The Pull

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

My guest this week is frame builder Mike Desalvo of Desalvo Custom Cycles. That's Desalvo on the left with Sacha White (center) and Paul Sadoff (right), both of whom get mentions in the interview. Desalvo is part of what I refer to as the second generation of American builders, those craftsmen who got their start […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

On this week's show, my guest is Mike Ferrentino. In the early 1990s Ferrentino rose to national prominence with the launch of Bike Magazine and his column the Grimy Handshake. Since then, Ferrentino has gone on to help found the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship and directed marketing for Santa Cruz Bicycles. These days he's in […]

On this week's show, we continue our conversation with Erik Noren of Peacock Groove. Last week we talked about some of Noren's signature creations like his Evil Dead bike and his Appetite for Destruction bike. While those works generated some controversy, much of this week's show will focus on a…

Among the many builders I've interviewed in my career, I can say that Erik Noren is truly unique. In a room full of unusual cats, he still manages to stand alone. This episode, and the next, because honestly, the conversation was that long and too interesting to chop into a…

The emergence of HIA Velo, the parent company of Allied Cycle Works, is notable as much for the quality of the carbon fiber bicycles they make as where they make them. At a time when all of the major bike makers produce their carbon fiber bikes in Asia, Allied has gained distinction for producing carbon […]

Few people can claim to be as inextricably linked with the birth of mountain biking as Gary Fisher. His company MountainBikes produced what were arguably the very first production mountain bikes, before he went on to found Gary Fisher Bikes, which he later sold to Trek. Though Trek has stopped producing bikes under the Fisher […]

In Part II of my conversation with Mark DiNucci, we discuss some of the work he has done as an engineer working on contract for other manufacturers, like SAPA and Evil. We go into greater depth about his building today, including the tubeset and lugset he designed for his bikes, right down to the CAD […]

If you wanted to find the American who made the most profound impact on the ride of steel road bikes in the last 30 years, it would be hard to find a person more influential than Mark DiNucci. As an engineer for Specialized Bicycle Components, he was instrumental in creating the steel Allez which went […]

On this week's show, my guest is Nick Legan, the author of Gravel Cycling, from VeloPress. Legan has one of the more varied backgrounds I've encountered in cycling. He began his career as a race mechanic, first working for Slipstream Sports and then working for Lance Armstrong's Radio Shack team. He founded a bike shop […]

On this week's show, my guest is James Winchester, the product manager for Masi Bicycles [Update: he is now at Giant]. The role of a product manager at a bike company is, perhaps, one of the most visible expressions of what it is to work for a bike company. They are responsible for determining what […]

On this week's show, my guest is Lennard Zinn, whose book, Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance, has just been released in its sixth edition by VeloPress. Zinn is best known for his work as technical editor for VeloNews, but he joined the magazine more than 20 years ago as a result of […]

For as much as American cyclists idolized Greg LeMond in the 1980s and early 1990s, for a great many years there was really only one book on the three-time Tour de France Winner, “Greg LeMond's Complete Book of Bicycling.” And while it included a fascinating look inside the 1986 Tour de France, the book was […]

On this week's show, my guest is framebuilder Todd Ingermanson who is part of a relatively rare set of artisans known for crafting nearly any sort of bike. While many builders base their business on mostly (or even exclusively) doing just one thing, such as road bikes, Ingermanson, under his label Black Cat Bicycles, has […]

On this week's show, my guest is teacher, author and creator Kristen Ulmer. In the early 1990s Ulmer rose to international prominence as the world's foremost female big mountain extreme skier. It's a status she held for an astonishing 12 years. Able to huck any cliff and ski die-if-you-fall lines, she went big and gathered […]

On this week's show, my guest is framebuilder Brad Bingham. He's been called the finest TIG-welder in the world. Bingham rose to international prominence as a result of his work as a welder for Kent Eriksen Cycles. He has won the best welding award at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show for each of the […]

Allen Lim has spent his career guiding athletes to their best possible performance. From the UC Davis Cycling Team to grand tour riders, Lim's career as an exercise physiologist was focused on helping solve problems athletes had. Nearly accidentally, Lim began making his own drink mix to help athletes, and out of that effort Skratch […]

This week I interview NAHBS Best in Show winner Gabriel Lang of Altruiste Bikes from New Brunswick, Canada. Lang won with a long-travel 29er that was truly unique among the bikes shown at the show. In this, our second episode, we talk to him about his background as a builder, how he got his start, […]

The Pull is a new podcast from The Cycling Independent. My many interviews with framebuilders over the years have all lost something in translation from the conversation to the printed page (or pixels). I spent years dissatisfied with the outcome and honestly, reduced the number of interviews I did because the outcome was so dissatisfying, […]