The Ornate Problem

There was a period where I would spend an entire afternoon on a detail that three people in the world would ever notice. A hand-mitered brake bridge mount. A dropout with a swoopy "A" machined into it, polished stainless, fitted like jewelry.

I thought that was what serious craft looked like. I thought the whole point was to make something so considered, so finished, that it announced itself even in the parts you couldn't see. I was wrong. It took a few years of racing to figure that out. But once I did, I couldn't unsee it.

Back when I was building steel bikes, I was deep in the world of artisan framebuilding. This was the mid-aughts, and the cool thing at the time was your logo in the dropout. Vanilla started it. Their "V" cut right into the steel.

And then everybody was doing something interesting with dropouts. It was the spot on the frame where you signed your name, and I was no different.

Mine had this stainless "A" with an organic sweep. Polished. Intricate. A total bitch to manufacture and keep straight, if I'm being honest, but that was sort of the point. The difficulty was part of what made it feel significant.

The problem was that it didn't actually do anything. And I knew that. I just didn't think it mattered yet.

The parts I'd spent the most time on kept failing first. The race doesn't care how long something took you to make.

Cyclocross is where that lesson landed hardest. Road riding is forgiving. You can hide a lot of sins on the pavement. Cyclocross is not. You're carrying the bike, throwing it into corners, racing through mud and sand, and riding in conditions that are basically designed to break whatever is fragile in your setup.

And what I kept finding, ride after ride and race after race, was that the parts I'd spent the most time on were the ones failing first. The ornate stuff. The high-touch stuff. The stuff I'd built to be noticed. The race doesn't care how long something took you to make.

What racing exposed was something I now think about as the delta between functional and ornate design. They're not the same pursuit, even though they can look the same from the outside. Ornate design is about the maker. It's a demonstration of skill, of taste, of commitment to a kind of excellence that exists partly for its own sake. Functional design is about the object and what it does.

When the two are aligned, you get something genuinely special. When they're not, you get beautiful things that fail.

The dropout I eventually built to replace that polished "A" is the clearest example I have of what the shift felt like. I'd been thinking about the Breezer-style dropout that had come out of mountain biking — a round, clean shape where the chainstay and seat stay mitered into it and brazed to a butt joint, rather than the old slot-and-fill method.

Faster to build, easier to keep straight, structurally sounder. I started there, made it oversized, and then added something that had been bothering me about cross bikes: the inability to run the same frame as both a single-speed and a geared bike. So I designed an interchangeable axle hanger that bolted in on a three-bolt pattern. Horizontal or vertical dropout, your call, same frame.

It looked good. I added a titanium insert with some machined insignia because, yes, I still cared about how it looked. I just cared about what it did first. That was the thing that had changed. The aesthetic intent had to serve the functional argument, not the other way around.

If I'm going to put something on a bike, it has to deserve to be there. It has to hold up the whole story, not just look cool in a photograph.

That sounds obvious when I say it out loud. But I think a lot of what passes for design in the bike industry — and, honestly, in many industries — is still ornate design dressed up as functional design. You can tell the difference pretty quickly when you put it under pressure.

The race is a good way to do that. So is a wet November morning in Oregon when you're three hours into a ride, and the conditions have turned, and you're relying on the machine to do exactly what you built it to do.

The RM3 and the GR3 are the fullest expression of that reckoning so far. Part of why I believe they deserve to exist — genuinely deserve it, not as a marketing claim but as a technical argument — is that they can compete at the highest levels of elite cycling. That's not the goal in itself. The goal is the ride, the feel, the experience of being on a bike that works with you, not just under you. But if a bike can't hold up to elite-level racing, I don't have a strong answer for someone who asks why it's worth what we charge. The race is still the test. It always has been.

I'm not sentimental about the steel era. I kept a steel cross bike. There's something in the feel of it, the simplicity, the way it rides that I don't entirely want to be without.

But if you put me on it and asked me to close my eyes and just pedal, I'd tell you the same thing I tell everyone. The new bikes are just so much better. Faster, more comfortable, more capable. The craft is still there. It's just pointed at something real now.

This is what racing taught me, and it's the thing it's been building toward ever since. Because if it's going on the bike, it has to earn its place.