle that I built at United Bicycle Institute in Portland, OR under the tutelage of Joseph Ahearne. It is built from oversized 9/6/9 butted tubing. As such, it is a reasonable weight, quite stiff for how tall it is, and can handle light to moderate loads very well. 

I wanted a bicycle that I could ride long distances with a light load that would be fun to ride on pavement, light single track, and gravel roads. A bit more off-road oriented than a traditional randonneur bike, but not quite a Salsa Fargo either. Hence, "rando-gnar." This is a category that I am very interested in expanding further. I went with cantilever brakes mostly out of ornery contrariness, but the decision was also informed by my own ability to set up Paul's cantilevers to work really, really well. 

I do love me some mountain biking. I built this one for myself, based around the long-travel hardtails that have grown popular in the industry (Kona Honzo, Niner ROS, Trek Stache) over the past couple of years. Super short chain-stays, fat tires, slack head tube angle, and a long top tube. It is a lot of fun to ride rigid, and one of these days I may put a suspension fork on there. Going forward, I see myself being more into mountain bikes that are fun to ride rather than fast to race.

This is a build for an old friend of mine who was looking for one bike to rule them all. The geometry is a modified cyclocross bike- I lengthened the top tube and lowered the bottom bracket in order to fit my friend's long arms and to make the bike more confident and stable cornering on pavement. The frame is made of 9/6/9 tubing with a lighter 8/5/8 top tube to give some springiness to the ride quality, in the tradition of many French builders of the mid twentieth century. The lug at the seat tube cluster is stainless, as are the STI bosses on the down tube.

This is a cargo bike in the traditional Dutch front loading style (a bakfiets, or bucket bike). It allows for a variety of different cargos to be carried, not just things in panniers, and is great for hauling children, pets, and groceries. Boson's is an old rigid mountain bike frame spliced onto a cargo bed that is all steered by a 20" wheel up front. This keeps the center of mass low so that the bike retains handling characteristics of a more normal bike. It is comparatively low trail, so that it will handle confidently and stably at low speed. 

Once upon a time, long ago in Portland, OR, Emily and I worked together at the downtown branch of Bike Gallery. We had also both attended Reed College, although we didn't know each other at that point. I spent far too much time browsing pictures of handmade bikes on the internet at work and promised that one day I would build Emily a sweet steel frame. Looks like the time has come, as we now both work at Bicycle Habitat in NYC. At first, Emily thought of the bike as a touring bike, but it gradually turned into a gravel/dirt explorer with the capacity for a light load. Very reminiscent of the Rando-gnar I built myself. This one, however, will be thoroughly modern with thru axles, disc brakes, and a rather lighter and stiffer set of tubes than those i used for the Rando-gnar..

I had to put this bike together in somewhat of a hurry after Emmeline and I decided to do the Cape Loop of the Baja Divide (bajadivide.com). I built it around 26 plus tires (26x3.0) so that she would be able to tackle the sandy loose conditions of the sections that we were planning. In the future, she will be able to ride either the plus tires or a 27.5x2.5ish tire. The chain stays are a bit on the longer side than is currently fashionable to provide stability with a load and on steep descents. The bike was perfect for our ride together- Emmeline was able to ride away from me in the sandier sections and the bike was more than able to handle whatever the trail threw at us. Many more adventures to come on this bike!

Karen is a co-worker of mine at Bicycle Habitat in NYC. She was looking for a step through commuter bike with an upright riding posture, rear load capacity, u-lock integration possibilities, and disc brakes. I worked up a couple of versions of the mixte design, and ended up running this one. I like the one big swoop of the diaga-struts. It will have fenders, dynamo lighting, and a matching custom rack!

Alex was one of the first people that I met as I moved down to Baltimore. He approached me, a few years later, looking for a custom hardtail. The design process on this bike was interesting. His previous mountain bike was more XC oriented than I was used to, and initially he wanted something similar. We went back and forth on numbers, and came up with this, which blends current long reach hard tail design with some more XC-ish angles. The result is surprisingly similar to some BMX geometries, but scaled up for 29" wheels, with the option of going to 27.5 plus size tires if he feels like it. A bike to get rad on that can also take a rack and cargo cage. 

After I rode a significant portion of the Baja Divide on its inaugural year on my old mountain bike, I needed some revisions. Over the course of my time on the Divide, I broke that frame twice and the fork once. I chose tubing far too light for loaded use over such rough terrain. Baja demands up to 12 liters of water in your kit, on top of the usual shelter, food, and supplies, and the “roads” are everything from washboard to melon sized river rocks. Sometimes still in a river! I also wanted more tire clearance, as the 2.25 that I built the back end of the old bike around buried itself in the sand at every opportunity it got. However, I did not want to use a Boost platform, as it would complicate field repairs pretty significantly. In order to get sufficient tire and crank clearance, I had to fabricate a chain stay yoke, as seen in the second photo. Several other builders have used this technique, and I like its simplicity and rigidity. With this setup, I had 29x3 tires front and rear. I also reconfigured the front end, splitting the difference between the true suspension corrected geometry of my last version and a dedicated rigid geometry. The idea is that It would be a little more aggressive and forward than the old geometry, but still adapt well to a 130mm suspension fork. I haven’t had the chance to plug a fork in yet, but it rides very nicely with the rigid fork, which I designed as if Tom Ritchey were making a 29+ BMX fork for touring. After another bout in Baja, I’m happy to say I was not able to break it even once!

This is an interesting bike for me to have made, for a couple of reasons. I believe that custom bikes should remain relevant to current trends in frame design, should provide something new. Yet this is a bike with vertical dropouts, rim brakes, a freewheel, and a 1x6 drivetrain. Hardly gets more retro, right? However, the point of this bike is that I have worked in bike shops for almost 10 years at this point, and the one thing that people keep telling me, again and again, is how their old schwinn or fuji or panasonic worked so well for so long without any maintenance, and that their new bikes take so much more work to keep working well. I’ve been listening! Drivetrains with 8 speeds or less are incredibly robust: I have seen innumerable bikes with these parts suffer decades of use and abuse and still continue to function in a way that 9 speed and better drivetrains simply don’t. Once you wear out a “modern” drivetrain, the chain skips over the cogs of the cassette and render the bike effectively unrideable in that gear. The older spacing will take literal decades of daily use with a load before reaching that level of non-function. The trade off is that shifting is less smooth, that it takes more skill to use properly. As an old manager of mine once said, that’s a bike that will suck forever. But the point is that it keeps working forever, even if the fine points of its shifting performance aren’t up to current standards. My friend Dustin, that I am building the bike for, is a man who will just ride this thing again and again and again and will not have to think about things like chain stretch and cassette wear for a very, very long time. For casual use around town, who really cares about how smooth and refined the tactile experience of the shift from cog to cog is? You just want a couple of gears to deal with bridges and hills and hangovers, it doesn’t have to be a fucking tactile revelation in motion. This is bike that will get you to the store, to work, or across the country if you want it to. It fits 650b by 42 tires with fenders, or, if you want to get sporty, 700x28 with fenders and a different set of brake calipers. It is set up for clean 1xn drivetrain routing, but has internal front derailleur cable routing if you should want a derailleur later. 130x10mm quick release dropouts are past proof and allow for innumerable drivetrain configurations, from cheap and dirty to fancy and refined. The fork and frame are routed for internal dynamo writing, and it comes with a matching rear rack for your luggage. This is a vehicle, not a toy. The quality of its ride comes from the design, fit, and quality control, not the trends that have dictated current drivetrain and brake standards. Any doofus can spit out a 1x11 disc brake thru axle townie just because those are things that come on bikes right now: the whole point of this bike is that it will address the specific needs of its rider, not those provided by the marketing departments of the current bike world.

Sam is a friend who used to work with me at Bicycle Habitat in NYC. I built him a rigid fork for his Surly Instigator, which was a pretty fun little project all by itself. Sam has been searching for a very specific track bike for a number of years. His road bike is a beautiful team Landshark, and John Slawta made a few track bikes in matching livery. Given the scarcity of those bikes, Sam asked me to come up with something complementary for street riding. The geometry is a modified track bike, clearance for 28s, rim brakes, and some funky business in the front end!

Mat first reached out to me about a bike that he could use for road riding, primarily, but with capacity for some gravel/dirt road/overnight trips. He was on a really nice Bottechia at the time, so I based the geometry off of that bike but left more clearance for tires up to 700x35. I kept the cable routing as clean as possible, routing the all the cables internal except for a brief bit of external guide under the bottom bracket shell. The cables are fully guided through internal brass tubing. The frame tubing was very similar to the tubing mix that I used on Sam’s track bike build, as it was supposed to be a sporty, fun bike. The powdercoating presented some challenges as well, as we were shooting for a black matte to gloss fade with a gloss logo embedded in the transitional phase. Initially the matte top coat did not sit well on the lower coat of gloss black, and so I ended up having to redo it. Second time it came out great! Mat has been riding the bike a great deal and has since upgraded to some carbon wheels.

The TravGrav is a bike concept that I’ve been mulling over for quite a long time. It is a revision on the same concept that I started with for Orange bike, numero uno, but tweaked to allow for some more easily adventurous use. It is built around the Ritchey coupler system, and so will be packable into a suitcase that is under airline maximums and help make travel easier. The geometry is more mountain-bike-y than the orange bike’s geometry, which I hope will translate to more confidence in technical riding conditions. I hope to preserve the consistent handling both while loaded and unloaded across variable terrain, although realistically nothing much rougher than jeep tracks.

I’m working on a modular bag system similar to those that Fern/Allygn have produced with some Fidlock bags from Class 4 Designs up in Vermont. In its final form, it will pack flat and fit two small panniers and a cradled saddlebag, all of which will have some provision for quick installation and removal. I’d like to preserve the clean front end of the bike and be able to avoid a handlebar bag for shorter trips or even races if I ever ride myself back to a decent fitness level.

So far the bike has been riding nicely, I took it out to the MADE show in Portland to ride around last summer. I held off on finish work until I had the build dialed, and I’m glad I did so that I can add routing for an internal dropper post as well as a seatstay bridge to stiffen up the rear brake! I’ll get this updated as I get the last bits worked out, looking forward to more adventures with this weirdo.

I am set up to make stems to any specification needed. The first one, which you see here, is a simple thread less one bolt design that goes 95 millimeters from an 1 1/8" steerer tube to a 31.8 mm stem clamp, most suitable for use with flat, riser, or townie style handlebars. I will have some removable faceplate designs soon. 

I made a set of threadless bullmoose bars for my own mountain bike, and will have a couple sets of them built up soon. They can be bent to whatever angle you find comfortable. I may also do some townie handlebars in the style of Rivendell's Bosco bar. 

The fork is, in some ways, the most important part of the bicycle. It determines the handling characteristics of the bike, determines where weight is best carried, and plays a role in weight distribution between the front and rear wheel. I have built several forks aside from the ones pictured here, most typically with the frame projects that I’ve taken on. These are forks that I built separate from the frame itself, which is a different sort of project. When I can build the frame and fork together, I can tune how they play together, but when I’m building one for someone else’s frame, I have to work within the constraints of the existing bike and the customer’s expectations. As I build more things, I appreciate balancing the creative aspects with the actual requirements. Forks are scary because of how catastrophic a potential failure could be, so you really want to work on the conservative side, design-wise. I broke a fork I built myself riding it way overloaded, which really drove this point home for me.