I guess it’s the philosophy & history section all mashed together

The road that leads to being a professional bicycle framebuilder is long and strange for one and all. My road started with the need to do my own repairs and maintenance when I began commuting by bike as teenager. A red reverse mitered HLE tubing Peugeot 12-speed form the 80s. You know the one. After I crashed and destroyed that, a Centurion Super Lemans I bought the next day because I needed transportation. It became a fixed-gear, as the fashion of the time dictated, and then the insatiable desire to tinker was fully realized. From there, tallbikes MIG & stick welded in backyards, scavenging and scrapping, piles of bikes in the basement and yard, mixing and fixing street rats for everyone that needed cheap transportation. I volunteered and the bike co-operative, worked at a series of bike shops, ran my own underground shop, went to college and studied literature (little math, no engineering), rode bikes as a courier, worked as a pedi-cab mechanic, apprenticed with an old timer building frames, took a framebuilding class, went to trade school to learn to machine and TIG weld, all the while building, repairing and modifying frames in my home shop, riding a bicycle everywhere I went.

However many years on, here I am. Bikes are serious business to me, they are wonderful and powerful tools for self and society. They are simple, elegant, versatile, democratic. Or at least they should be. I’m against the insane proliferation of so-called “standards”. Disc brakes are fantastic, and so are thru-axles. But their adoption also seem to be industry attempts to invalidate all wheels from the last 100 years of bicycle history. That being said, I’ll build them, I’ll fix them and I’ll ride them. I want to build bikes that will still be around in decades- like the bikes that brought me here. Strong and durable, sometimes timeless, sometimes elegant. Not pigeon holed into narrow functionality. Inspiring and encouraging, something you’ll be proud to own for decades. It’s also one of the reasons that I will never stop doing repairs. We don’t need to live in any more of a throw-away world than we already do. Even if it doesn’t make “economic sense”, repairing something that’s broken is both the common-sense thing, and the right thing to do. I believe manufactured good should be high quality, and durable. It should not cost more to make a minor repair to an item than to buy a new one, that is no way for the world to function.

One of the reasons that I started building frames was that I was afraid there wouldn’t be any more lugged bikes. I love lugs. I’m not super artistic, but that’s one of the things I love about them- simply building with lugs imparts a sense of artistry to a bicycle frame, and connects to the rich history of bicycles and framebuilding. A shop owner once remarked about a one of my first built I had rode in “That bike looks like the 70s”. It was a compliment, and that was the point. Bicycle folks have a had a lot of good ideas over the last hundred years or so. They’ve also had a lot of bad ones. I’m standing on the shoulders of innumerable giants, bringing my version of this beautiful machine into the world.

There you have it. Thus far, completely un-edited and vague personal history and philosophy towards bicycles. Maybe my work makes a little more sense now. Maybe you want a sweet, modern lugged classic even more now.