I’m still in shock. I have some sliders I bought years ago for my first frame that I still haven’t built yet. PMW seemed like a constant that would always be there and make things a little bit easier for both first time and seasoned builders.
Everything I have seen was pure speculation so far. I am sure there are a number of factors at play: Mark’s retirement and a young owner looking at downward trends in demand, the rising costs of doing business in the USA, especially California, the rise of 3d printing and Taiwanese contract manufacturing all contributed.
I find this part especially distasteful. Taking away one of PMW’s last intents just to get more clicks.
Especially for a group that kind of signals they stand for values and all
I am gutted for the team at PMW, they are solid people and really worked hard at supplying the industry with some of the best parts going round. I still use their tube blocks and have used their drop outs etc. Because of where I live, the cost of exchange and shipping, just made it a second guess option for me. I also was designing stuff that meant using their products wasn’t working for me. I hope they can sell their IP and material assets to be able to walk away with some reward.
Now, I’m going to be a hard arse and encourage you all to rather than bemoan the loss, look at it as an opportunity. Bring your parts design in-house and add some individuality to your bikes. Take a lot of their ideas and modify them to suit exactly what you are doing. If you don’t want to order 100 of something, get in with a couple other builders and spread the cost. We’ve already seen some awesome collaborative efforts here on the forum to design options for wide use, so you have all proven it can be done.
Yes, it’s heart breaking to see PMW go, but if it affects your business you have been given an opportunity to evolve differently to your first plans. I feel most of you will actually benefit and in time Metal Guru and BFS with also get more business for the parts you don’t want to design. And that is ok too.
I initially found it distasteful as well, but I am glad I found out when I did so I could order spare parts for the Syntace dropouts I have used on all my bikes, especially since now I have found out that Syntace also appears to be ceasing operations, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to get them anywhere else. If I were running the Radavist, I might have felt a responsibility to my readers and preempted Paragon so they could get in on the inevitable run on parts as early as possible.
Ideally Paragon would have emailed all recent customers first so that they had a chance to get the parts needed to complete their current builds.
@visusest ‘s hint about about exporting dropouts from BikeCAD to FreeCAD was useful for me. I figured out that you can download the RattleCAD component library (free). It is an obscure “tclkit” file, but with Claude Code’s help I was able to extract the stp files within, including the most popular Paragon dropouts and all of the models that I’ve used.
Here is DR4043 loaded in Fusion. That is a UDH Rocker insert plus frame part and all hardware:
DM me if you need one of these and are stuck. I want to respect PMW’s decision to pull the STEP files from their website while they are trying to sell IP.
To be fair to the radavist, I got the original email from paragon at 10:30 and the radavist article was posted several hours later. Between those two times the news was already out there through private channels spreading like wildfire, dms/dozens of panic texts, radavist was just the first to put an article out which quotes that email. Paragon would know that the second that email went out the news would be out regardless of when they intended to publicly announce it. Even if they emailed all recent customers the same way, it would have had the same effect.
Yes and no. Countless FBs used Campy dropouts, Prugnat lugs or whatever, and didn’t make a single damn frame component in a long career. The trade has always made it easy to make frames this way, a very low barrier to entry.
And when a company did design and make their own lugs and dropouts, sometimes they were ugly and weak. Maybe I value individuality less than some, but I’d rather have a proven design than a clunky one with ugly curves.
As a guess, I’d say less than 5% of readers of this forum have the wherewithal or desire to make in-house all the stuff that they used to get from PMW. If you do, then I say “awesome”, the world needs more of that, but I’m not going to shame a FB who prefers to buy dropouts rather than design and fabricate them. Some people just want to make frames, not dropouts.
There is absolutely no shame in buying in parts to make the whole. Making parts, especially in low numbers is painful both time and money wise. Frame builders by necessity are pretty resourceful and just reminding them that there are work arounds to the new situation.
Paragon closing is a real shame. Mostly for the staff. As builders, we’ll work around it. I suspect it’s less of an issue for builders outside of the US. I’ve used a lot of their parts in the past. Their PolyDrops are a pretty integral part of one of my models, and I’ll need to do some redesign on that front. I’ve wanted to move away from that dropout for a little while for various reasons, but now I guess I’m forced to.
I totally respect Paragon’s right to extract as much value as they can out of the remaining assets and IP, and so I feel a little funny about sharing step/CAD files. They offered those as a courtesy to us all under very lax terms, which was very generous. That said, I’d love to see the files for the replaceable/consumable parts/inserts/hangers etc be made available under some kind of free-use licence. I’d hate to see dropouts and frames be rendered unusable in the future because of the lack of replacement parts.
Making your own parts is fun, and I’ve recently been working on a chainstay yoke for a MTB. The process has gotten easier with 3D printing at home for prototypes, then outsourcing final production (in my case through SendCutSend). As a hobby builder I have no cost schedules to pay attention to.
I appreciated PMW existing because their parts were generally well designed, very well made, and easy to source.
This is exactly why I was interested in finding the STEP files for the inserts. My bikes and many of my friend’s bikes use the rocker and slider dropouts. I’d rather buy machined inserts than make my own, even though I do have a CNC machine capable of making them.
Hopefully Paragon is successful in selling their most popular designs and we have a long term solution going forward.
