While in Ashland, Oregon over Halloween, Andy Karr was treated to a tour of Jones Bikes HQ by Jeff, Sheila, and Korbin Jones. The Joneses brought Andy in from the rain for pizza and a deep dive into the experimentation and carefully thought-out details that make Jones Bikes stand out from the crowd. Read on for a look behind the radical and rational design philosophy of Jones Bikes.
Jeff Has Ideas
Jeff Jones has ideas about how a bike should be designed and how it should ride that don’t conform to the industry norm or prevailing trends. Anyone who has looked at a Jones bike could tell you this. But what most people understand about Jeff, or his bicycles, is that these ideas are not born out of an esoteric sense of contrarianism or an attempt to be bizarre or controversial. Jeff Jones has taken a lot of time to think about riding and making bicycles, and he’s spent that time dreaming up the ultimate bicycle. He’s been on a near-religious pilgrimage to discover the bicycle since he was a kid.
Jeff’s journey with bicycles started at the age of eight. His first job involving bikes was riding a paper route at age 10. He worked in or around bike shops since his first shop gig at age 15. Jeff also owned shops and worked in quality control and design for GT Bikes. He was a regular at Interbike for most of its history. All this time, he’s been ideating, testing, and tinkering. The bikes made by Jones, with their unconventional geometry numbers and swoopy lines, are a logical, methodically engineered, finely-tuned, and purpose-built high-performance machine honed over decades of experience.
Jones Bikes
Jones bikes have always raised eyebrows and drawn attention. This has worked to his advantage in some cases (he’s always had more luck drawing interest just walking one of his bikes around the crowd at Interbike than he ever did in booths or displays), while made him a misfit in others (major cycling publications have interviewed him for stories that they never ran because they couldn’t figure out which section of the mag to run them in).
The brand fits in with, and is in many ways a product of, its location. It is headquartered in the delightfully quirky town of Ashland, not far from Crater Lake in south-central Oregon. Ashland, like Jeff Jones and his bikes, does things its own way. Readers of this site would probably find the amazing access to nature and world-class mountain bike trails and gravel forest service roads straight from downtown as the most noteworthy thing about Ashland, and don’t get me wrong – it is a real selling point for the town. But Ashland is best known for being the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the beautiful Lithia Park, and as a funky, witchy little downtown with a strong theatre-kid aesthetic.
My wife and I were there over Halloween, which Ashland celebrates with the fervor and commitment that other towns celebrate Christmas or the Fourth of July. Jeff, his wife Sheila, and their son Korbin welcomed me into the shop space the next morning, on a day they are typically closed, for a tour and a deep dive into his design philosophy.
Inside/Out
I had already been inside the workshop for an hour, deeply engrossed in bike geometry nerdery, before realizing we hadn’t left the entryway. We were deep in conversation about the concept of stability when Jeff stopped me and said, “Hey! You wanna see more of this place?”
Jones Bikes HQ is more a laboratory than a bike shop. I mean, sure, there are bike tools and stands and boxes all around. But the space is characterized by experiments. Current experiments, past experiments, successful experiments (an early Gnarwal aero bar extension: very comfortable) and failed experiments (the one-piece bar, stem, and fork combo: very uncomfortable). I can easily imagine Jones as a Frankenstein-like mad professor when he first mounted a tubeless tire to his now-signature 45 mm inner width rims.
The workshop (and it really is that, a workshop) is full of permutations and iterations. And they are everywhere. In corners, on the walls, in bike stands. One early bike particularly caught my eye because of its one-piece bar/stem/fork combo. While the standout front end is eye-catching, the prototype is important because it’s an early example of geometry that would allow you to “stand” in a more natural position, centered on the bike with hands closer to your sides when doing out-of-saddle climbing. It’s a position that’s become a hallmark of Jones Bikes.
Ashland
Jeff and his wife Sheila moved to their current location in Ashland when they started Jones Bikes more than 20 years ago. The choice of Ashland was almost entirely by accident. After selling their shops in California, they built out an RV, packed up their young daughter and their cat, and began planning a grand cross-country road trip in search of a new location to settle down and start Jones Bikes.
Before embarking on the big trip, they decided to do a quick test run of the rig and drove up as far as Ashland before turning around and heading home. But while in Ashland, Jeff went on a bike ride. Afterwards, he thought: this is it. That great American road trip still happened, but they already knew where they were going to land. They were ready to rush back and get started. And that’s what they did.
Being new to town and working on his own schedule meant that Jeff did a lot of riding alone after they first moved to Ashland. These solo mountain rides, which in Ashland are possible to start and end in downtown, were instrumental in the development of Jones Bikes. When you are riding alone, you are only riding for yourself. You’re not trying to look cool for anyone, you aren’t trying to impress anyone, you aren’t trying to ride at anyone else’s pace or speed. And you are only influenced by your own brain chatter about what you encounter on the trails.
Jeff found himself changing his bike setup almost every ride, experimenting, exploring the extremes of fit and setup. From hacking together prototypes with 90-degree seat angles (“Problem is, you can’t get off the thing; you’re so high up!”) to stem and bar combos, to just experimenting with how much he could carry on a bike. He loves his cars, also featured here, but he also loves the concept of the bike as the do-it-all machine. One of his experiments involved carrying buckets full of water down a trail to test the strength and rigidity of a prototype rack.
Bike Evolution
Jeff was just trying to make the bike he wanted to ride. He still is. Even the sizing is reflective of this. When he first got started, he made only one size. Most people thought it was one size fits all, but it really wasn’t. It was just one size. His size. When he started making more sizes, he made a smaller one, and a larger one. The “medium” is the original size, but Jeff’s a pretty tall guy, he wouldn’t ride a medium in other brands’ bikes. But the Jones medium is his size. The smaller is smaller than his size, and the large is larger than his size.
There is a common misconception about Jeff and his bikes: that he’s designed bikes as a contrarian. But the design decisions are all based on desired performance attributes. Visually, they are curious compared to convention. Even the earliest forms of the Jones Bike challenged perceptions about fit. At the time, having a lot of seatpost showing was a sign of a poor fit. He intentionally designed his bike around the longest post available at the time, the Thomson 410 mm, to give it rear compliance. When he first came out with his design, he caught a lot of heat for designing bikes that looked like mixtes. The road racing bicycle, especially at the time, was a specialized piece of machinery designed for the 30-second sprint at the end of a road race. Jones bikes are designed for riding.
Rigid
Jones bikes are rigid – they are not designed around being suspension-corrected. They are designed to be right for what they are. The saddle and bars should be level, or as Jeff puts it, “Naturally balanced.” He likened a good bike fit to building a bridge. Despite the long setback on a Jones Bike, the reach is so short, and stack so high, you end up in an upright position. With a flat, not arched back. The back is key. The fit is designed to take strain off your back. You’re always told, when lifting heavy objects, that you should lift with your knees and not your back. Any warehouse in America has signs all over the place telling you this. Enter the Jones Bikes “standing climbing” position.
You can absolutely sit and spin on a Jones bike, but you don’t have to. It climbs at will without breaking traction when you stand because you aren’t leaned forward, and thus the rear wheel stays weighted. Also, because you are not leaned over the front, you are pulling up on the bars from an upright standing position when you are really hammering uphill. Downhill, you’re making full advantage of the rollover capabilities because you aren’t pushing down on the bars from either the seated or standing position, the bars almost float in the hand.
So hitting bumps downhill neither wrecks your hands nor causes the front end to dive. The form, and famous “space frame” styling, are the results of achieving the geometry needed to enable the desired position on the bike. It’s an iconic design, but it’s not designed to look the way it does; it just came out that way. He designed it for what it needed to be. A tree looks like a tree because it needs to be a tree, not because it’s designed to look like one.
Space Frame
The swoopy lines of the “space frame” and the industrial design of the truss fork are iconic, and a central part of the brand identity of a Jones bike, as is the titanium frame material. What Jeff found was that in explaining the ride characteristics and comfort of the bike, reviews would focus more on the titanium materials and the truss fork. While good press is good press, Jeff found it frustrating that the reviews were so fixated. “No, it’s the geometry that makes it work like this!” He began producing more “boring-looking” diamond frames with unicrown forks in part to make a more affordable option, but also in part to demonstrate that the magic is in the design, not the materials.
Of course, the space frame offers some unique advantages beyond the geometry. It’s designed to flex in some interesting and advantageous ways. The unique fit of a Jones bike unlocks some incredible performance gains, the most surprising of which (for me) was the braking capability. With the center of gravity behind the bottom bracket, a 76 mm rake, and no dive or compression from the rigid fork, and endless grip from the big, soft tires, these bikes can decelerate incredibly fast and, on anything close to a flat surface, are near-impossible to endo by actuating the front brake. I watched Jeff bring a LWB to a full stop from full tilt with only the front brake. Both tires remained perfectly planted.
Long Ranger
The original Jones bike, called the Long Ranger, was inspired in part by a very long wheelbase townie bike he bought in Taiwan while working there with GT Bikes. He took his young son out on the back of the bike and found that even though the tires were skinny and the frame was stiff, the long wheelbase put the axles behind and in front of him, not under him, and it improved his comfort considerably.
These design choices have led Jeff in a different direction than conventional bike design philosophy often leads. But it’s not total divergence. There are even some places the industry is trying and even failing to follow. Mountain bike wheelbase length has been getting longer and longer, chasing after the stability that Jones bikes provide. But traditional mountain bikes are hamstrung by their reliance on suspension. Jones Bikes can’t run suspension forks. With a 3’’ rake, it is pretty much impossible to make a suspension fork work. But this is an intentional design decision. That rake gives the bike the long front end and wheelbase that gives you stability downhill, without having to lengthen the top tube and push the rider’s body weight out over the front.
Rims and Tires
Rims and tires keep getting wider and wider, and pressures lower and lower. The industry goes in increments, declaring new marginal gains in comfort and grip with each iteration. Jeff skipped all that. His rims are between 45-49 centimeters wide between the beads, his tires are between 2.8 and 3.25 inches wide, and he runs a pressure of between 10 and 11 psi. He’s been using his 50 mm external width rims since 2007. Even with the industry steadily marching towards wider and lower, these numbers are still extreme by typical standards.
But the way things are going, they may not be for long. And then Jeff will have been right all the time – not that he seems to care. Jeff isn’t looking for vindication, he’s looking for performance. “Can you imagine any other wheel and tire combo, on any other vehicle, where the rim would be half the width of the tire? No!”
His tire experiments have continued. The bike he had in the workstand had his most recent tire experiment, where he is going for the most efficient tires possible. The tires are stock 29’’ x 3.25’ (700c by 82mm) knobbies, but he’s cut all the knobs off and used a random orbital sander to bring the surface of the tire to a perfect smoothness. He says not only will they roll super fast, but they will disappear golfball-sized rocks under their supple casing. He says it feels like being on a hovercraft.
As part of his experiment, he also painted a line across the casing of the tire to measure wear. He’s found the non-drive side wears faster than the drive side. Why? The roads we ride on are subtly crowned to control runoff. The surface on the inside of the road is slightly higher than the outside. Science!
Presta to Schrader Valves
Going his own way on design has meant a fair amount of DIY. Example: most mountain bikes today still use Presta valves, which are kept closed by the internal air pressure of the tire. What Jeff found was at his desired pressure of 10-11 psi, it’s not enough pressure to keep a presta valve shut if the valve core is not screwed down properly. Given how easy it is to bend Presta valves – few maintain the tolerances required for long. This led Jeff to start experimenting with the old standard Schrader valve, which he worked with a partner to develop into a tubeless version for his bikes. There are numerous advantages to this wider valve, and few disadvantages, especially with the rim widths for Jones bikes.
As instantly recognizable as a Jones bike is, the Jones Bar (officially the H-Bar Loop, but everyone I know calls them simply “Jones Bars”) may be even more of an icon. People who have never considered, or maybe ever even seen, a Jones bike will have a set of Jones Bars on their bikepacking bike, or utility bike, or town bike. I’m one of those people. They put your wrists in a much more natural position, and are in fact inspired by Jeff’s wheelbarrow. While working on their first house in Ashland, he wondered, “If this is the best angle for comfortably controlling a heavy wheelbarrow, how would this work on a bike?” The answer, apparently: pretty well. Today Jeff sells more bars than bikes. More and more manufacturers are adopting more sweep for their bars. But here’s the thing: his bars are designed for Jones Bikes, and other bikes don’t fit like a Jones.
Jeff has advice for people who want to get the most out of their Jones Bars on a non-Jones bike. Make your bike more Jones-bike-like. Go for a setback seatpost to shift your weight back and away from your hands, bring the bars closer to the bottom bracket with a shorter stem. Bring them up with a much higher stem. Based on customer feedback from Jones Bars users, he brought the Jones H-Bar Loop 2.5 to market, a bar with a 2.5” rise to bring the ride height in line with a Jones bike.
Jones Motor Bikes
Jeff’s DIY approach and independent ethos is most apparent with his e-bikes, which are branded under Jones Motor Bikes. I asked him why the e-bikes get their own branding, and he said simply, “I call them motor bikes because… they are.” He mused that in the 1910s, no one would have put a motor on a bicycle and thought about calling it anything but. They are lightweight little motor bikes. He figures the categorization of e-bikes under bicycles is being driven more by regulatory considerations than logic. The bike industry has helped write the regulations. Technically you don’t need insurance required by the government for these e-bikes. But he reckons you should anyway.
Originally the idea behind Jones Motor Bikes was that his customers could adopt the same DIY approach to building bikes that he does, but he ultimately found few people want to do the level of tinkering he does, so instead of selling conversion parts, he focuses on complete bikes now. That hasn’t stopped him from tinkering with the designs, though.
The most truly astounding machine in the entire shop is one of his e-bikes, a test mule for forks and tires. It’s a titanium LWB e-bike modified with a larger battery, aero fairings, extra frame stiffening supports, and a system of pulleys and springs to make the mostly standard mountain bike drive train operate at higher speeds and torques. It’s easily capable of 65 miles per hour. Truly. He reckons he can break the record for shortest stopping distance from 65 miles per hour.
One of my other favorite tinkerer’s specials is the bike Jeff built for his son Korbin when he was still a kid. It’s a space frame in miniature. He modified an XTR cassette to fit onto a singlespeed hub with 135mm hubs front and rear with dishless wheels. While clearly designed as a kid’s bike, it also helped Jeff experiment with shorter cranks. He found the short crank arms weren’t any worse performing on the uphills. He likened it to running up stairs with shorter steps – it’s not easier, it’s just different.
The experiments are entertaining, no doubt, but also continue to inspire innovation. Jeff has recently been playing around with windscreens and fairings for pedal bikes, and pushing his already eye-popping e-bike motorcycle prototype further and further. He’s got a handful of new products in testing, including the Gnarwal-Ball, which looks like a little squeeze ball that mounts to the end of the Gnarwal aero bar (already unconventional in that it’s a single, not double, aero bar. The first time I saw him put his hands around it and get into position, it made so much sense to me, I was left wondering why you would ever need two of them). Like any good R&D shop, many of these innovations may never make it into the hands of customers, but some surely will.
Connecting with Customers
As much as this has been a personal and family journey, the development of Jones Bikes is still a customer-centric affair. He builds the bikes he wants to ride, yes, but the idea around the brand and the shop is to bring those ideas to his customers. Jeff was incredibly generous with his time for me, but it’s not because I had a camera, voice recorder, and a laptop.
Jeff and his family spend as much time on the phone with current or would-be customers as tinkering in the shop. The website even has a section to arrange a phone call with Jeff. Jones Bikes doesn’t exist to improve Jeff’s riding experience; it exists to improve the riding experience of their customers.
He found that many of his customers, especially those coming from road-racing bicycles, found they actually weren’t bad at riding bikes after all; they had just been using bikes that were bad for riding. With their Jones bikes, their backs felt better, and their hands stayed fresher. They could brake on a dime, comfortably carry more on the bike, and realized they were faster downhill and better at cleaning uphill obstacles than ever before. He has a lot of repeat customers, and many of them have sold off their collections of other bikes to double down on Jones.
Jeff takes pride in making high-performance riding easier. The hardest thing for his customers, he says, is learning to let go of the desire to fit in. But as the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” Jeff Jones quietly proves that performance, comfort, and joy on two wheels come not from following trends but from a fearless willingness to defy convention.