Just caught this rad project on the Soma blog:

“Soma is working on a road frame project with Rivendell Bicycle Works. We have admired Rivendell’s amazing frames and their work with Nitto for years and are excited to have a chance to collaborate on this project. We shared with Grant Petersen that we wanted a “road sport” frame, but he was free to interpret what that meant.

Specifications we like to share with you at this stage —

Project name: San Marcos (named after a lovely place in Guatemala where our main warehouse guy was born)
Full Rivendell lug set
Tange Prestige heat treated tubing
Threaded fork with flat crown (1”)
Original geometry from Grant (not a clone of anything Rivendell has in its stable)
Two of the smaller sizes may be 650B

While we are letting Grant do much of the design work, the frame will follow Soma’s philosophy by being tough and reliable and by being affordable to most cycling enthusiasts. We have just received the first prototype and will probably doing a second before this gets green-lighted. Graphics and paint are subject to change, but this prototype does show an alternative graphic scheme we are introducing on some 2010 frames (more news on those later).

As for the question “When can we get one?” Our reply to that is, “It will be ready when it is ready. We want to do it right and ‘right’ takes time.” We are planning a 2011 release, but if it is ready earlier, then we’ll release it earlier.”