Is this bike gloriously impractical or simply amazing? As seen at the 2026 MADE Bike Show, the Paladin AM1’s front triangle is machined as a single solid piece on a multi-axis CNC machine. Reportedly, around 30 hours of machine time goes into producing one of these frames.
This bike stopped me cold while walking down the aisles at MADE this year. The Paladin AM1 doesn’t look like it was built so much as it looks like it was grown out of a solid block of metal and then had everything unnecessary carved away. Which is essentially what happens with CNC machining— and it’s extravagant, as the amount of machine time that goes into one of these frames has to be hard to justify on paper.
Not welded. Machined.
Most frames — steel, titanium, aluminum, whatever — get to their final shape by joining tubes together. Paladin skips that step entirely. The AM1’s front triangle is machined as a single solid piece on a multi-axis CNC machine, using a process built in-house rather than licensed from anywhere else. The head tube, seat tube, and bottom bracket all come out of the same chunk of material, with the top tube hollowed out from the sides like an I-beam and the downtube hollowed and closed up with a double-lap shear joint. No welds, no lugs, no bonding.
Machined out of a block of 7075 aluminum, it’s the same family of aerospace alloy found in high-load structural parts. It’s known for being difficult to weld, which is why nobody builds frames out of it the conventional way. Machined, it’s reportedly almost twice as strong as the 6061 aluminum most welded frames use. Paladin claims it holds up something like ten times longer under repeated loading.
The bike reads more like a piece of industrial design sitting on a pedestal than a bike frame sitting in a booth.
Geometry
I didn’t hear a claimed weight, but Paladin intends it as a purpose-built all-mountain platform. Riders can choose 150mm or 140mm rear travel depending on how you spec it, as well as configurable wheel size and chainstay length so you can tune the bike to how you ride rather than picking from three fixed trims.
Boost spacing, a threaded 73mm bottom bracket, SRAM UDH hanger. The head angle sits around 64.5–65 degrees depending on travel and wheel size, reach scales from 420mm up to 500mm across the size range, which puts it solidly in modern-progressive territory without going full extreme.
Who is Paladin
The team’s background isn’t in the bike industry, and it’s not even their day jobs. They’re mechanical engineers who picked up mountain biking and pointed some very serious manufacturing capability at making something unique.
Right now the AM1 is in preorder territory — frame-only or custom build, built to order out of their Portland shop, with room for custom builds and engraving if you want to go that route.
Learn more at https://paladinbikes.com/