For the true bike nerd, it doesn’t get much better than Ogle Designs. Josh Ogle’s work is just so meticulous, so detail-oriented, and yes, outrageously over the top. His latest work shows that more than ever with a mountain bike that borrows parts from a tiltrotor military aircraft to take internal brake routing to the next level.
It would be easy to look at the Ogle Designs v3 and miss the most insane feature about it. Unless you’re specifically looking for the brake line fittings mounted to the frame, you’d probably think it has a standard brake hose routed internally through the frame like any other modern mountain bike.
No, no, no. This is a show bike, so everything is next level. Including the brake routing. As the story goes, Josh was inspired by Sean from Soulcraft, who had a bike with hard lines in the frame back at Interbike around the year 2000. Josh bent brake lines for race cars for years and decided he wanted to make internal brake lines for a mountain bike.
So he found 1/8″ titanium tubes with the perfect internal diameter to act as hard-piped brake lines inside the frame. This tubing just happened to be used on the V22 Osprey tiltrotor military transport vehicle, and is rated to 4,200 psi. He’s been able to test the system to 3,500 psi in his shop, but doesn’t have the equipment to test all the way up to 4,200 – but it should be more than adequate for MTB use.
By welding the tubing to fittings inside the frame, Josh was able to attach brake lines directly to the frame fittings, eliminating the stretch of housing through the frame. There is a bit of housing to run the line from the front triangle to the chain stay, where it is again hard-piped through the stay back to the rear brake.
When asked, he hasn’t done the math to see if it actually saves any weight. And it requires more fittings and more work to set up initially, but damn, if it isn’t cool.
The v3 frame also represents the final changes Josh wanted to make to the design, which is how it earned the nickname ‘the Final Boss.’ And what better way to represent that than with a retro 8-bit video game inspired motif.
Typical of Ogle Designs, this is much more than a ‘finish’ with video game-inspired details printed right into the titanium components. The lugs are still designed by Josh (Ogle) and printed by Silca, and the new frame features redesigned lugs for better mud shedding and an updated internal seatpost clamp that increases the clamping area and works with less torque.
There are clever details wherever you look on an Ogle, and this one is no different. The headset cap on this bike is a 1:500,000 scale map of Durango, CO that takes an entire hour just to machine. If you look closely, Josh can point out the location of his house and shop on the top cap.
Josh made his own headset and bottom bracket for the build, as well as an Asteroids-inspired chainring. As Josh put it, Asteroids is the perfect game since it doesn’t have an ‘up and down’; it works no matter where the chainring is located.
At the back, there is an Ogle-designed derailleur stiffener, which he says is the only design that actually stiffens and straightens the derailleur to accommodate variation in UDH frames.
Due to the 3D-printed nature of the lugs, the v3 can be made with completely custom geometry (within the constraints of the suspension system), as well as custom touches to the lugs themselves. As a result, expect the bike to sell for around $27,500 as built.
