Meriwether didn’t last that long or make a ton of frames but I thought this would be an interesting exercise to show what was made. The table below shows the various types and quantity of frames over the last 14 years and as you can see… it ain’t much. I’m not an efficient worker, i have shiny obect syndrome, and sweat the details too much, but I’m proud of what i accomplised in framebuilding even if it wasn’t financially successful. All builder’s new businesses start out slow, making a frame every so often when time allows, then ramping up when possible (and when you have enough orders). We all have life challenges but for context in my time as a builder, i threw a move from Colorado to California in 2012, my dad needing a lot of help in his last year in 2019, and then a serious injury that took me out of the shop for a few months in 2022.
Starting out I learned a lot from the various framebuilding forums, primarily Mtbr and Velocipede Salon. I remember reading a post from Doug Fattic that said something to the effect of, “lots of people can build a nice frame, but not everyone can build a nice frame fast enough to make money.” This echoed in my head a lot over the years. I kept thinking that as i built more i’d get faster, but the bikes kept getting more complicated and i admit that was somewhat self-inflicted. I hope others that build can find the needed balance to make it work, and to you that don’t build: keep supporting those framebuilders and buy their bikes!
Here’s the breakdown of the table in words. I’d be fun to see the same type of table for builders that have made a living at it over the long term. You can see small trends with what’s popular and when.
I made 227 frame & 110 forks – only steel for the first 6 years then built 54 Titanium frames over the last 8 years. I built 10 cyclocross, 67 MTB, 28 plus, 69 Gravel, 46 Fatbikes, and 6 road frames. I built 26 frames for myself (including prototypes), 68 for friends & friends of friends, and 133 for people i’d never met before they contacted me for a bike. For comparison, Moots makes at around 100 frames a month and has around 20 employees.
My takeaways of the table:
- I started out making forks with almost every frame. Forks are cool but definitely not a money maker. Also probably not a good idea to build when you’re just starting out welding and fabricating. They complete the package and are a selling point, but they took a lot of time I should’ve spent focusing on frames. (I’ve had 4 forks break, two at the steerer tube and two at the fork blade, all on segmented forks. These 4 forks were owned by 2 people, so maybe they were just hard on forks but i learned a lot from the failures and changed what I did on future forks because of those failures.)
- I made a lot of bikes stuffing the biggest tire into the shortest chaintays possible. This was the trend at the time but isn’t easy and has compromises in tube selection, Q-factor, and max chainring size you’re able to use. I sort of became known for plus and fatbikes which had an ever-evolving list of “standards” to design around and it was a challenge and expensive to build this way.
- I made a lot of friends bikes. In the first few years that makes sense – nobody will pay for a frame from you anyways. But I didn’t actually sell a frame to someone i did not know until my 3rd year after about 30 frames under my belt. Having a lot of friends who ride bikes is great for product testing and getting your confidence up in a relatively low risk way. But I should have charged more to make it sustainable.
- I usually turned people away when they asked for road bikes but I still built 6. Even though they seem simpler to build than a MTB, they would take me longer since i never built them and wasn’t versed with the specs and tubesets. I should have focused on my strengths and avoided my weaknesses.
- I made 10 “true” cyclocross bikes that were used to race. Somewhere around 2014, gravel took over and people would use their gravel bikes for racing cross. These are the trends i find so interesting. You could break the table down even more with type of brake to see when canti or v-brakes finally died and discs took over. Another trend that’d be fun to track is geometry by seeing how head angles slackened over the years, or front center distances.
- The peak of my Plus and Fatbike orders was 2015 and by 2018 it was more or less done. The 2.6 size had been settled upon as better for most riding and also just easier to build around. True plus sizes live on for bikepacking rigs but the number of tires available has drastically declined. After 2018 I received almost zero fatbike orders if it wasn’t for building some frames for Corvus. I felt like fat and plus were the majority of my queue for several years and that vaporized very quickly. If the type of bike you’re known to make is no longer cool, best pivot fast, and for most that was pivoting to gravel.
- Gravel…whether you like the name or not it took off in 2015 and hasn’t looked back. The few i built before 2015 are post-hoc gravel bikes, as in they’re not cross and they’re not MTB’s but would be considered gravel bikes now. I’d argue more tires and components have been designed for this category of the bike market than any other during the last 20 years. Fat and Plus had a lot of new standards and tires, but not the sales. I have always loved “dirt-drop” bikes, basically what Charlie Cunningham, Steve Potts, and Bruce Gordon did in the 80’s, and what Rivendell’s Allrounder did in the 90’s, so my gravel bikes have emulated that style or feel of riding – bigger tires, higher bars, not race bikes but allrounders. Again, this is (or was) on the edges of popularity and did not garner a lot of orders.
- Titanium. Getting into Ti was by far the most expensive decision i made. The tubing is obviously expensive and it is very different to machine so will eat up drill bits and endmills if you don’t know what you’re doing. It uses a ton more argon per frame, I don’t know the actual ratio, but it’s a lot more than steel. It is a fun material to weld and ride but my favorite part is it can be built up as soon as you complete the finishwork. Speaking of…if you are manually doing the finishwork it can be brutal…and requires sharp cutters and you’ll want earplugs. I see now why shops only will build in Titanium. I invested in tooling that allowed me to do some of the finishwork on the mill and lathe, expenses you don’t see back in frame sales. Raise prices? One can try but you may not get the orders since you’re not considered on the same level as the builders that have been doing Ti for decades.
That’s all i got but will add thoughts if they come up later.
Check the In the Wild gallery for some of the bikes made over the years…