‘20% of people gave me a barf emoji’: Three MADE showstoppers push steel into new territory

“Steel will never die,” Dario Pegoretti once famously declared.

The legendary Italian framebuilder was speaking about the material’s enduring quality at a time when carbon was rapidly taking over the bike industry. Nearly two decades later, while walking through the MADE bike show, Pegoretti may have been right – though not in the way he may have imagined.

Steel was everywhere at the Portland handmade bike show, as you’d perhaps expect, but what was more surprising was what builders were doing with it.