U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
This is Julie’s Mudhoney PRO, our top of the line cyclocross race bike. This one has Sour Apple Chris King disc hubs and matching headset, both the wheel and bike builds done by the good folks at Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington, MA. This is a fast bike for a fast rider, and we think it came out great.
This is Ken’s Evergreen SL, another great build from Bob at Wheel Werks in Crystal Lake, IL. It’s hard to tell how well the bike came out, because Ken more or less immediately put it through hell (see his comment below), and he sent pictures with it still covered in mud from one of the more intense editions of the Dirty Kanza in recent memory. We love it.
Ken says:
The bike is great, couldn’t be happier. Two days after I picked it up I did a 300k and if performed perfectly in terms of fit and performance. Also did Dirty Kanza 200 a few weeks later, same thing (rider, not so good…19hrs, 59 minutes).
See more of Ken’s photos here.
June’s Dusk to Dawn Ride was another inaugural event for Overland Base Camp, the more organized incarnation of our own Rob V‘s obsession with dirt and mixed-terrain riding. D2D indulges Rob’s penchant for late night adventures, serving up 85 miles of crazy trail sections linked by pavement. A bonfire at the turnaround gave riders an opportunity to refuel.
This style of riding demands a lot (including a SPOT tracker and enough battery to power lights through most of a night on the trail), not just physically, but also mentally. All your concentration is riveted on a patch of light ahead of your front tire, and staying upright depends on reading the line quickly.
This edition of D2D was plagued by downpours, but all the riders finished safely and happily, if not completely exhausted.
Some photos below:
Three of us showed up for this morning’s shop ride on three different bikes (while others…ahem…chose to sleep). It’s only 10 miles, but all on twisty, rooted, rocky single-track, one of those cool stretches of uninterrupted dirt that seems so improbable so close to the city, but it’s a gift we avail of ourselves year round, year-after-year.
It was just the regular Thursday morning dirt commute, but here’s where it gets interesting. One of us rode a mountain bike with 2.3s. One of us road an Evergreen with 40c tires, and the third road a cross bike with 32s. None of us was out of our league, and none of us seemed to have too much bike. Were there differences in how we performed over the varied terrain? Sure. The mountain bike was fastest through rock gardens and over roots. The other two bikes were faster on packed climbs. But it all evened out, and we all had fun.
This was one of those cool, unintentional experiments that yielded reinforcement for an idea we’ve been nursing for a long time, that the common conceptions about the “right” bike to ride in a given situation are probably not more than reasonable suggestions, and that really, you just have to ride what you love.
Don’t get trapped by expectations. Be led by fun.
It was Thursday morning. We’d met at the usual spot and rolled West, crisscrossing some trails, then turned south on the road towards more trails, and eventually to Seven.
Mike said, “This is why we do what we do. This right here.” By this point, we’d been to the coffee shop down the street from the shop and were all riding one-handed up the hill to work. The sun shone. It was cool, and we’d done 15 or 20 miles of road and trail in a lazy, pre-work ramble.
We like what we do all day, building bikes, talking riders through their designs, figuring out component compatibility, researching the new cycling trends, but none of it means much without riding.
Riding feeds bike-building, and riding the bikes we build tightens the feedback loop, so that we are so closely engaged with what we’re doing that the riding and building seem to be part of the same process. In some ways, they are. But the riding is why we do what we do, the nurturing of that feeling of freedom and adventure, and the hope that we can spread it to as many people as we can.