Every frame I build is made to order and takes into consideration both you and your riding style. Every tube, dropout and braze-on for the bike is selected to this end. Whether it's stiffening up chainstays for maximum power delivery or bringing the tube diameters way down because you are a featherweight and don't need to be riding a bike designed for a clydesdale, the goal is to make the best bike you've ever had.

Once you decide you're ready for a new bike, call or drop me a line via email. We'll talk about what sort of riding you're looking to do with your new bike and any issues you may be looking to resolve from current or past bikes you have had.

Once you're ready, you can head over to the Order Form and submit your deposit. This secures you a spot in the queue and starts the design process.

After we've settled on a design, you're all set until it's your turn in the build queue. At this point I'll call you, we'll finalize all of the numbers and specs and I'll start building. This is also when we'll discuss build kit if you're getting a complete bike.

Once I'm done with it, it's off to the painter. When it's back from there, it gets a final pass with the taps and facers to make sure it's ready for parts. Then it's packed and shipped off. If you've ordered a complete, the bike will be assembled and adjusted so it will be ready to ride with a minimum of reassembly on your end.

Straight to business! There's a couple of reasons why you might want or need a custom bike:

The most obvious is that you're probably not proportioned exactly the same as the rider/model for whom your current bike was designed. If you have the same physical measurements, weight distribution and flexibility as Lance, by all means, grab a mid 2000's Trek 59cm.

Ever since Adolphe Quetelet inflicted standard (sic) sizing on the world through the cunning use of averages, we've been doomed to just make do with things that don't quite fit.

Very short and very tall people will also have problems with proper bike sizing. Mass manufacture of bicycles tends to economize where it can. The main tubes (seat tube, top tube, etc.) will vary (in length, not diameter or thickness), but rarely will you see chainstays vary through a size run of a bike. Forks are all pretty much standardized as well. Combine those two and funny things start to happen with the extremes of the size chart.

A frame that's made individually doesn't have to limit itself to the constraints of stock materials or specialized industrial tooling. The rider can be placed perfectly over a bike that's tuned for their physique.

Fit aside, maybe there's some combination of features that you're looking for that just isn't out there. You've been searching for a bike that just doesn't exist, because it hasn't been made for you, yet.

No.

If you think I'm going to go to all the trouble of hand-picking tubes based on their diameter and wall-thickness to suite your weight and riding style, but I'm not going to pick a wheel size appropriate for you, well... now you know better.

My goal is to make a bike that will be in harmony with you. This means that if you're very short, you won't be able to run the largest of wheel/tire combos (trust me you don't want to). If it's any consolation, tall people almost certainly shouldn't be running a #tukt rear end.

Fully custom frames start at . If you want a custom steel fork also, you're looking at and up.

Complete builds can come in a huge range of prices. You should hit me up about quotes for specific build specs.

When you're ready, just give me a call or email and we can get things started.

I definitely encourage everyone who is getting a frame to come by, hang out, and go on a ride with me. Having some face time to discuss what you like and don't like, want and don't want, is always a good thing. Not to mention going on a ride will allow me to really see how you fit on your current bike. It also helps identify any issues you may not even know you have. And, who doesn't like riding bikes?

Building a bicycle is a time-consuming, tedious, and above all else, boring (to watch) process. So you probably aren't going to want to hang out while a bike is actually being built. But I do have group (mostly gravel) rides I lead from my beautiful slice of the outer Metro area. Check my Facebook Events for details about when the next ride is.

This is the part of the website where I'm supposed to build up the mystique and streetcred(sic) of my brand (me). If that's what you came here for, I'm truly sorry, but there are a thousand other guys out there who used to race BMX as a kid who got into building bikes by sweeping floors at the Whatever Factory in East Rumpenshire. I'm not one of them.

I won't claim some great pedigree in the bike industry. I've done my time in it. Enough to know that there's more hand-waving here than at a Jedi family reunion.

I get it. If you've gotta sell the same stamped out stuff to the same folks, year after year. You're either gonna get hand-wavy or you're gonna get super curmudgeony and insist that the bike was perfected at some point in the past, and use that argument to justify only making boneshakers or 70s era road bikes.

If we were close to perfecting the bike, we'd be elusively chasing the most incremental of changes.
Think we're there? Just compare a mountain bike from ten years ago to today's mountain bikes. They're nothing alike.

The science of how a bike works is so wonderfully complex, there are no elegant equations of motion that capture it. Trying to distill this system down to a couple of geometric variables only gives rise to a sense that there are mythical qualities to some bikesClark's third law, when in fact, there are very real reasons bikes ride the way they do. They're just hard to grasp within the scope of mental math.

We let emotional concepts step in for rigorous analysis.

And that's fine, if you're riding a bike. Riding should always be about converting calories to pure emotion.

But if you're trying to be an authority on how bikes work, or what the perfect bike should be/do, check the fuzzies at the door. The bench is a place for steel and files and fire.

I'm a former bikeshop mechanic, studied physics in college, and raced everything from track to backcountry bikepacking (just no BMX).

With a formal background in theory and a decent mechanical aptitude, I decided to attend Walt Wehner's Framebuilding School, which is a one-on-one design-to-assembly course. Walt built me a frame in 2005 and is an overall thoughtful builder who has a naturally mentoring personality. I've always valued his thoughts on bike handling and geometry, as well as his no BS approach to the craft.

After attending his class, I returned home, setup shop and immediately began experimenting with different ideas of design as I built and rebuilt my personal quiver of bikes. I live in gravel riding heaven about an hour east of Atlanta, so I have a perfect testbed for everything from classic road to National Forest shredders right outside my front door. And with just over an hour's drive to the Southern Appalachians and three to Pisgah, where every bike gets pushed to its limits, I can run just about any idea through its real world paces.

I spend way too much time thinking about how all of the variables on a bike work to affect all of the different ride qualities we all crave. I'm just short enough to know all about the trade-offs that have to be considered when designing a bike. I'm used to bikes with slacker-than-they-should-be headtubes because some designer valued toe-overlap over preserving the ride quality of the larger sized models.