Home - The Framebuilders

Looks like this website stopped updating in 2020 or so. Does anyone own this site or know why the site is stale? I point people this way (also to Made.bike and the Philly show exhibitor lists). I get an inquiry at least once a week from people looking to get a bike built/upgraded/repaired

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Seems like also their IG went silent in 2020.

The owner/s may be someone from Beaverton OR but they are hiding their WHOIS data (like it’s customary to do) so that may also be a bad address.

The domain keeps getting renewed so I bet someone is still receiving the contact info, you may want to try to reach out

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There have been several attempts or discussions of this over the past 10 years that I know of; even going back to the Framebuilder Collective. My understanding is The Framebuilder Collective was more about formalizing the trade rather than marketing individual builders but presumably, they would have eventually created a directory for member marketing as a reason to join. I think they had considered a framebuilder certificate and other approaches to standardizing the framebuilder ‘job’. I could be conflating two separate topics in my memory.

I wonder if this map was created by the guy who did the demographics study on framebuilders a few years back - I think it was for a degree project if I remember correctly? He was on this forum for a while.

My guess is they figured out the Sisyphus-like effort of the project wasn’t worth it. For those in the “Interested In Custom Frames” bubble, it seems like a great idea but the difficulty of sustained framebuilding, quickly converts a lot of big dreams into dead URLs. This in turn results in directories like this being outdated quickly.

Sometime in the past couple of months, I stumbled across a bookmarked pages that listed hundreds of builders and after randomly clicking through a couple dozen links, 2/3rds were dead or years out of date (like mine!). It might have even been this map or the underlying data because they were listed by state.

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