U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
Here’s a handsome crew. Our friends at Outdoors, Inc in Memphis sponsor a race team called Los Locos (pictured here with some of their Sevens), and this is a shot of them just after the Race Between the Bridges, a local gravel grinder. Seven rider Hart Robinson, second from right, made this year’s race podium. Outdoors, Inc. owners Joe and Carol-Lee Royer are in the middle.
Out of 100+ starters, only approx 38 finished the race due wet conditions with clay mud and gravel.
Brad and Matt are at it again, this time taking on the 1200km Coulee Challenge in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We remixed their TransAt bikes for this new event. This ride differs from the TransAtlantic Way they took on last month in the quality of the road surfaces (thus the switch to 700c wheels) and the type of climbing they’re doing.
From the ride description:
Our RM 1200k route includes great roads and bike trails in Minnesota and Wisconsin with a focus on the challenging coulees of Southeast Minnesota and Southwest Wisconsin. The terrain will have some hilly sections, with multiple, occasionally steep, hills crossing ridge lines followed by pastoral valleys and quiet, bucolic roads. Along the way riders will enjoy passing through a number of small towns in the coulees and river towns on the Mississippi River.
A coulee is a deep ravine, one of the defining features of the terrain in Minnesota and Wisconsin. This is no flat, mid-Western romp,so we reconfigured Brad and Matt’s bikes for the occasion.
The Coulee Remix bike is a progressive gravel bike that features a number of innovations, special offers, and incentives. It’s also available for a very limited time. The Remix employs the SRAM Force 1 group set with mechanical shifting and hydraulic brakes, aiming for the lightest weight, simplest design, and purest performance.
We had a nice note from Omar B, who has just been in France for the Etape du Tour, on his Axiom SL. This year’s route, based on Tour Stage 10, took the riders around Lake Annecy and packed in more than 4,000 meters of climbing. But, one thing we noticed in the photos Omar sent was the big smile on his face. Regardless of how fast you’re going (and he looks pretty fast), that’s the right look.
Omar said:
Just finished my first Etape du Tour ( de France) on 8 July on my Seven Axiom Sl. Bike did great. A big thanks for a great bike.
We build a lot of tandems. A custom builder is a natural fit for tandems, because the challenge of fitting a tandem is doubled. Both the captain and stoker need to be comfortable for the bike to work at all, and making two people comfortable is much harder than making one comfortable.
We’ve been building tandems for 20+ years, and we’re one of the few (if not the only) custom builder to offer road, gravel, and mountain bike tandems. That explains why so many pairs come to us for a new bike.
What we didn’t expect to happen is to be contacted by so many blind riders, looking for tandems they could stoke. And even though, over the years, we’ve built a fair few bikes for blind riders, we certainly didn’t expect Team Sea to See, the first visually impaired team to take on the Race Across America (RAAM).
We built a tandem for Dan Berlin with our friend Rick at The Phoenix Cyclery in Fort Collins, CO back in 2013. This year, he and his captain raced RAAM with Team Sea to See. These guys are demonstrating that visual impairment doesn’t mean life impairment. They are also, we would add, demonstrating that they’re amazing cyclists.
There was an excellent news story on them recently, and something from the Today Show, too. We’re proud to be involved, if only as a (literal) vehicle for the message.
