About

I’ve been riding, thinking, and obsessing over bikes for over 20 years. I’m a career bike mechanic, guide, and shop manger but my greatest aspiration has always been to design and build beautiful and fast frames.

During and after college I was a rabid single speed racer, and did pretty well racing XC, XXC, hundred milers and all that. My every-weekend-no-compromise race career ended after I raced Tour Divide and the Colorado Trail and burned out on the whole thing. Now I do a handful of races a year, which is much more enjoyable. I do strongly believe that there’s no substitute for racing when it comes to testing a bike — if something is going to break or have a problem, it’s easy to find that point when you’re exhausted, riding bad, and smashing a rocky descent at full speed.

I interned at the late great Dirt Rag Mag when I was younger (those guys were even nice enough to pay me! And when I was a teenager I definitely wasn’t worth it!). Working at the magazine gave me some really valuable insight to the backend of the bike industry, and I got to write some fun adventure stories while I was there.

My wife and I spent our later 20s guiding week-long bike trips at Wilderness Voyageurs (my full time work is running bike tour operations there). Working double or triple time over the busy season and living in an RV on company property with no rent allowed us to take a long, though carefully budgeted and maximally cheap, bike trip every winter. We bikepacked from Flagstaff down Baja (pre-Baja divide), New Zealand, the California coast, Colombia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and across the American South. Those trips were a lot of blissful and occasionally painful miles, and I spent a lot of that time thinking about how my bikes could be better.

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When it comes to bike design, this is what is important to me

Fit: The frame needs to perfectly fit the rider’s body before anything else. Riding a bicycle turns you into a kind of cybernetic centaur. You’re half-human, half-machine, capable of traveling faster and further than any of our ground-pounding ancestors could have ever dreamed. That’s how it should feel — not like you’re riding the bike, but like the bicycle is an extension of your body.

Handling: The frame’s geometry needs to be designed around the intended use, the rider’s preferences, and ride style. Especially with bikes built to ride on dirt, there unfortunately is no “right” geometry, and every positive change is also a compromise. I’ve ridden hundreds of different bikes over the years, and thought deeply about how each geometry change affects the ride of the bike as a whole.

Tubing selection: There’s a lot more to a good frame than making it as light as possible. It needs to be stiff in the right places, supple in others, thick enough or heat treated to resist dents, and tube sizes matched in a way that the complete fabrication of the frame is strong and seamless. And although this is a whole different essay, material and tubing selection is an area where riders are often misled. For example, the rear triangle of the frame does not “flex” on a vertical plane for ride comfort, instead the bike mostly flexes at the headtube and fork. Steel doesn’t flex more than aluminum or carbon by default — it can actually be stiffer depending on the size and thickness of the tube. And so on.

Aesthetics: Beautiful paint and lines! The bike’s first job is to ride well, but it should also look spectacular. Pretty things make life worth living.

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I’m currently building bikes for friends, but am hoping to open up orders after I get my home shop built sometime in 2026. Thanks for stopping by

-Montana