I gotta say it: I love singlespeeds. There’s just something about how darn simple they are that just tickles my fancy: Everything you need and not a single ounce more than you don’t to ride! I’ve built hardtails for myself that could take gears, but when I’m honest with myself… I’ve got a geared bike …
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Dedicated Singlespeed
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The Business of Framebuilding
The business of Framebuilding is not an easy one. Its incredibly demanding in the sense you need three essential skillsets: Business and marketing acumen, practical applied design and fabrication skills and financial resources. If you’re missing any of those three, the uphill road that is framebuilding gets exponentially steeper. Experience occurs over the course of …
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Midfoot
I’ve been an SPD addict for over 30 years. I actually bought a set of my buddy’s old Shimano M737 SPD’s back in ’91 or ’92 when he “upgraded”. But I’ve been a SPD pedaler ever since and I’ve always biased the cleats slightly ball of foot forward of the pedal spindle so strictly a …
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Research and Development
Recently I’ve been working with Spencer Thomson, a lead engineer at EOS North America who is a producer to 3D metal printers. Spencer reached out this past summer with a cold email essentially asking if they printed parts for me, would I like to work with them to try and speed up development of SLM …
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Snakedriver Design and Development
I’ve been building custom bicycles for a bit more than a decade now. Hard to imagine 10 years have gone by but here I am! When I first started out, there was so many variables to overcome to obtain a level of proficiency I could then master. I came to the bench with a level …
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Snakedriver by the Numbers
I’ve been working on the Snakedriver project since 2019. 5 years of R&D and 4 prototypes have brought me to this current iteration. After an evening of assembly, tuning and triple checking my work during the build process, I took V4 of the Snakedriver on its first shake down ride. I couldn’t be more pleased. …
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Electrification
Editors Note: The above image is purely a visual for size and technology comparison. It is not meant to compare old vs new nor is it a Shimano vs SRAM comparison. The GX AXS rear derailleur is actually my personal piece of kit for bike packing excursions to quickly convert my singlespeed to a geared …
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New Road
I’ve been playing with the fit and handling on my Huntsman now for a while. I never really liked that traditional stretched out feeling on a road bike and really took to frames that were smaller than what I was “supposed” to be riding. A case in point was back in 1998/99 when I was …
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Geometry
When I built my first bike, I pretty much didn’t have much of an understanding of geometry, handling and what made both click. I basically plucked a few numbers based on riding experience up to that point and then slowly, over many iterations, a lot of trial and error, riding, building and repeating, things started …
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Snakedriver V3 Development
Back in July, I penned the following: “V2 of the Snakedriver is currently at powder. It’s been a long road to get to V2 with a delay happening last season that most likely was the best thing that could have happened for the project. It forced me to reassess the overall project and the literal …
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