Josh Ogle’s quest for the ultimate seatpost collar

A 14.1-gram, US$155 piece of functional titanium art.

Seatpost collars are pretty mundane pieces of kit. Barring proprietary ones with funky shapes or internal wedge-style designs, they’re basically just nominally cylindrical aluminum rings with a slot, a screw, and a lip to keep it from falling down over the seat tube. You can buy new ones from overseas suppliers for literally two bucks, or if you want to get fancy, you can splurge on a Chris King, Wolf Tooth, or Salsa’s venerable Lip-Lock. For most people, going with one of the latter in a snazzy anodized color would do the trick, and even for the nicer ones, it’s hard to spend more than US$50.

Josh Ogle is not most people.

A man with a particular set of skills

Josh Ogle is perhaps a name with which you’re not entirely familiar.

He started building frames about 30 years ago, “almost out of resentment and bullheaded persistence,” with a borrowed acetylene torch and a homemade jig made out of particle board. A gifted machinist and welder with a knack for picking up new skills and an obsessive approach to design, he was the man behind the Jericho Bicycles brand – a cult favorite around the turn of the millennium – and highly sought-after items like the Payback and Leadfoot frames, and the Suffering singlespeed chainrings.

In the mid-2000s, Ogle embarked on a tumultuous personal journey and essentially vanished from the cycling world. He built custom headers exhausts for exotic cars. He worked at a local bike shop. He even got into making custom high-end titanium watches under his own name.

Bicycles have always been Ogle’s passion, though, and a call in 2018 from an old friend brought him back into the world that he always felt was home after more than a dozen years away. That friend was Tyler Evans, one of the co-founders of Firefly Bicycles, and he told Ogle they were looking for some help with a new custom titanium seatpost collar. Ogle ended up penning the design – a gorgeous little chunk of machined 6/4 titanium with double rotating barrels to maintain proper bolt alignment, artful cutouts, and an engraved logo – and also machining it for Firefly at his California workshop in Los Angeles.

Lovely. Images: Firefly Bicycles.

Firefly was clearly pretty happy with Ogle’s work, because the collaboration has expanded since then to include stem, headset, and seatpost parts; head tube bearing seats; dropouts; rear derailleur hangers; and most recently, a custom titanium fork using a 3D-printed titanium crown and dropouts.

Ogle was quite happy operating behind the scenes to support his old buddies, but once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.

In 2021, he launched a new brand called Ogle Component Design, and relocated the next year to Durango, Colorado. That “OCD” acronym certainly rubbed a few people the wrong way, but Ogle insists it's nevertheless an accurate representation for his approach to design. In the span of just a few months, he introduced a radical aftermarket rear derailleur pulley cage assembly, a striking machined titanium chainring spider, lustworthy titanium brake rotor lockrings, and even – in what some might consider a particularly poetic return to form – modern interpretations of those old Sufferings machined chainrings.

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A machined titanium mountain bike stem came earlier this year, as well as some machined titanium bashguards that seem far too pretty to me to actually bash into anything.

One item’s been sitting on the back burner for the last four years, though, and it’s only now that Ogle has taken the time to finish it: a titanium seatpost collar of his own.