In our opinion a bicycle’s dropouts are like a framebuilder’s signature and we wanted ours to be, well… ours…

We started with a sketch (actually about 50 of them) and honed the dropouts down to their essence. We then refined the design to work in both titanium and stainless steel.

There are dimensional differences between our stainless and titanium dropouts, but our goal was to make them essentially look the same. Without measuring you can’t tell the difference between the titanium ones and the stainless ones.

We chose to CNC engrave our name/logo into the dropout face. This was important to us for many reasons. Functionally the 17-4 alloy of stainless and the 6Al/4V alloy of titanium that we use are very hard materials. Much harder than most quick release gripping surfaces. Engraving the dropout face makes it so it so the quick release has some traction on the dropout preventing potential wheel slippage under heavy load.

Another reason is that, if you strip our frames down to the bare metal, you will always know it’s a Firefly.

…and they are just so damn sexy. When they showed up from Paragon Machine Works all activity in the shop ceased… just for a moment, then the polishing of the faces began.

It seems as though there is some sort of converse rule that the cleaner you want to make something the dirtier you have to get. But I must say, there are not many things more satisfying than a good polishing session.

After polishing a dozen or so there was nothing else left for us to do but build.

So now… we build.