With the pandemic causing severe delays and stock shortages, building up a new bike in 2020 and into 2021 is proving to be quite the ordeal. Erik is a local here in Santa Fe and a customer at Sincere Cycles. I first rode with him a few years back when we shuttled Winsor while I was visiting. At the time, he had a Santa Cruz Chameleon, which proved to be a capable ally in our mountains. Jump forward a few years and Erik was looking for a new bike. The aforementioned delays due to the pandemic had him looking at other options outside of the brands offering titanium frame models. He had his sights set on a custom titanium hardtail from Waltly in China…

Erik had ridden the Chameleon enough to know what he liked and what he didn’t like about the bike. After consulting Bailey, our local singlespeed/bikepacking guru, he sent a contact form over to Waltly with his desires for a bike. Included in his correspondence was geometry, tire clearances, cargo/bottle bosses, cable routing, and other minutiae that makes up a 100% custom bike.

He sent his deposit over and +/- 40 days later the bike was here in Santa Fe, awaiting a build-up at Sincere Cycles.

The frame cost Erik $850 plus $200 in shipping fees. It shipped from China in two days. Lightning-fast. Even for a pandemic. So why are the titanium frames made overseas offered by brands so expensive? Well, there are many reasons for that. Think of this direct-to-consumer model as cutting out the middleman. Brands will spend a lot of time designing bikes, sampling them, and spending countless hours on PR&D. There are a lot of hoops to jump through related to production as well including taxes, tariffs, shipping costs. Then, to top it off, brands have to pay their employees, pay for their healthcare, overhead, etc. All these factors and more are why a titanium frame made overseas can still cost upwards of $2,000. Yet, if you’re willing to design your own bike, and wait a month or so, you can get your own bike built by factories like Waltly…

Luckily, most of his parts from his Chameleon swapped right over and he used this time to upgrade to Magura Brakes, a Sinewave Beacon, and a SON hub. Jpaks bags, Teravail Honcho tires and some Wolf Tooth bits are the icing on the titanium plate!

As for the name, Hawk, it’s something Erik came up with.

Erik climbs and descends this bike all throughout our Sangre de Cristo Mountains, with plans to take on various bikepacking routes throughout the Southwest and beyond. The day after I photographed his Hawk, I saw him out on the trails taking on a big, tough loop. It’s easy to get swept up in the mystique of titanium bikes, yet they make for great all-mountain allies…