Last weekend I made a quick run up to Santa Cruz to meet up with the legendary Paul Sadoff of Rock Lobster Cycles. Paul’s a super cool mellow guy with a long history of frame building. He got his initial introduction into frame building from Ross Shafer who was the talent behind Red Bush Cycles and the original Salsa Cycles. I asked him about the name Rock Lobster and he confirmed that it was a name he borrowed from the B-52’s. He said that in the early 80’s most of the mountain bike names were either named after the builder or were really macho like Stump Jumper or Rock Hopper and he wanted more of a fun name. Perhaps he took some inspiration from Ross Shafer on choosing the name too. When you go through his bicycle wonderland of a shop you see beautiful bikes and lots of little Lobster toy’s all over the place.  Paul builds with steel and aluminum and has even worked with titanium in the past. Strongly consider Rock Lobster for your next road, mountain or cross bike.

Here’s the outside of his shop




Pretty cool window display with dead Rock Lobsters, Fat Chance, Mountain Goat and Colnago frames.







Here’s the bike Paul rode up on



Dig the Nontrager decal



This is the first frame Paul ever built. He said he did a pretty whacky job on the geometry but learned a lot from mistakes

In this mix are some of his earliest frames, a killer Della Santa and the bike that Paul rode the Paris Brest Paris race on.






The scenery in Santa Cruz is spectacular as was the Nopales breakfast burrito.



This view is just south of Carmel, California