The Radavist

Martin from Second Spin has quite the vintage MTB stable and at last weekend’s MWBA Pancake Breakfast, he brought out his grail. Growing up worshipping Klein, Yeti and Mantis, Martin was able to own various Yetis and Kleins, but never a Mantis in his size. When a trade presented itself, he jumped on the deal for this Valkyrie.

The build spec is period correct, down to the Campagnolo skewers, which many mountain bikers used on their builds. The Cook Brothers crank and Ti bottom bracket have Specialized chainrings bolted on. Martin went with a WTB theme on this particular build with WTB roller cams front and rear, with WTB classic Grease Guard hubs. A Cunningham stem with internal cable routing holds Cook Brothers bars, M730 shifters and four finger calipers.

Even with this nice mix of parts, nothing takes away from this bike’s stance. It’s confident in its funkiness yet still elegant in its form. Having never seen a Mantis in person before, I now understand why Martin was so attracted to these frames.

Vintage mountain bike collectors will swoon over this one, but that goes without saying.

Painting for Poppi: A Black Metal AWOL for Ultraromance
Process photos by Dylan Buffington, bike photos by Beth Welliver, words by Erik Nohlin.

Painting a bike is equal parts preparation, painting and cleaning. With a good mise en place, strategy and focus, things will go more smoothly but hardly never 100% according to plan. Especially not if you’re an explorer in paint like me. The outcome of a paint proccess, in my eyes, is much about sticking to your initial vision but be prepared for some professional improvisation. I love to see shows like How it’s Made, Mega Factories or any behind the scenes show and I’d thought should walk you through the steps of my latest paint creation: the over- the-top, worldclass weird, Black Metal informed, Manowar infused Heart of Steel AWOL Comp for our friend @ultraromance (Poppi).

On a crappy phone connection from a desolate south eastern Mojave desert town, the conversation started something like this:

May These Quiet Hills Bring Peace
Words by Erik Nohlin, photos by Lucas Winzenburg.

“May these quiet hills bring peace to the souls of those who are seeking.”



These were Sada Coe’s words when she donated the ranch and surrounding land she inherited from her father, Henry W. Coe, to the people of California in 1953. She formed a deep understanding of our human need for wild places while growing up on the grassy hills around Pine Ridge Ranch. Five years after taking ownership of the ranch, Sada decided to give her property to Santa Clara County as a wilderness retreat, open to everyone. Sada’s spirit is the reason why the public now has unlimited access to the beautiful wilderness area today known as Henry W. Coe State Park.



If a beast were to crawl its way out of the Abyss, only to find itself mutated into a two-wheeled, human-powered machine, it might look like this thing. When I first saw it in person, with the Supernova light dangling from the stem, I was reminded of a Deep Sea Anglerfish. A fish that spends its life in complete darkness, only illuminating its path with a luminescent organ called the esca at the tip of a modified dorsal ray. Could that be this bike’s spirit animal?

Erik works at the big, bad S. He’s a designer for the AWOL and other excursion-oriented bicycles. He made this bike as a special project for his plans on taking on the SF-area’s Super Brevet Series. Initially, he wanted a bike that would fit a 45mm slick 700c tire, with a tighter geometry than the AWOL and a tapered headtube, mated to a carbon fork. He spec’d the main tubes from a stock AWOL with the geometry more like a cross bike, milled a head tube to spec and used a Secteur fork for its rack attachments. While the AWOL is a dedicated touring bike, this is closer to a light-tourer or randonneur. So, in short, this is a one-off custom, made in the USA bike that gave Erik the ability to test out a few concepts.

The bars have an aero shape, there’s a Supernova AWOL switch in the bar end from the EVO project. The tires are prototype, made especially for muddy trails. There’s even a custom-milled stem cap that holds a USB battery but what puts this bike back into the Abyss is the sparkle, glitter fade paint, which Erik applied himself.

As with most concepts, ideas Erik used to create this one might trickle down the Specialized product line at some point, but don’t hold your breath. Unless you’re an Anglerfish.

Leave it On the Road’s 2015 Crush the Coast Charity Ride
Words by Michael Tabtabai

Ride from the heart and anything is possible. In mid October a crew of seven riders departed Portland and headed for San Francisco on a quest to ride bikes, take photos, and raise money to fight cancer. Through the rolling hills of Oregon wine country, down the foggy coast, through the Redwoods and down the golden rollers beyond Mendocino. We were a little nervous about the weather, as this was the time of year where the wind shifts and the rains roll in. But we got lucky – just enough rain and fog to make it interesting and more than enough sun to keep spirits high. To live the life of a cyclist, that is, 100% of your days truly devoted to the sport, the preparation and the recovery, is an awesome thing. And it is even better when you get to help raise over $25k for a great cause – City of Hope. When we arrived in SF three riders continued on to Los Angeles, knocking out nearly 1400 miles in 14 days.

This was the third major Leave It On The Road ride, and we called it #crushthecoast.

Rust Never Sleeps on Sofia’s AWOL Touring Bike
Words by Erik Nohlin, photos by John Watson

TRUST ME, I’M A DESIGNER

As a designer of bicycles I try to stay on top of things like material development, new alloys, paint pigment, flakes, pearls, platings and whatnot. It’s in my interest to stay updated in an ever-changing world. What you see on the floor in a bike shop is not just a bicycle with a random color: it’s the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of trial and error behind the scenes at any one man bike shop or huge bike brand with a fleet of designers.

That one color started out as 666 other potential colors and in the end, only one made it. For the one man operation or smaller brand in a well-defined niche it might be easier to do cool and crazy shit to please that one customer with that weird request of a thermochromatic dead matte black that fades to metallic peach with a pride parade pearl to top it off. I design bicycles for a global brand and need to create a bike that pleases a global rider and as you all know, trends and cultural differences around the globe vary, fluctuate and make my day pretty complicated.

I’ll be honest with you: it’s frustrating to rarely ever be able to bring the raddest and weirdest stuff to you. One example is the one off Full Nuke Rainbow AWOL I created for the Transcontinental Race, a bike that almost blew up the internet when John posted it. So much stoke and love was thrown on that bike but the reality is that it would be impossible to produce it, guarantee the surface quality, get a decent price and distribute it to you. Doing rad stuff is easy but mass producing it is a completely different story. So, I try a lot of surface treatments and materials but most often these tryouts, experiments never leave the design studio as more than dirt on my hands, stains on my jeans and once in a while, a painted one off bicycle that I can tell you about.

The Rust AWOL is my wife Sofia’s bike and it used to look quite different. A super glittery rainbow flakey touring bike that was left in the hands of Garrett Chow on a journey to the heart of Death Valley early last winter. The washboard and dirt in Death Valley eat bikes for breakfast and the beat up bike that was returned to her had a couple of scars too many so I promised to bring it back to its “old glory”. The frame is one of the first nickel plated frame samples for the Transcontinental Edition AWOL we did and a perfect canvas to be creative on since the nickel makes it completely sealed for corrosion – ironic isn’t it? Rust is corrosion and in this case impossible to achieve without some chemical magic from a UK paint company called Rustique.

My colleague Barry Gibb had previously used it to create a fantastic surface on a carbon bike and I wanted to try it to, on steel this time. We ordered some paint and decided that Sofia’s nickel plated bike would be the victim for this experiment. The month of June is usually pretty mellow at work (read: not as completely fucking crazy as July and August) and I spent some afternoons in the workshop and paint booth to finish off this creative experiment in an effort to bring real organic life back to a surface that’s dead. In a step by step series on Instagram, I told a transparent story about the process of the #rustawol and here it is and for the first time, a somewhat finished bike. The project was crowned with a Brooks Cambium rust saddle and bar tape where the fabric matches the bike and the vulcanized rubber matches the tan wall tires nicely.

As a last step I gave the Supernova headlamp and the Tubus rack a kiss of iron oxide. The humid and cold San Francisco summer will continue to corrode and oxidize the surface even though it’s been sealed with a clear coat as I surprisingly discovered after picking up the bike today. I learned a ton on this project, got my hands dirty and created a bike that Sofia really seems to like. I love that I sometimes can show you the hands-on process of being a designer at a big brand when 90% of my work never leaves the design studio. Confidentiality keeps us all from sharing what I know a lot of you like seeing and know more about.

Personally, the making-of-dvd in the Indiana Jones DVD box is far superior to the movies themselves and getting dirty is the only way to learn something new.

____

Follow Erik on Instagram.

Taking on the #FlowShiv
Photos and words by Chris Riekert

Here in the hallowed halls of the big red ‘S’; you know, the Death Star of the cycling world… you might be surprised to see there are some real people roaming around. Real people that are, first and foremost, big fans of bikes.

People like my buddy John Friedrich, the only man I know who would happily talk about the different weights of DOT brake fluid and what they offer to the rider, literally, until you’d choose water boarding over continuing the conversation… Or like our mechanic Patrick “Tree” Miller who seems like someone delivered to earth in one of those rescue pods shot through space as the planet Krypton went through nuclear collapse. Patrick is the NICEST most willing to help person I’ve ever met… and yes, he is a bicycle mechanic! How about that?