In really short… The year, 2010. Appleman Bicycles is the brainchild of me, Matt Appleman. I’m a one-person shop and build bikes and cranks the hard way, but the right way (if there is such a thing). The materials I work with speak to me and I like to honor that by using processes that make the materials happy. 

In short, a knee injury in college sent me down the path of custom framebuilding. I built a custom frame with wacky geometry to help my knee pain. It helped… a lot. But I still had knee pain. Then I started riding shorter cranks. As I got shorter and shorter (155mm) my knee pain was gone (woo wooo). Eventually, this lead to me creating the 2XR Crankset.

The long story goes something like this… I had a knee injury. I also had a degree in composite materials engineering and had work experience building wind turbine blades and aerospace materials. 

A custom geometry frame really helped my knee pain, but didn’t completely fix it. I knew I was onto something. I also knew I didn’t like working for “the man” so I started Appleman Bicycles in 2010.

I started experimenting with shorter and shorter cranks and boom. I had a “drill and tap” set of 155mm cranks that relieved years of knee pain 🙂 (This was ~2013).

Custom frame customers also found sweet relief from appropriately sized cranks and that’s when I knew I was on to something.

Come 2022 and I really wasn’t happy with the cranks available (and my brilliant wife said it was a good idea). Like everything, I decided to make it difficult and make cranks from the ground up.

2XR Cranks are born. Designed to fit the wide range of people that ride a wide range of bikes. Uffda, thanks for reading all this.

-Matt Appleman