The Pull

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 great custom frame; Brewer has owned several, including a Land Shark. As an academic, he became interested in just how big the custom frame building community is. It’s an interesting question: just how many custom frame builders are there? But Brewer wanted to know more than how many people are building, he wanted to get a picture of the profession. He has created an interesting survey for frame builders and he’s with us today to discuss it and what he hopes to learn from it.

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 […]

This week our show is an appreciation of frame builder Bruce Gordon who passed away June 7th at the age of 71. Gordon was one of the most experienced and talented frame builders ever to pick up a torch. He learned the craft from Albert Eisentraut in the first frame building class he taught after moving to Oakland from Chicago. He went on to invest in Eisentraut’s business and became production manager, before leaving to hang his own shingle. Gordon would spend time building in Oregon before returning to Northern California and settling in Petaluma. I’ve interview five people for today’s show: frame builder Mark Nobilette, his former co-worker at Eisentraut; Don Walker, the director of the North American Handmade Bicycle Show; our guest from the last two episodes of The Pull: Paul Sadoff, with whom Gordon produced frames under the name Schnozzola; machinist Mark Norstad of Paragon Machine Works, whose braze-ons, dropouts and other frame fittings are some of the most popular in the industry and with whom Gordon gave the SOPWAMTOS awards; and finally White Industries employee and the Soul Craft owner Sean Walling, who worked for Gordon early in his own career.

First up, thanks for enduring this several-week break due to my travels. I would have loved to get an episode squeezed in there somehow, but today’s show required a fair bit of tending to create; it wasn’t the simple conversation that so many of these interviews are.So this week’s show is part two of my long-awaited follow up to my interview with Paul Sadoff. As happens from time to time, I’ll get on the phone with a builder and we will begin a conversation even before the actual interview begins. The upshot is that I frequently notice that we are discussing something that would make for a terrific element of the interview and I deem it too interesting to leave on the cutting room floor.We begin with him talking about his customers and his regard for them. But more significantly, we move to a conversation about choosing the right builder for the frame you want. Paul’s humility and understanding gives him a perspective that’s refreshing in its honesty. I should mention that Paul mentions Bruce Gordon in the interview; this was recorded prior to Bruce’s passing last week.

My guest this week is Santa Cruz-based builder Paul Sadoff of Rock Lobster Cycles. I first encountered Rock Lobsters in the late 1980s when mountain biking was exploding. It was only later that I learned just how accomplished Sadoff was in building road bikes and especially cyclocross bikes. He is one of those rare builders, like Richard Sachs, who sponsors a team and can be found at cyclocross races in the Bay Area most fall weekends. In a world where handmade is often synonymous with fancy, Sadoff is headed in the other direction. While he has the skill set to do a pretty, lugged bike, many of his bikes are TIG-welded aluminum race bikes. When you place function ahead of form, that’s an understandable answer. Our interview was lengthy and meandering. Once again, this will be a two-parter, with me editing in bits of the conversation we had before the official interview started. He’s a fascinating and thoughtful cat and has a refreshing perspective on what it means to be a custom frame builder.