the little things that mattered

The wording on the homepage of Paragon Machine Works reads as follows:

We are ceasing all major operations as of March 27th, 2026. Thank you to our staff and customers for their amazing support during our 43 years of business. We are deeply grateful.

We understand this is shocking news and appreciate your patience and support during this very difficult transition.

These words appeared on the PMW homepage last Thursday, following an email sent by Calvin Norstad out to the huge rolodex of framebuilders who have been relying upon Paragon for everything from dropouts to headtubes, for the past 43 years. Paragon had been built from the ground up by Calvin’s dad, Mark, and by the time Mark retired a couple years ago had become THE go-to supplier for just about every framebuilder in this country, and many around the world. This sudden closure sent a percussive shockwave through the boutique bike world.

Consumers of Trek and Giant and Specialized bikes may not have heard of Paragon, but anyone who has bought a handbuilt frame from a TIG-welder or Oxy/acetylene torch-wielding sole proprietor craftsman in the past few decades has almost certainly had Paragon parts somewhere on their bike. Paragon crafted parts from steel, aluminum, and titanium, and whether talking about bottom bracket shells or brake bosses, head tubes or dropouts, cable guides, derailleur hangers, frame couplers, skewers, massive 66-tooth chainrings, or the subversive cool of stealthy weed pipes or titanium bottle openers, regardless of the material, the metal shipping out of the Norstad’s machine shop in Richmond, California was guaranteed to be in spec. and to be the right parts for the job. Whatever that may be.

In addition to their torch skills, many custom framebuilders are also handy machinists. It comes with the territory; creative artists working with metal evolve from trying to find a way to get their tube mitering super clean and their frame alignment just right to milling the very specific parts they need one by one. Many of them are incredibly skilled. This is an artisanal world top-heavy with talent; applying it to bicycles that at their best are custom-fitted, rideable works of art. They can design and machine and weld together just about anything. But it’s a labour-intensive, costly process. Paragon made all their lives easier, supplying well-engineered metal frame parts precisely machined to an almost jewel-grade finish that matched the aesthetic and qualitative needs of the best of them. In the framebuilding world, and among the shop rats of Northern California and beyond, Paragon was hallowed ground. An institution.

The very first shop I worked at, back in the twilight of the 1980s – Velo City Cycles on Stanyan Street in San Francisco – had a pair of machined PMW hubs sitting in the display case alongside the Potts stems and WTB rollercams and Chris King headsets. Those hubs, with their legendary skull and crossbones logo, crossbones poking out the eye sockets, they called to me. But my ramen and peanut butter budget couldn’t fit them into my world. Perhaps sensing my dismay, Velo City’s owner, Holland Jones, slyly handed me an old Mafac patch kit tin one day. Nestled inside it was a tiny Paragon pipe and a nugget of weed. This gift felt like an initiation, a rite of entry into mountain bike mysticism.

By the mid-1990s, I found myself annually trotting around Interbike. And every year, I would find my way to the back corner where the traffic was light, and where Mark Norstad, Bruce Gordon, Ron Andrews (King Cage), Wes Williams, Chris Paretich, sometimes Jeff McWhinney, sometimes Gary Helfrich, and a rotating cast of metal fabricating geniuses would be holding down their patch of turf with anarchistic prowess. They were SOPWAMPTOS. The Society Of People Who Actually Make Their Own Shit. It was an honor to be tolerated, sometimes even welcomed, into that fold, even though I regularly felt like the dumbest person in the room by a country mile. They would tell stories of riding freight trains and making potato cannons, while casually showing off LEFT HAND DRIVE replicas of Campagnolo track gruppos, jewel-like titanium cantilever brakes that Bruce sort of shrugged off as just a small part of an achingly beautiful whole, or titanium cruisers whose tubes were bent seemingly impossibly and then joined with a perfection that was mind-blowing.

Paragon was about more than machining sweet parts. Paragon was a wild counter to the mass-produced lack of imagination. Paragon was a cultural incubator. Paragon was about challenging builders to dream big, then making the parts that helped them bring those dreams to life.

But what do I know? I’m the dumbest guy in that room. So, I asked the two people who I have bought frames from this decade what Paragon means to them, and what their absence means to the rest of us. Both are exceptional craftsmen, skilled welders and machinists; Cameron Falconer and Todd Ingermanson.

Cameron Falconer:

PMW meant good, reliable parts made by people I largely know. Mark changed our industry, he led the development of readily available titanium parts since the beginning of titanium’s validity as a frame material. He also was the leader in the evolution of steel frame parts from cast parts to machined, the TIG welded steel world would look very different without PMW. PMW also meant good tools; Mark made tons of tubing blocks, not sexy but they turned out to be helpful in a big way. 90 percent of my tube holding is based on their blocks. Some truly brilliant people came out of Paragon, namely Chris Paretich and Jeff McWhinney.

As to PMW closing shop… Oh boy… At the least this means making bikes just got harder and more time-consuming. Having to sort out a bunch of new part suppliers that can fill the gap is going to be a time suck and who knows if they will produce what I want. A perfect example is front thru axle dropouts. I don’t know anyone who makes similar products and I don’t want to use cast stuff. It doesn’t look right to me. Those of us who choose to push the boulder of framebuilding up the mountain all have little stuff that is important to us that we don’t want to compromise on. For me one of those hills I will die on is using as many USA made parts made by my friends as possible. Does this matter? No, not in a functional way, but I want to stick with my beliefs on what makes a good bike. I think some builders may fold, the hourly wage making custom stuff isn’t great and the close of PMW just gave us the opposite of a raise. I’m fairly lucky as I mostly use dropouts I designed and had made, so I’m less affected than many. Particularly, the people who make mainly titanium bikes are in a tough spot. PMW was the best game in town.

Todd Ingermanson (Black Cat Bicycles):

What did PMW mean to me? Dang, hard to say exactly. When thinking about Paragon, it’s hard to distinguish the organization from Mark Norstad. The whole thing is in orbit around him, even after his retirement, so when talking about PMW on the grander scale, it’s really talking about Mark. The single word that comes to mind is “grace”. Graceful in his designs, graceful in his business dealings, graceful in his social dealings, and graceful in his place in the bike business, even outside the micro-niche of modern framebuilding. I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with Mark and the team of solid folks he put together on several levels, personally and professionally, and every time I come away with positive feelings. They all put forward an example of how to be enablers, in the best possible way. The entire modern framebuilding scene (and by extension, the entire bicycle industry) is a testament to Mark and Paragon. Ideas that are now industry standards came from – or were enabled by – Mark and Paragon. Their importance to modern bicycles can’t be overstated.

The impact of Paragon closing is one of those things that’s impossible to answer because it’s a case of omission. What ideas won’t come from the ground up anymore? Who won’t get turned on to making stuff, because making bikes is a catalyst to “greater” things? What are the easy answers?

It’ll devastate the hobby builder. It’ll create a much higher barrier to entry for those folks. For a newbie, a box from Paragon is like Jules’ briefcase in Pulp Fiction. It’s magic.

It’ll be a bit of a nightmare for a more established builder. I’ve purchased parts when Paragon parts weren’t available (thanks, Covid), and they looked right, but they didn’t actually meet the standard to function. I had to spend a bunch of time modifying the part to work right. Paragon parts always work and it becomes most apparent when you try to sub something out.

I think the biggest effect is the continued dispersion of the supply chain. One of the things that’s really making the bike biz hard right now is paying the ever-expanding shipping costs for individual parts or each component as suppliers close or reduce inventory. That reality has shrunk margins for everyone, but when you have to get your cable stops from a different place than where you get your headtubes it’s going to be hard to absorb for a lot of folks. It will be a huge disadvantage to smaller organizations who can’t go big on their ordering. Smaller organizations are more agile, so as usual, it’ll take longer for innovation to bubble up, and we’ll be even more tied to the top-down, model-year cycle, with every bike looking just like all the other bikes, with all the same features.

Paragon closing creates a vacuum that will invariably be filled to some extent by several organizations, but Paragon has been an institution since the American Bike Biz was – at best – a cottage industry. Having that pedigree is a real thing, and we’re all poorer when that goes away. Paragon and Mark understand what it takes to build a frame and what it takes to be a framebuilder, so no longer having them in our corner is a real loss.

I’ve always kept an eye on trying to be my own supply chain, so it’s not going to affect my bikes too obviously, but there are fewer and fewer people out there making a living doing this. Having “competitors” in your circle of friends is about as cool a life as you can wish for, and the closure of Paragon both makes that circle smaller, and makes staying in that circle harder.

Stories of Mark come back to that “grace” word. About 20 years ago I came up with a swinging dropout idea for single speeds, that eventually became somewhat of a standard for chain tension. I quietly shopped the prototype around for someone to make for me, and when Mark saw it, his eyes got big and he was very complimentary (which was not the usual reaction). Most saw it as a threat to their widget, and pooh-poohed it, but Mark was immediately positive. While he didn’t end up making them for me, he let me have my run at selling the dropout (which established and built my business) – being a direct competitor of his own product for years – before he gracefully let me know I’d had my run, and he needed to make his own version of it. He was careful to make a version of it, not a copy, which he very easily could have done. Most who took the idea tried to play it off as their own and avoid eye contact. Not Mark. Grace.