The Pull

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 PR with Uncommon Communications, but he’s still dedicated to advocacy issues. I recorded this interview with him in 2017 when I was producing the Redwood Empire Pedalcast. The podcast was heavily concerned with advocacy and I wanted to talk to Ferrentino about his views. Though the Pedalcast is gone, this interview was just too good to keep on the shelf, so to speak, and with all the recent concern expressed about trail access, I thought it was high time this thing saw the light of day. Be forewarned: there's some spicy language in this episode.

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 bike that has been widely acclaimed for its incredible attention to detail. That bike is his collaboration with Anna Schwinn, an homage to the rock star, songwriter, guitarist, producer and filmmaker, Prince. The Purple Rain bike is really all Noren needs in terms of a resume. It’s a bike that in its devotion to its subject shows the full range of expression of which Noren is capable. Put another way, this bike is so badass that Chuck Norris bowed out of the ring. We open the conversation by talking about his experience of attending a lunch sponsored by Balvenie to honor people at the top of their craft.

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 half hour, are going to be unlike anything I’ve produced previously. Part of that is Noren’s fairly colorful use of language. He drops f-bombs in this interview like flakes of snow in a winter storm. Fortunately, iTunes has an explicit setting. So if you’re offended by coarse language, maybe drop by two weeks from now. Noren’s mantra for Peacock Groove is “deep custom.” By that he means more than just designing a bike that fits you and handles the way you want. More than picking the perfect tubeset. He is referring to his preference for creating a bike that speaks to your passions, and very often that leads him to build theme bikes. It takes a different sort of builder to dig such a rabbit hole, and Noren is just that guy. He himself is as unfiltered as his language, and that makes this particular interview unusually revealing. I never have builders open up to this degree. Not all of this interview is easy to listen to; he talks about some difficult issues including depression and child molestation. Because our conversation went on for nearly two and a half hours and because I could find so little in it that wasn’t interesting, I’ve cut the interview into two episodes. Not only that, there were elements of our conversation prior to the official start of the interview that were just too good to leave on the metaphoric cutting room floor. With his blessing, I’ve pulled some of those moments out to share with you.

On this week’s show we remember frame builder Dario Pegoretti who died last week at the age of 62. Pegoretti rose to prominence in the 1990s as a contract builder who provided custom frames for professional racers painted to look like the sponsor’s bike. He was so respected he built frames for the likes of Miguel Indurain, Marco Pantani and Mario Cipollini. I spoke to three men who knew him: Don Walker, the director of the North American Handmade Bicycle Show; Josh Poertner, the CEO of Silca; and Richard Sachs, arguably Pegoretti’s closest friend in the frame building community.

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 […]

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 […]