Stinner Frameworks Reveals Updates to Its Handmade USA Enduro Bike

You’ve likely seen the Romero floating around, but if you haven’t, it's Stinner Frameworks' latest passion project, and a tease in the back of my mind since I saw it at MADE 2025. It was elegant, sure, but as anyone who has spent years at a shop bench knows, "elegant" can sometimes be a code word for super expensive and delicate. That isn’t the case with Stinner's first swing at a full-suspension mountain bike using the Ministry Cycles 3VO linkage.

The goal is to get this handmade steel-and-alloy 160mm/170mm enduro bike into a cost-effective package without losing that "made-in-the-USA" craftsmanship, and I cannot wait to get my hands on one.

In the latest update from the Stinner Frameworks shop in Santa Barbara, Aaron Stinner and his team pull the curtain back a little further and offer a tantalizing peek at Version 2 and 3 of the Romero, and I’m here to tell you that the changes are exactly what we wanted to see. The big news? They’ve ditched the one-piece billet machined rear end for a welded, rectangular aluminum tubular structure. This hasn’t changed the interface with dropouts, though. They’ve kept the modular dropouts, allowing for chainstay adjustments between 435mm and 445mm and easy mullet compatibility for those of us who like a smaller rear wheel. 

Why the shift from machined to tubular? This approach tackles two of the biggest hurdles for handmade bikes: stiffness and affordability. By moving to in-house welding and a tubular design, Stinner aims to create a product that is not only stiffer and more tunable than the original Ministry-designed concept but also more accessible to the rest of us. That means standardizing the hardware in the pivot and making this an easy bike to wrench on.

They’ve moved to extended race bearings, which completely eliminates the need for those annoying loose spacers. Even better, they’ve standardized the hardware - almost all the bolts on the linkage are identical, meaning you won’t need a specialized toolkit to keep this thing running.

The "ease of living" features don't stop there. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest has made me a bit of a weatherproofing snob, and although the Romero is born and bred in California, Stinner wants this bike to be without penalty all across the world, so seeing O-rings and quad seals added at the bearing ingress points is a great way to do that.

Stinner’s crew has over a century of cumulative wrenching experience, and it shows. They’re building a bike for the rider who wants to ride the bike hard and then be able to service their bearings with a pair of vice grips if they really have to. I, for one, can’t wait to see this thing get out of the CAD files and onto the dirt.