The Radavist

We’ve seen this frame offering from Sim Works before, during the insane bicycle tour we got to partake in while in Japan with our friends from Circles. For NAHBS this year, Sim Works brought their Doppo touring bike, set up with 650b wheels, fenders, drop bars and their new Volummy tires. This bike looks great, painted in a matte olive drab, with custom Sim Works anodized green Paul components Klampers and skewers.

Arigatou gozaimasu, Sim Works!

Like the great old one Cthulhu, this Oddity mountain bike pulled me in with its ominous appearance. The tendril-like fork coming from the head tube looks like some alien beast reaching out to make you part of its low-carb diet. It drew me in. The titanium cockpit, post and fork were powder coated neon green to match the steel frame, angering the locals in Fort Collins, Colorado. Or so the owner of the bike said.

Then I noticed all the dicks painted on the bike. Dozens of them. Dozens of dicks. On a show bike. Then I loved the bike even more. Oddity, you’re one strange builder, but I think I love you.

If it were possible to craft a carbon road bike from molten lava, Calfee would be the ones to do it. This new Luna Pro is magma. It’s fire. The color pops so much, it burned the sensor in my camera. Joking aside, this might be one of the nicest Calfee road bikes I’ve seen at NAHBS. It’s bright while still being subtle in the details. For 2017, Calfee has updated the tubing on the Luna Pro, making it all the adjectives you want to hear when it comes to carbon fiber bike design.

Best of all, the Luna Pro is still marketed as the least expensive US-made carbon fiber road frame.

Oh, you like donuts? Do you like donuts a lot? Perhaps you have a stem cap or a bottle with a donut on it. In this world, there are people who are willing to commit to a donut on a t-shirt, and there are people who are so committed to donuts that they make their carbon fiber road bike one giant donut. This year at NAHBS, Appleman did just that.

How’s that for donut dedication?

Inspired by the BMW M Sport livery, this Breadwinner Lolo disc road bike has speed in its bloodline. As part of Breadwinner‘s limited edition runs, this bike will be offered with varying build kits and will go live next month. With these bikes, Breadwinner offers a limited edition paint job, with plenty of class and flash, all ready to roll for a quick turnaround.

White bikes really pop when shot like this and I gotta say, this one was my favorite of the day…

Where do I even begin here? Kyle from Golden Saddle Cyclery loves the Grateful Dead and the team at Stinner Frameworks loves a challenging paint scheme. After a few design emails were passed between the two, this is the final product. Built with all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, this bike is ready for just about anything Kyle can throw at it or jump off of with it.

SRAM’s Eagle 1×12 drivetain will ca-cawww into the San Gabriel mountains with those plump 2.8″ ONZA tires and King bits all around. That rowdy Pike will make minced meat out of the granite babyheads and all the while, Kyle will be singing his favorite Dead tune. Yes, this is a delightfully absurd bike and I can’t wait to see it dirty!

Some of the finest bourbons in the world are unobtainable, so it would make sense that Chris King‘s newest limited edition color was so small batch that only a select few builders were able to put it on their bikes at this year’s NAHBS. This was not their intention, however. It seems the brown anodizing was nearly impossible to get consistent, so making headsets, hubs and other bits to match wasn’t gonna happen. Big frowny face. There are two other colors which King has launched at NAHBS this year, which I’ll get to in a bit. Up first is this fire red Cielo dirt drop MTB. Now, this is their standard frame, which can be run as a rigid or a hardtail, with dirt drops, set up for touring with bikepacking bags. These frames no longer use slider dropouts and switched to front and rear thru-axles.

I dunno about you, but I wish that bourbon brown would happen because it’s so damn smooth!

For 2017, Mosaic has launched a new paint program with multiple tiers of finish offerings. Customers can now choose between 30 colors and 6 layouts, making their bike unique. The paint is executed by the newly-acquired Spectrum, which Mosaic owner Aaron Barcheck purchased last year. While the Spectrum label is under Aaron’s control, it is still a separate entity from Mosaic.

This year at NAHBS, Aaron brought his fendered road bike with Dura Ace Di2. By utilizing ENVE’s GRD fork and fender attachment, this bike will be good on the Colorado roads throughout the spring.

Continuing our discussion, or at least my rant about proper nomenclature with drop bar bikes today, Andrew Low brought this prototype disc road bike to the 2017 NAHBS. Designed to ride on sealed or dirt road and everything in between, this bike features a tapered steerer, disc brakes, clearance for a 40mm tire clearance and 7005 FLEXshape alloy tubing.

Like all of LOW’s bikes, these are made by hand in San Francisco and feature smooth welds that are hand finished. I dunno about you, but I’d ride the hell out of that thing!

I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of disc brake-equipped, drop bar bikes at NAHBS with clearances for bigger tires and while I’m not a huge fan of the nomenclature I’ve adopted, I can honestly say I’ve thought about other alternatives to “all-road.” As we were going out to shoot this bike yesterday, Adam and I had a discussion. The gist of it was that I look at a bike’s geometry, not it’s build kit in determining its “type.” So, for instance, if a bike has the geometry of a road bike and fits big tires, I call them road bikes. People get hung up on this though, because of the tire spec. Yet, if one of these bikes has the geometry of a ‘cross bike, it’s still just a cross bike, flat bars, drop bars, 1x, 2x, SS, it doesn’t matter, ATMO anyway.

So you’ll have to giggle when you read my titles for NAHBS bikes this year, as it’s taken me a good amount of time to figure out what the hell these things are, without using the oversaturated keywords being lobbed all over the cycling industry: gravel and adventure. It’s just a damn road bike.

Ok, enough of the rant, let’s check out this bike’s build kit. It’s built with Force CX1, Industry Nine AR25 wheels, Sim Works cockpit, Thomson post and some big ol’ fatty WTB Riddler tires. Once this 56cm beaut finishes making the rounds at NAHBS, it’ll be for sale too. Email Sklar for details.

I wish I could keep shooting bikes in the Moab desert, but alas, I’m in Salt Lake City as you’re reading this, firing away in the Salt Palace.

Each year when NAHBS rolls around, many builders use the opportunity to build themselves a new bike. This year was Curtis Inglis‘ time for a new hardtail. Over the years, Curtis has experimented with the Funduro model, altering the bottom bracket drop and angles ever-so-slightly to dial in what he feels like is the ultimate hardtail geometry. As a pretty tall dude, he decided to give the 29+ platform a spin, resulting in a bike with a large stance and aggressive geometry.

Over the past few days, Curtis has been riding this show bike and not exactly babying it. He’s got one of those new White Industries headsets on the bike, along with White hubs, cranks and a Paul stem, PIKE fork, XTR rear mech, with a Thomson dropper.

I’m in Moab, Utah with a handful of framebuilders and will be previewing their NAHBS offerings leading up to the event…

Fans of the Rebel Alliance would know that paint scheme without even reading the title. Ted Lincoln is an artist, one that paints scenes from the Star Wars Universe using mother of pearl in what he calls “Mother of Pearl Art.” Ted has been officially endorsed by George Lucas and has gained quite the traction amongst the Star Wars fans. Traction like a 27.5+ tire on sandstone! It just so happened that before Ted was big, Jeremy Sycip knew him in San Francisco, so for this year’s NAHBS, he asked Ted to paint his own personal hardtail for the show. What you’re seeing here is Ted’s first ever mother of pearl bicycle art.

Even as a photographer who loves challenges, this bike was particularly hard to document without my studio light setup allowing me to make the details pop out, but then again shooting bikes in Moab > shooting bikes in a convention center…

The NAHBS 2017 Awards
Photos by Brad Quartuccio

Each year, a panel of judges pick out the creme of the crop from the many builders showcasing at NAHBS to hand out a series of prestigious awards. This year, I thought I’d pull our NAHBS documentation to a close with a superb gallery, compiled by Brad Quartuccio. Enjoy!

NAHBS the Hard Way: Bikepacking off the Beaten Path from Santa Rosa to Sacramento
Words by Nicholas Haig-Arack and photos by Derek Bolland, Rie Sawada, Brendon Potts, Toyoshige Ikeyama, Adam Sklar, and Nicholas Haig-Arack

I’m sitting here eating a bowl of melting ice cream trying to recollect a few hazy days of sungold and lime-green-tinged moments in the rolling hills and burnt panoramas of remote Northern California, where our international band of amigos took the long and dirty way to the world’s greatest handbuilt bike show.

Let me set the scene with a quick prologue: Three years ago I rode from Santa Rosa to NAHBS in Sacramento by way of scenic Hwy 128. Two years ago I took a meandering MTB road trip to NAHBS in SLC by way of Sedona and Moab, with plenty of memorable stops for singletrack sessions along the way. Last year I skipped the show in Connecticut – too far to ride, too far to road trip – but I was there in spirit since my personal purple haze hardtail was on display in the Sklar booth. After last year’s show was over, when I heard that the Handbuilt Bike Show was making a return to California’s capital in 2019, the wheels were set in motion. I had to plan a route to top them all. More mileage, more dirt, more fun, more friends, more fence-hopping, more roughin’ it.

Big tires, short chainstays, double crankset, pick two. Normally. Then there’s the concept of a boost road bike, in which case, pick all three. I call it a concept because there’s a lot that has to go into making a boost road bike a reality. To go from 142mm rear spacing to 148mm rear you’ve got to move things outboard a bit. I’ve seen a number of cobbled together solutions for this, which usually revolve around adopting a complete MTB drivetrain from the bottom bracket spindle, to the cranks, cassette, and chainline. But what about a road bike? Or a chubby road bike? That’s where it gets interesting.

“As I was posting process photos of this bike on Instagram, people kept saying, oh it’s so Art Deco, and I didn’t know what that even was. I finally opened a book and said, yeah! It totally is. I was so inundated with it being everywhere in New York that I didn’t even know it had influenced my work so much. Art Deco is in the buildings, the subway, the gutters in the street. It’s everywhere.”

I hate to throw quotes around that saying because I’m sure I got some of it wrong but it really resonated with me. Tom Porter is a sculptor in Brooklyn, New York. His brand, Porter Cycles is a side gig for him. As a full-time sculptor and fabricator, he began building bikes in 2010 and this year at NAHBS, he brought this beautiful townie that presents an interesting dichotomy.

What does a 1997 Chevy Lumina, a whoopee cushion, and Planned Parenthood have in common?