Bikes and Builders of MADE 2025 Part 2 - BIKEPACKING.com

Original text and pictures from Bikepacking.com courtesy of Nic Morales and Neil.
The full article can be found on Bikepacking.com - at this link

B Vivit from Hot Salad is an industry pro who fought her way up from being a bike mechanic to teaching the UBI framebuilding school. After UBI, she went to work for a major titanium manufacturer, Simple, later returning to the Pacific Northwest and starting Hot Salad in 2022. Primarily working with titanium, B built up one of her show bikes this year for her partner. Admittedly not a cyclist, he wanted a townie. So, B took the opportunity to remind people that she still has plenty of talent in welding steel. As you can see from the welds here, she hasn’t lost a step. Regarding her growing reorientation with the material, B said, “I think a lot of folks are re-learning about titanium. The early ’90s ones were noodles and not as fun to ride (I’m sure someone will argue); but these days, it’s a way to make a steel bike half as heavy, while adding the aluminum style stiffness. If you increase the diameter of a tube by 2x; it makes it about eight times stiffer.”

B also built the fork, and while she intended to build a rack, she ended up using an offering from SimWorks as she ran out of time. Unfortunately, B seems a typical case in the bespoke framebuilding world. Exceptionally talented, she’s about to lose her full-time job managing an outdoor retailer and will have plenty of time to build bikes. Given what’s she’s produced here and in the past, its a wonder how she has such a small queue time, as she appears to be one of the most talented framebuilders around.