Of the many builders I've met over the years, I don't think I've met any with a more unusual background. Bryan Hollingsworth is a New Englander who cut his teeth working for Seven Cycles. He may be the only builder I've ever met who has fabricated frames from carbon fiber, titanium and steel. I'm reasonably convinced I've not met another builder who has laid up an entire carbon fiber frame as well as brazed steel in lugs or done fillet brazing. It turns out, he comes from a family of cyclists...

Of the many frame builder who can capably be called masters of the craft, it is distinctly possible that no one has been at the bench longer than Mark Nobilette. His credentials are impeccable. He was trained by Albert Eisentraut in the first frame building class that Eisentraut taught, which was held in Chicago, before he moved to California, way back in 1973. Nobilette went to work for Eisentraut and since then has gone on to produce thousands of frames in the Eisentraut tradition, with...

In this second part of my interview with Toby Stanton, we discuss his team of juniors and what the ingredients are that has made the team so incredibly and consistently successful. Hot Tubes riders and stars and stripes jerseys are kinda like peanut butter and jelly. There are other things you can do with peanut butter, but peanut butter with jelly doesn't really surprise anyone. Stanton is incredibly candid and he gives insight not just to what makes his riders ride so well, but also how he...

I first met Toby Stanton at a mountain bike race in 1991. He was coaching a team that included future cyclocross supahstah (this was in Massachusetts, mind you) Jonathan Page and their kits were white with red, yellow and blue dots, signifying their sponsorship by Wonder Bread. A year or two later I sent him my Canadian-built Miele frame to be repainted and to have a second set of bottle bosses added. I would go on to ride in his VW Vanagon helping him provide neutral support at some races in...

My guest today is frame builder David Wages of Ellis Cycles. There was a time when the most common career path for a frame builder was to put in solid years building bikes for a brand that sold bikes in production sizing. Only after having put in a couple of decades at the bench was a builder established enough in reputation to venture out and order decals with his nam. David Wages may be among the last builders to have worked for established brands before he concluded it was time to make his...

This week my guest is writer and flow state expert Steven Kotler. Kotler is a New York Times-bestselling author known for his work decoding the neurochemistry of flow. What began as a series of articles for Discover Magazine led to his first book of nonfiction, West of Jesus, a tale of surfing, spirituality and a reappraisal of mystical states. His book The Rise of Superman explores how flow states lead extreme athletes to progress at a rate that is unheard of in other sports. He breaks down...

My guest this week is the former executive director of the National Interscholastic Cycling Association, the organization that oversees, administers and fosters mountain bike racing for high school kids. McInerny has been involved with the organization almost since its inception and became the executive director in 2012. At the time, McInerny told the board he planned to do the job for three to five years, but ended up staying on for seven years. The organization has grown dramatically, and...

This week my guest is sports psychologist Dr. Kristin Keim. Keim came to my attention several years ago when I began to see her posts on social media reshared by friends of mine in the bike racing world. Her posts were fonts of positivity rooted in practices that can bring about real change in a person’s life. I began to follow her as well and quickly realized hers was an outlook built on a backbone of daily effort and supported by a rigorous study in clinical psychology.Put another way, I...

This week I’m taking a slightly different tack and am interviewing an academic. My guest is sociologist Ben Brewer of James Madison University. Brewer picked up the cycling bug in the 1980s as a teenager and had the good sense never to lose his interest in the sport. Like many cycling enthusiasts, he appreciates a great custom frame; Brewer has owned several, including a Land Shark. As an academic, he became interested in just how big the custom frame building community is. It’s an...

My guest this week is frame builder Mike Desalvo of Desalvo Custom Cycles. Desalvo is part of what I refer to as the second generation of American builders, those craftsmen who got their start as builders in the 1990s. Many of these builders learned their craft in part or in whole from the builders who were working in the 1970s and ‘80s. Desalvo stepped into that tradition of builders teaching builders by becoming a frame building instructor for United Bicycle Institute. With more than 25...

My guest this week is painter Rudi Jung of Black Magic Paint. Jung caught my eye in 2017 with a frame he painted for Chris Bishop. It was a mostly black frame and fork, but had a red-orange-yellow fade through a design that had the look of wood grain. It’s was eye-catching in the extreme. Making the bike even more notable was the fact that the Bishop down tube logo featured gold leaf. I’d only seen one other painter use gold leaf and that was frame builder Brian Baylis. In fact, Jung had used...

My guest this week is frame builder Frank Wadleton, better known in the industry as Frank the Welder. Wadleton, or FTW as he was often referred to, was a household name to mountain bike action readers back in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Wadleton made his name initially with Yeti where he helped design an ultra-light aluminum frame, the ARC, that’s A R C, that was ridden to a number of stars and stripes jerseys. Wadleton was and is known for being great at prototyping frames and in the...

My guest this week is someone that you likely haven’t heard of before. His name is Ryan Johnson, but his resume is arguably one of the most interesting I’ve come across in the bike industry. For anyone who wants to know how the bike industry works, Johnson is someone who has seen almost every nook and cranny of the bike industry, save maybe finance.From working on bikes to writing marketing copy to packing up a factory and moving it nearly 2000 miles, to building frames out of steel and...

This week our show is an appreciation of frame builder Bruce Gordon who passed away June 7th at the age of 71. Gordon was one of the most experienced and talented frame builders ever to pick up a torch. He learned the craft from Albert Eisentraut in the first frame building class he taught after moving to Oakland from Chicago. He went on to invest in Eisentraut’s business and became production manager, before leaving to hang his own shingle. Gordon would spend time building in Oregon before...

First up, thanks for enduring this several-week break due to my travels. I would have loved to get an episode squeezed in there somehow, but today’s show required a fair bit of tending to create; it wasn’t the simple conversation that so many of these interviews are.So this week’s show is part two of my long-awaited follow up to my interview with Paul Sadoff. As happens from time to time, I’ll get on the phone with a builder and we will begin a conversation even before the actual interview...

My guest this week is Santa Cruz-based builder Paul Sadoff of Rock Lobster Cycles. I first encountered Rock Lobsters in the late 1980s when mountain biking was exploding. It was only later that I learned just how accomplished Sadoff was in building road bikes and especially cyclocross bikes. He is one of those rare builders, like Richard Sachs, who sponsors a team and can be found at cyclocross races in the Bay Area most fall weekends. In a world where handmade is often synonymous with fancy,...

This week, I’m devoting the show to frame builder Roland Della Santa who passed away last weekend at the age of 72. Della Santa is most famous for helping to launch Greg LeMond into bike racing; one of the earliest shots of LeMond winning a bike race is of him wearing a Della Santa jersey astride one of the builder’s bikes.Della Santa was a builder at a crucial time of development for cycling in the U.S. He was both a builder and a racer during the era when the likes of Gary Fisher, Tom...

In the second part of my interview with Tom Kellogg, we begin with a discussion of geometry for track bikes, and while this subject may not seem super-compelling on its face, it brings in a very interesting discussion of position, weight distribution and handling geometry on the bike. As a result, it's an opportunity to hear Kellogg talk about something on which he is an acknowledged master.One of the other truly extraordinary details of Spectrum's steel frames is the fact that they make each...

This week my guest is Tom Kellogg of Spectrum Cycles. Kellogg’s career in the bike industry spans more than 40 years and includes relationships with brands like Merlin, American Bicycle Group and Time. His bikes have won more dozens of national championships and even world championships, which is why you’ll see the rainbow stripes on each frame carrying the Spectrum logo. I first met Tom in the 1990s when he was standing in Merlin Metalworks’ booth at the Interbike trade show. I commented on...

This week my guest is frame builder Steve Rex. Back in 1997 I moved to Redondo Beach, Calif., and began doing the local group rides. There was a guy on that ride who wasn’t on a Trek, Specialized or any of the other big brands. He was on a Steve Rex and because he threw a draft like a Mac truck, I was fond of sitting on his wheel. It gave me ample time to study the contours of the frame and the more time I spent on his wheel, the more I came to appreciate that bike.Fast forward a year and he...

No. 22 is a newcomer on the custom bike scene. The company was founded in 2012 by Bryce Gracey and Mike Smith on the idea that titanium just rides better. After working with a couple of different contract shops that produced prototypes for them, they settled on Saratoga Frameworks—the operation that rose from the ashes of Serotta Competition Cycles—for their production. Just one problem: the operation shut down a week after No. 22 placed their deposit. Some people would have been discouraged...

This week my guest is frame builder Nick Crumpton. We may be in the golden age of frame building thanks to the fact that some of the finest steel frames ever produced are being built today. That didn’t stop Nick Crumpton from deciding he wanted to apply his knowledge to carbon fiber. Crumpton is one of a handful of builders who works with carbon fiber. Mostly, it is a material used by much larger manufacturers in much bigger factory settings. With more than 10 years of experience under his...

To hear Aaron Barcheck tell it, he wasn't even planning to be a frame builder when he went to UBI to take their titanium frame building class. He definitely wasn't thinking of starting a brand. But after finishing the class and working for Dean Titanium, well, one thing let to another and now Mosaic Cycles is turning 10 years old. Since the launch of Mosaic, Barcheck has built the company from just him into an operation with half a dozen employees and one of the few operations that can...

In the annals of the North American Handmade Bicycle Show few builders have been as celebrated as Curtis Inglis, the man behind Inglis Cycles and Retrotec. Inglis has taken awards home more than a half dozen times from the show, due in no small part to the artful curves of his Retrotec frames. Inglis is likely also the only builder on the planet to build frames under two different brands. His Inglis frames are reasonably straightforward in that they all share straight tubes, while the...