The Frame Builders

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Day 7

The beautiful golden goose egg.

People think that because I lobby for custom-built bikes, bikes constructed and assembled just for me, I’m immune to the charms of manufacturers’ ultimate super bikes. That’s not the case. Bikes on a rack at a high-end bike shop, bikes made from carbon fiber or Ti or steel with electronic super sets, bikes with décor paint jobs and other racy cosmetic tweaks—I definitely feel the intoxication. 

But I worry—how many John Drakes are out there to get these correct? Not enough, I bet. But why would anyone want to start with something that requires at the very least tuning, and at worst a large number of upgrades—even a full-body transplant? 

It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. 

Hey, in the end, I can’t account for your a priori, but if doing a fit first, getting it right first, getting it all dialed in at the outset doesn’t seem like the only way to go about buying a bike, well, it really ought to. 

The coolest bikes you can get. 

It’s just a fact that bikes that aren’t designed especially for you can struggle with a lack of graphical coherence. Just about any mass-produced bike you can name is an artifact of the assembly line which often kills the ride. To get a bike right, the engineering required is highly specialized. And that’s what makes getting a bike from John Drake cool. Really cool. 

Sleek and impressive, these are frames worthy of gods. 

The frame builders John Drake works with are all electrifying, luminous builders—superstars. The best in the world. Best Ti, best steel, best carbon fiber. The best. Period. And they build with full control and with one rider in mind. Every decision is made to meet the needs of one person—decisions that revolve around all the important aspects of a frame: material, geometry, ride characteristics, functional and aesthetic features, paint options, and accessory choices. These builders create frames that meet a rider’s aesthetic vision and deliver a world-class ride exactly—I repeat: exactly—as planned.

If God is your copilot, John Drake is your navigator. 

When choosing a bicycle frame, you want to let John direct you. He’s familiar with every specialty brand and builder. The ones he chooses to work with the most are also the ones he admires the most. And when he explains why he prefers these four or five or six builders, he touches on topics many of us didn’t realize we should care about (and then we do). His sentences are so perfectly measured, each one is like a no-nonsense little argument. He is better at explaining how to decide on a frame that is right for you than any book or any other person I know of and as close to, a genius at knowing and understanding the engineering and free-body physics between human and bicycle as anyone, anywhere.