Our European correspondent Petor Georgallou is back for the second installment of covering Eurobike in his trademark gonzo style. Read on to follow Petor’s tracks into the wonder and weirdness of Europe’s largest cycling trade show.
The first couple of days shooting bikes were somewhat frustrating, with my colleagues Trevor and Sean intermittently demanding my attention, the lengthy process of actually getting into the show, and the venue’s security guards making my life difficult going in and out to shoot bikes. Time was running out, bikes weren’t, and I had work to do, so I decided to skip the morning hostilities and ride in through the back door at speed. I didn’t want to cause a fuss, so I rode in smiling and waving as the guards shouted at me in German. If only my nihilist friend had been at the back door.
Amapola Track bike
Safely back in the handmade area, I headed straight over to Amapola Cycles from Spain, who were exhibiting an absolute dream of a track bike built with rare NOS Columbus Air aero tubing and the even rarer corresponding lug set. With a weird but fantastic mismatched stack of parts, from Campagnolo Record threaded headset to Shimano Dura Ace track hubs, a smattering of Cinelli, and an amazing lenticular fiberglass disc wheel on the back, assembled properly with a good bit of track slack on the chain, it’s the bike my 2005 self wished that they could ride around London, regardless of how twitchy, bendy and uncomfortable that would be. I really enjoyed the Not UCI Legal sticker on the seat tube and the care that had been taken not to damage the original paint and decals on the disc wheel, keeping them preserved under the paint-matched vinyl.
Passoni Titanio All Road Bike
Italian titanium manufacturer Passoni does a weird thing with their construction that I’m not sure anyone else does. It must take ages. I’m not sure I like it or agree that it’s a good idea, but if you love it, there’s only one place to go. If you hate it but want a Passoni, it’s optional. Essentially, they make titanium frames with massive welds and then grind them down to a perfect smooth seamless finish. It’s kind of like what Cannondale does on aluminum frames, but with titanium, which is much, much harder.
It gives smooth transitions between tubes for a very particular aesthetic, which I feel is kind of redundant because printed lugs exist for that. Nevertheless, I was a fan of the subtle but extremely well-executed paint on this bike, with impeccable shore lines between a dark metallic green interior surface and a pinky purple on the external surface (both automotive paints to match a particular Porsche). If ever a bike needed Super Record EPS, this is the one. I love the way the calipers marry up to road bike frames, although I’d have loved to have seen a Campagnolo wheelset on it, as wheels are by far the best thing Campagnolo makes at the moment!
Zoceli Dobordelu
Czech builder Zoceli first came to my attention at Bespoked in Dresden last year and each time I see one of their bikes, I’m just super impressed. This Dobordelu freeride machine was no exception. There’s just so much going on with an innovative frame and suspension design. There are heaps of little details that are super well thought out and pristinely executed. Each frame is made to order one by one, and the number of processes and design decisions that go into these bikes is mind-boggling for a small builder. I love the head tube and the folded sheet metal gussets, the eccentric rear triangle, and all the in-house machined linkage parts. It’s an amazing-looking bike which I’m sure is heaps of fun for someone else who likes falling off things to ride.
Stijn Cycles Peg 2.0
The Stijn (pronounced stain) mini velo is a bike I’d love to try out on a long-term basis, because while it’s kind of weird, it also seems like it would be a great bike to live with as a mode of transport. It’s small and super light, with enough carrying capacity for almost every kind of normal riding.
Because of its small form factor, it’s easy to carry up stairs or store in narrow hallways. The front wheel can turn back on itself 180°, even with the specially designed front rack attached, which makes a very small bike indeed, suitable for Rinko regulations and public transport as well as making it easy to pack into a box or vehicle with little to no disassembly. The overall design is pretty smart and well-executed, with geometry conceived from scratch as a small-wheeled bicycle, rather than being designed to handle as if it were bigger. It’s also made in Taiwan and designed by a 3-time Belgian national champion downhill racer – not the design etymology I expected for a little road bike! I loved the use of an upside-down Timba frame bag on top of the top tube. The compact aluminum frame looks to be reasonably stiff, and there’s nowhere to hide in terms of comfort with smaller wheels and relatively small-volume tires. This is a bike I’d love to see if I can live with, rather than just riding for a day.
Ortlieb and Peak Design
The Ortlieb booth was a hive of activity during the festival days, with free repairs on Ortlieb equipment as well as a keychain-making free-for-all surrounding a pile of offcuts. Ortlieb are a brand that I really rate in terms of their genuine commitment to making high-quality, ultra-durable, and super-repairable products. I listed the Ortlieb Atrax backpack (which I now own in two different sizes) as one of my favorite products of last year, and that still rings true this year – it’s the backpack I use the most, and that I had with me at Eurobike. I popped in to see if I could get it modified slightly to allow for external compression straps for when it’s not full, however they didn’t have what I needed available on the booth, so I instead watched an insanely efficient patch being applied to repair someone else’s bag before moving onto the Peak Design booth.
Peak Design has been a staple of camera nerds equipment for a while now, with their most notable products being the almost ubiquitous anchor link straps, and their innovative travel tripod. Last year they launched their first bike-specific range of products, including a handlebar mount for a mobile phone which I’ve been using pretty consistently on my normal town bike. It’s super useful for navigation around town and has outlasted both the phone case that it attaches to and the phone inside that case. I visited Peak Design’s booth specifically to grill them about not making a super fast access bike-specific camera sling that fits a relatively big camera – because it’s the thing I need that literally no one makes. They were polite, but I don’t expect to see a bag any time soon. I also bumped into ultra-distance athlete India Landy, who’d been using the new Peak Design camera duffel en route to the start of the Accursed Race, cycling over 200km with a massive duffel full of equipment on her back. She seemed as surprised as I was that it was somehow relatively comfortable. I poked around the bag, because I’m a giant bag nerd, and it seemed pretty well thought out and decent. They sent me home with a gaggle of their new packing cells to try out, which was ideal.
Dangerholm, Crossworx, Portus
Eurobike wouldn’t be Eurobike without Dangerholm. This year one of Gustav’s builds stood out as perhaps my favorite Dangerholm build yet. It’s rare, even in the context of niche handmade bikes, that a builder pays such attention to every detail, to bring together such a coherent and considered build. While Gustav works more or less exclusively with Scott frames as a starting point, they are very much just a starting point.
The Mad Max-inspired Scott Solace on display was pretty heavily modified with the addition of an extra top tube, as well as a fully bonkers 3.5kg fork made for the bike by Moné with integrated bars with adjustable height and sweep, and a clamp for headset compression/adjustment. The unpainted, fillet brazed fork, built with sections of aero-formed tubing and capped with coins, could have been incongruous with the carbon e-bike frame. However, the frame itself was painted with a two-part paint product containing ferrous particles that cause the finish to actually rust rather than just painting on a rust effect paint.
Every detail was considered and almost every part was customized, including de-anodizing all of the aluminum parts to a perfectly weathered patina, and painting the Ceramicspeed jockey wheels to match the frame. Other parts made specifically for this build included saw blade disc rotors with tubular steel rotor guards, and the aesthetic consideration even extended to the little bits of brass wire used for cable routing. Hanging out with Gustav is always a treat, and Eurobike has become the place where that happens.
We chatted about the delicate balance between serious and silly, the importance of precise communication, and the importance of being able to disagree with people respectfully, as well as both having grown up in awe of concept cars in the 80s and 90s. I was glad to have places to be and people to hang out with in the evenings as football seemed to reign supreme this year when the show closed each evening. The Eurobike official afterparty became a huge crowd watching a gigantic LED screen in the outside area as Germany played against Spain in some kind of sports tournament that seemed to captivate the audience.
Although it was undersubscribed, the handmade area had an amazing lineup of world-class DJs in the evenings, including DJ Soul Rabbi who has opened massive stadium gigs for seemingly everyone, from Lou Reed to James Brown, with more 7” soul records than probably every record shop in Frankfurt. Back to business.
Crossworx had a pretty impressive selection of bikes on show, but I picked this not-singlespeed to shoot. Crossworx was founded in 2019 and therefore grew up in lockdown, which is why they are a little-known brand outside of Germany. The company was founded by Chris and Kiwi, who first studied together and later worked together at Nicolai, where Chris designed the bikes that Kiwi would ride for the Gates-Nicolai UCI Downhill World Cup team. Racing offroad and manufacturing in Germany has always been their focus. Crossworx are unusual in that they are built in aluminum, which is not a material often used by small independent manufacturers. This hardtail, built with in-house machined sliding dropouts and a Gates carbon belt drive, features a Classified wheelset giving all the benefits of a singlespeed running a belt as well as having a bailout/climbing gear. It’s super minimal, light, and fun. I wonder if it’ll be allowed to race at the Singlespeed World Championships in Germany later this year as planned?
Alex Clauss is another Eurobike hero who I’d have been disappointed not to see this year. He’s still working with Portus, the company which he founded and has worked under for many years, as well as starting his own special projects division, working under the moniker “Experimental Dad”. The bike on show was a collaboration with the two and Schwalbe, who supported the project. They brought this Portus cargo bike to the crazy mass-start downhill event Megavalanche, where Alex rode the bike laden with tubes, tools, and compressed air in a cylinder on his rear rack to help racers who’d flatted mid-race for free. It’s a super fun project that I think might be repeated next year!
Officina Battaglin Roma
I was lucky enough to interview Giovanni Battaglin onstage in the handmade area, although the process was slow as we had to work through his son as a translator. I don’t speak Italian and he doesn’t speak English, so we mostly focused on his winning the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta de Espana within 48 days of each other in 1981 (which has yet to be repeated).
Officina Battaglin is a small independent bike brand founded by Giovanni at the height of his racing career in 1981, which continues to make high-end bikes, predominantly road bikes, today. This Battaglin was unusual in its construction and finishing, and is potentially the most Italian bike I’ve ever seen, made in a way that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen. It’s constructed from steel with silver soldered stainless cast lugs, TIG welded chainstays, and what looks to be a brazed bottom bracket junction, with a carbon head tube, carbon seat tube, and carbon seat stays bonded in.
The head tube and seat cluster lugs were cast specifically for this bike with extremely large diameters to produce a modern, super stiff, lightweight race frame. Battaglin’s “cromovelato” finish harks back to the golden age of pro tours in the ’70s and ’80s and is, I believe, steel parts chrome plated and then painted with a colored lacquer. It looks to be an insanely expensive bike to produce with so many separate processes and manufacturing techniques going on at the same time. Its design ethos is definitely more “ok go” than a money-making exercise. It was for sure worthy of all the Super Record drip, because what else are you going to put on basically a Lamborghini?
Kocmo Titan Ultra Rig and Purple Dog Concourse Randonneur
Kocmo began building titanium bikes in Russia in 1994, but have now relocated to Berlin, where I believe they have a relatively small workshop building unique iterative prototypes, as well as bicycle fitting for custom-geo frames built elsewhere. They make both frames and parts aimed towards building affordable high-end bikes for normal people. This particular ultra-distance drop bar 29er had a bunch of neat, comfortable features, and looked like a lot of fun.
Purple Dog specializes in making super nice dynamo lights and chargers in their small workshop in France. Their companion bikepacking and touring dynamo light offers a unique all-in-one solution for a dynamo-powered light and removable power bank/torch. Nikola also makes frames and on display was his personal Concours de Machines bike, which, while not as smart and polished a product as the light, was still super interesting. It was built with plain gauge 4130 tubes, and featured a lot of in-house machined parts like the front dropouts, tube splitters, his unique luggage system, and a fork whose legs can be removed at the crown. The stars of the show on this bike were the lights, which were neat, well-placed, and super functional. I can’t wait to see them being run by more people!
2Rads Bike Bags and Filip’s Kona Fire Mountain
2Rads Bike Bags are based in Mainz, just outside of Frankfurt, where they run repair workshops and teach upcycling and sewing classes as well as making custom bike bags, cargo bike bags, wheelchair bags, and dog panniers! They have the best logo: two rats.
The bike is Iliana’s partner Filip’s bike, assembled around a gifted Kona Fire Mountain. Filip is a hobby bike builder who has a penchant for 26” wheels. The olde Kona fits Filip just right with drop bars and a Velo Orange Cigne stem. I loved the mix of old and new, built around an old frame with a modern 1x SRAM drivetrain. My favorite parts of this build were the parallel pull Shimano XTR v-brakes and the old Kona head tube badge logo. The bags were spot on, looked amazing, and they elevated the entire thing into a fully ready touring bike. The thing that I liked most about the bags was the metal interference fit buckles used for closure. While I’ve had backpacks that use similar buckles and enjoyed using them, these are the first bike bags I’ve seen the buckles on, which is kind of surprising because they are lightweight and low-tech and super robust, so it’s kind of odd that no one else uses them.
Sayle 3×3 Cargo Bike
This mixed wheel size, long tail cargo bike was a strong favorite from the 3×3 booth. It was built as part of a Mobility in Cities degree and had loads of quirky bits going on, including a mixed drive train with both a chain and a Gates carbon belt drive with a floating hub in the middle connecting the two. It’s a weird system, but it allowed for better cargo placement and less issues with having a super long flappy chain. It did, however, need both an eccentric BB and sliding dropouts. It was presented with Hope brakes running BrakeStuff rotors, a RockShox Rudy XPLR fork, and a full brace of Ortlieb bags in full touring mode – a fun angle for a small cargo bike.
I like the idea of the 3X3 hub and I’m looking forward to having one in hand to review in the coming months, hopefully on an electric cargo bike which seems to be their niche, as they are designed for longevity but also for massive torque loads compared to other hub gear systems. More on that soon!
And the Rest….
It was Eurobike. There was too much for even three of us to cover in only one week. While Trevor and Sean ran around making videos, I wandered the halls looking for the best, the worst, and the weirdest. I found lots of each. From ride-on luggage suitcases to printed titanium electric road bikes, there was something for everyone (as well as a bunch of things that I really have no idea who they were for).
On the one hand, there’s Pinion’s integrated gearbox motor drive system, heaps of innovative design, and some fantastically high-quality making and modifying going on and on the other, for me at least there are heaps of weird e-mobility solutions that don’t serve any purpose anywhere near as well as a normal bicycle. Eurobike presented heaps of design for design’s sake. Wandering the halls, I often felt pulled between trying to approach weirdness with kindness and empathy, and being honest with the numerous wide-eyed and bushy-tailed small business owners and aspiring transport entrepreneurs as the ultimate kindness, no matter how uncomfortable it was in the moment.
There’s a difference between one-off bikes made for one customer, where to some extent the stranger and more innovative the better, and trying to start a small business in a relatively harsh economic climate, pouring your savings into a strange and inherently flawed idea which works for you, but won’t work for the majority of people. Ultimately I find it’s best to take Eurobike with a pinch of salt, to see it as a business meeting and a corporate jolly, but most of all as a load of mega enthusiasts being mega enthusiastic.
The best question to ask or to be asked at Eurobike is, “What was the weirdest thing you saw today?”
For some, it was “Gary Fisher,” or for others, “Dangerholm wearing full-length leggings rather than short-shorts.” For me, it was for sure Lopifit: basically a treadmill-powered e-bike where walking makes you go, but electrically. While it was fun to razz around on for a bit, and the Lopifit salespeople were nothing but lovely, I can’t say I fully understand its function or who it’s for.
“It’s for people who like walking. It’s healthy, so people can go outside and get exercise, but it’s faster than walking”
I wasn’t sure if I was trolling them or they were trolling me, but Sean, Trevor’s intern and aluminum ladder enthusiast, told me in hushed tones on a rooftop bar that if he lived in Amsterdam, he’d ride one.