48 Hours with Argonaut Cycles

Cruising along scenic roads beneath the tall pines surrounding Bend, Oregon, is an experience any cyclist will appreciate. Whether you’re climbing into the sky on mountain passes or escaping deep into the forest, riding here evokes a special kind of freedom that’s at the heart of cycling. It’s a feeling.

Argonaut Cycles, based in Bend, is on a mission to give that feeling to its customers, with road and gravel bikes engineered to create a completely unique riding experience for each person. “I think there’s this moment when they’re cycling where everything kind of falls away,” says Ryan Taylor, Director of Sales and Marketing at Argonaut. “It’s this kind of magical moment that feels really close to what it would feel like to fly. With Argonaut, we’ve found technological ways to help people experience that more often.”It all happens in Bend, where Argonaut manufactures no more than 200 bicycles each year. We recently spent 48 hours at the Argonaut facility to get a glimpse at this commitment to craft and witness these custom bikes in action on the roads and trails of the Pacific Northwest.

What Makes This Carbon Special

When Ben Farver founded Argonaut in 2007, he originally worked with steel. Those early bikes shared a commonality with the Argonauts of today—they looked great. But aesthetic was the main focus, and Farver eventually grew disillusioned with the process of chasing form over function. “I wanted to make a bike where I could say that this bike rides better, it’s made better, it is better than anything you could get off the shelf, and that just didn’t feel like it was fully possible with steel,” he says.

So Farver turned to carbon. “Carbon provided an opportunity to make a bike that rode wholly different and better than the steel bikes I was making,” Farver says. But he didn’t just upgrade the material. Argonaut developed a special manufacturing process that gets maximum benefit from carbon and ensures consistency of quality for every bike leaving its doors.

Argonaut achieves that through the brand’s patented High Pressure Silicone Molding process, which lays carbon over a rigid silicone mandrel rather than an inflatable bladder, which is the standard for many in the industry. This unique molding process—done by hand in Bend—is designed to ensure uniform pressure throughout the cure process, resulting in cleaner fiber consolidation and no voids between layers.

The rest of the building process aims to deliver that same level of care. From design to assembly, each bike is built entirely in house. That means that every person who touches the frame understands the process and their role within it so they can build the best product for the person who matters: you.

Custom Fit

Everything follows fit. To determine a customer’s unique fit, Farver and team start by identifying a rider’s ideal contact points on the bike. They use those details to design the geometry underneath those touchpoints, aiming for maximum power output, pedaling efficiency, and comfort.

When customers begin building a bike with Argonaut, they have several ways to get their fit. They can use one of Argonaut’s worldwide authorized fit specialists, or if needed, use contact point data from their current bike. But the best way to get fit for an Argonaut bike is in person, in Bend. Customers are invited to come do their fitting face-to-face, where they can see the process in action and use Argonaut’s Guru Dynamic Fit Machine to dial in the details.

Bikes are available with both fully- and semi-custom frames, built around the basic platforms of the RM3 road bike and GR3 gravel bike. There’s also the hyper-limited Supernaut series, a collection of unique bikes built with artists, designers, and engineers to be a truly one-of-one ride. Getting a Supernaut is like going to a world-class restaurant and letting the chef make all the decisions: Supernaut customers (of which there are only a handful per year) step back and trust the vision of Argonaut’s builders and collaborators.

Built in Bend

It’s hard to imagine a better place to test the Argonaut vision than the endless network of roads outside Argonaut’s doors, with forest roads and scenic byways branching off in all directions. “Bend is a great place to test product. We have a really wide variety of riding here,” Taylor says. “Literally two minutes from here, we can be on dirt and not see pavement for hundreds of miles.”

Plenty of companies “test product,” but few get to do it quite like this, with world-class road and gravel riding outside their door and a bike built with quality in mind at every turn. “I truly believe the bike has helped me to be a better rider,” Taylor says. “That feeling of having the bike really work with you—you really look forward to the next time you get to ride it.”

That’s what happens when you’re truly a part of the process of building your bike. “Our customers have a real emotional connection with their bike,” Farver says.

When your bike is in tune with you, when it responds to the effort you’re putting in, it becomes natural to follow new roads to places you didn’t think you were capable of going. Wherever you ride.

Founded in 2007 by Ben Farver, Argonaut Cycles designs and manufactures the world’s best custom carbon bicycles in Bend, OR, U.S.A. Argonaut makes purpose-built bikes to heighten the riding experience. Leading the industry with their patented HPSM (High Pressure Silicone Molding) manufacturing process, Argonaut is redefining ride quality and performance of carbon bikes, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the pursuit of perfection. Argonaut bicycles are available worldwide at argonautcycles.com