Hi Jarod, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story. When I discovered your work, I immediately felt connected to your approach. Would you like to tell us when and how your love for bicycles began?
Hey Emanuele! I can’t really nail down a time for when my love for bikes began. I’ve always had one around when I was young, so it’s possible I took the whole bike thing for granted a bit, so in my view, I’ve always had love for them. When I start thinking about HOW my love began, my mind goes straight to all the rides with friends, the late night adventures, the freedom, the speed, the sense of accomplishment at the top or a climb or the end of a ride, and let’s not forget all the beautiful views. What’s funny though, as I’m listing all of those things out, I’m realizing none of them are about the physical bicycle itself, but the experiences they’ve allowed me to have. I should probably stop looking at my bike so much and go ride it.
Photo credits: Evan Christianson
Do you remember the exact moment when you realized bicycles would become something more than just a means of transportation, almost a personal language to express yourself?
Man you have me digging pretty deep at 11pm on a Monday night! I can already tell I’m going to be working through some thoughts and feelings for the first time unpacking questions like this, but I’m here for it, and I’m going to work hard at giving you some earnest answers.
Getting back to it, I might just be learning about this now as I try and answer this question. Only when looking back do I realize I started learning this “language” back when I was building my first frame at UBI. I didn’t know it though, I was just trying to build a sweet bike. Maybe what I’m getting at is that self expression might not be the driving force behind me making anything, I just want to build stuff I like for people I like. I guess I’m realizing all the ways I’ve chosen to do things have been the expressions all along whether I was aware of it or not.
You describe yourself as a “bicycle nerd,” and I honestly love that. Today, what gives you more satisfaction: repairing and evolving bicycles through mechanics, or creating a frame completely from scratch? And why?
Bicycle mechanics to me is just solving little puzzles all day, and as much as I like problem solving and tinkering around on bikes, there is more space to create in bike fab, and creating something is magnitudes more interesting and satisfying to me. I usually get a stronger sense of pride and accomplishment after completing a fab project than when I’m done fixing a bicycle. There are exceptions though, and certain things have to align for the above to be true. For example, I’d find more satisfaction in helping someone in the middle of a tour get back on the road again than I would building a frame for a shitty person. As much as I like making stuff, the “why” I’m making something is important too.
“If you don’t let your curiosity take the reins from time to time, you’ll be hard pressed to come up with anything considered authentic to yourself.”
Photo credits:Alex Gonzalez
In your work, there’s a strong attraction to unusual solutions and unconventional structures. Do you think curiosity is the most important force for continuing to create something authentic?
You know, for me, I do think it’s the most important. It’s the force that drives my “what ifs”, and those are always fun and interesting things to fool around with. If you don’t let your curiosity take the reins from time to time, you’ll be hard pressed to come up with anything considered authentic to yourself.
When I think there’s room for a bit of creativity, I’ll try and come up with something different, but more often than not, I realize that there are some things that are done for a reason, it’s been sussed out by generations of builders, and even though I have this cool idea, it might not be the best way of doing things. Even so, I don’t let that discourage me from exploring these things because even if I land back on the standard way of doing things, filtering through my own ideas gives me the opportunity to be authentic to myself.
I know your bicycles are born slowly, without rushing, almost as if every detail needs its own time to exist. How important is silence and the time spent simply looking at a bike before modifying or welding it?
I spend a lot of time in my head as I build, and for many different reasons. I could be going over the order of operations, or how a file stroke at this end of the tube will affect the angle and fitment of the tube on the other end. Sometimes it’s purely a matter of aesthetics, like I’ll just sit there and think: Would a curved stay bridge look better than a straight one? Well If I do that one curved, this thing over here should be curved, but if it’s curved, will it be as strong? Does it even have to be strong? And then I’ll try and start doing structural analysis in my head, which is something I have no business pretending to know anything about! Oh man, the rabbit holes I go down. But all these moments of just sitting with my thoughts, sometimes collected, sometimes scattered, help me come out on the other end of things with a fairly well thought out build.
I’d love to say the time spent just staring at my project is akin to Rembrandt carefully considering his next brush stroke, but in reality, it’s not that deep and I’m mostly just trying to not mess things up.
I completely fell in love with your “Space Truck” built for Josh. As someone who loves old mountain bikes and runs the Save The Rat Bike project, I was fascinated by the way you transformed an existing bicycle into something completely new and deeply personal. Do you enjoy starting from old or forgotten bikes to give them a second life? What fascinates you most about that process?
What fascinates me most is that Im giving an old frame a chance at a new life or at least extending its life. Being able to take a bike from useless, to useful, like what I did for Josh’s wrecked Spacehorse, feels like a super power. One of the other things I like about starting with an old frame is that I can take something that’s been mass produced and make it into something different and unique, something it really had no shot of ever being. Stayer, for example, is doing a great job at this whole second life thing by offering to make old frames into cargo bikes for their customers. There’s something poetic about taking a frame that Big Bike calls obsolete and making it into one of the most practical and hardest working style of bikes out there. It’s kinda beautiful.
“The origin story behind the custom is deeper and much more personal, and even though you might not be able to read it, the story is right there embedded into the frame.”
I imagine AMG Cyclery as more than just a bike shop, almost a meeting place. What has working there taught you?
I’ve been in retail for pretty much my whole working life, and over and over it’s pounded into you about how important the customer is, how they’re always right, and how they’re even kings. For the most part I’ve understood the concept, acting mostly in line with the customer-first mantras, and tried my best to provide good customer service. And while this way of thinking worked fine over the years and usually kept me out of bad Google reviews, the concept of how important the customer really is didn’t hit home until AMG opened and we had zero customers.
Upon the realization that the success of the company, and ultimately my job, depended solely on the customer, I became awfully thankful for the folks who walk through the door. Providing a good customer experience shifted from something “you just do” to something way more meaningful and genuine and I’d like to think that the customers can feel the difference. Two years after opening and you can really see the shop settling in and finding its place within the community, perhaps even becoming a third space to some.
Living in Seaside, California, what are the roads, landscapes, or moments that make you feel truly connected to riding?
It’s hard to beat a ride around the peninsula along Sunset Drive during, well…a sunset, or riding on the beach during low tide. There’s just something about looking out at that big water that always helps recalibrate my perspective on things. Now you’d think I was a beach person with answers like that, but I hate the sand, it’s just impossible to deny the beauty of it all. As someone who is involved in bicycles in my day to day life the bike itself can be very distracting to me and it’s the moments when I’ve forgotten all about my bike, that I feel most connected to the ride. Seems like the more I’m able to forget, the more I can experience.
When you build something new, do you start with a precise idea, or do you let the project slowly transform itself during the process?
I’m thinking there’s a mix of both going on. I’ll typically have an idea of what I want the end product to be. I’ll usually sketch through some ideas or draft out a 1:1 model, take aim and try my best to hit the target. It seems it’s almost inevitable that something will lead me in a different direction I hadn’t prepared for, but it’s these little side quests that are my favorite to work through because I get to flex my creative muscle and come up a unique or resourceful way of doing something. My trick is to keep an open mind, so that if something goes different than planned, it doesn’t destroy my idea of what the end product was supposed to be.
With Kory York, I personally realized that turning your passion completely into work can create enormous stress, to the point of risking the beauty of what you love. That’s why today, with Kole, I’m trying to follow a slower and more intimate approach, creating for only a few people, and I feel very close to your way of living things. But the dream of being completely independent always remains somewhere in the background. How do you personally balance this? Do you think one day you’ll fully make the jump, or do you prefer maintaining this freedom?
I’m lucky enough to like what I do for a living as a bike mechanic, so there isn’t much pressure to make a jump over to full time bike fab. While the freedoms and possibilities that come with being independent sound pretty damn romantic, I know that they come with their own set of risks and responsibilities, and that kinda leads my attention towards figuring out a balance between having a part time job and doing some sort of bike fab on the side. My focus would probably be less on frame building, and more on smaller projects like minor frame repair/mods, racks, or even pre-made components/accessories that I can make on my own time. I have some ideas, but they aren’t necessarily priorities at the moment, just some stuff I’m chewing on.
In the creative world, it often feels like everything has to grow fast: more production, more visibility, more pressure. Do you think it’s still possible today to create without losing yourself?
As a hobbyist, it’s hard to answer this question with any real experience behind the answer. The only pressures I get are from my friends I build for, things like “What’s taking so long” or “Why does a fork take you two months to build”. I’m mostly kidding, but also not.
It might all come down to being honest with yourself regarding your mental, physical, emotional and even financial capacities. If any one of them starts getting stressed, it’s going to affect the others in unhealthy ways. So my answer is yes it’s still possible to create without losing yourself, but it requires you have to have realistic expectations and the readiness and willingness to self regulate, and if you have to pull back and reevaluate everything, I don’t see that as a failure, I see that as self respect.
If someone found one of your bicycles twenty years from now, covered in scratches, dust, and memories… what would you hope they could feel about the person who built it?
I know it’d be asking a lot, but I’d hope they’d be able to recognize the time and effort invested. It’s easy not to think about those things if you didn’t build it, but behind every project there are countless hours spent drawing, cleaning, measuring, cutting, filing, drilling, double and triple checking, brazing, sanding and so on. I know it’s not anyone’s job to consider that stuff when looking at a bicycle, but when you compare a frame that was pumped out of a factory vs. one that was custom made, just know the origin story behind the custom is deeper and much more personal, and even though you might not be able to read it, the story is right there imbedded into the frame.
Realistically, all that I could hope for as a builder is that the stuff I make isn’t made in vain and that it gets put to use, maybe one day it could even inspire someone to pick up a torch and pursue fillet brazing just as I had and the whole story can repeat itself. What an amazing outcome that would be.
