The Radavist

Where do I even begin here? DiNucci is a damn living legend in the frame building world and anytime I can get my sweaty palms on one of his bikes, I take extra time documenting it. Case in point: this beautifully-lugged classic road bike with Campagnolo Super Record. I love everything about this build, from the lug work, to the Enduro headset, right down to the bright, sparkly arrow reminding you to keep pushing forward. With a bike like this, however, I doubt the owner will need any motivation. Mark, if you’re reading this, it’s always a pleasure to be in such great company.

When Mark DiNucci brings a complete bicycle to NAHBS, you better photograph it. Especially when it features such a bright paint job and SRAM Red eTap!

I’m here in Portland, Oregon attending the Bike and Beer festival at HopWorks Urban Brewery. While I’ll be documenting many of the frames, I’ll also be capturing the general vibes. For now, let’s just check out some bikes!

Mark Dinucci is the man. He’s been building frames for over 40 years, has been the go-to consultant for numerous other builders and still to this day epitomizes the craft of bicycle frame building. For this year’s Bike and Beer Festival he displayed a classic road frame, fit for a Dura Ace 25th anniversary group and elegant Joe Bell paint. While the bike wasn’t a complete, I still wanted to get a few photos of this masterpiece. Oh and some portraits of Mark himself…

This year, more than any other year at NAHBS, I got to talk face to face with the builders and their assistants. I took more time listening to their process and their pains. It’s not easy building bicycles in the States and sometimes, things get a little rough financially.

Earlier this year, Bruce Gordon put out an SOS (shop on stress) and the framebuilding world responded. Now, I’m not saying their shop is slammed, but business picked up and Bruce has some new products on the way. Cantis, toe clips and even a nice, 700c gum wall touring tire, made by Panaracer in Japan. It looks like Bruce Gordon is doing a lot better. His booth’s pride was a carbon road bike with details for days.

The townie and commuting bike contingency was rather large this year. More and more people are ditching their cars for handlebars and Ahearne Cycles showed off a few recent builds. My favorite was the blue townie, complete with bamboo lock box and rotating child seat. It even has foot pegs. Other goodies included his Sheldon Brown flasks and shirts.

DiNucci Cycles‘ bikes included a raw road frame and a classic road bike with Curtis Odom tri-arm sport cranks. Sharing the same booth was Vendetta Cycles, who returned with their ever-so-popular Columbus MAX track bike. This bright green beast had everyone drooling. I always love seeing how people use MAX on track bikes and this bike’s custom pinstriping just takes it over the top!

See all this in the Gallery.

Dirt drops are mentioned periodically here on The Radavist, usually in the context of a modern hardtail, rigid mountain bike, or adventure touring bike. But where did this terminology come from, and how are vintage dirt drops wildly different from what we have today? Using his 1983 Steve Potts as a platform for discussion, John unfurled the unique history behind this bike and looked at a proper 1980s dirt drop setup. Let’s check it out.

John and Tasshi from The Vintage MTB Workshop once again team up to deliver a Vintage Bicycles article. This time, featuring a 1975 Ritchey track bike. Read on for John’s photos accompanying Tasshi’s words…

“It’s just a bike.” The late Bruce Gordon built bicycle frames to enhance his customers’ lives. Through all my interactions over the years, up until his passing in June of 2019, he would take praise for his work, but would always end the conversation with: “It’s just a bike.”

To talk about this bike in particular, you first have to know Bruce. Who he was, his ethos, the mythos, and what he brought to the “g” word: gravel. Bruce was making fat-tire road bikes for a long time. Long before many. He developed tires, toe clips, and helped foster an entire movement of makers in the Petaluma, California area and beyond.

But just like that, he was gone, and he left behind a legacy…

2018 Handmade Bicycle Show Australia
Photos by Andy White, words by John Watson

Darrell from Llewellyn‘s work was first introduced to me by Andy White of FYXO on one of my first trips to Australia, somewhere around 2010 or so. I had never heard of his work, much less had seen it in person, so at the time, I was completely blindsided by Darrell’s craftsmanship. If you were to ask me for US-based frame builders who share a similar craftsmanship, Chris Kvale, DiNucci and others come to mind but there is something different about a Llewellyn and it’s not easy to put a finger on it.

Every year, I find myself staring down the barrel of my telephoto lens in a convention center, documenting some of the year’s finest bikes, yet there is very little time for reflection of these bikes on my end. At some point, I jokingly said “I should do a Radavist Awards for NAHBS this year…” to which whoever was on the receiving end agreed. While I commend the judging panel at NAHBS on their choices, what goes on behind the scenes there might not necessarily reflect this website’s subjective perspective towards bikes. In a lot of ways, the selection of bikes chosen for documentation have already made it through an initial “judging” process. I usually walk into a booth and pick my favorite bike to shoot. Even then, I have no idea what the scope of NAHBS will show me and it isn’t until it’s all said and done where I can finally reflect on what I saw. So, all I ask of you is to flip through this gallery of drive-side bikes before reading any further.

MinneCycle 2017: Chris Kvale And His Classic Steel Road
Photos and words by Jarrod Bunk

At the start of my trip to MinneCycle, I knew of Chris Kvale. His thin lugs are beautiful. He started racing bicycles at a young age. And these things you can see when you look at the vintage race aesthetic and precision in his builds.

I was able to get a small glimpse into his daily shop life right before he departed for his summer hideaway in Norway. Being that he’s Norwegian he’s extremely humble, and it was fantastic to have a mellow conversation about this beautiful bike. The Law of Jante keeps him reserved, and doesn’t let him romanticize about his process or his craft, but you can see a love he pours into each piece of steel he manipulates.

The way Chris takes extra time with each build – the bottom bracket, the DiNucci fastback seat clamp, his beautiful thinned lugs – Kvale is a true craftsman. He even makes his own tools, which I learned when I toured his studio right before he boarded the plane the next day. His workshop is always clean and extremely orderly and he still uses the same process he started with years ago. It was such a great experience to see his work in person. Check out more over at Chris Kvale Cycles.

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Yesterday morning I had a date with a framebuilding legend from the American West. Like DiNucci, Strawberry, Bruce Gordon and others, Jim Merz was a key figure in promoting the production of custom frames in the ’70s and early ’80s. He was a machinist first, turned cyclist, turned builder. He was also an endurance cyclist, pedaling from Portland to Panama in 1970, logging over 8,000 miles. He also toured extensively in South Africa.

Jim brought his knowledge of loaded touring and trekking to his own operations, designing, fabricating and in a lot of ways shaping the world of touring bikes forever. So why haven’t you heard of Jim Merz? (Or perhaps you have, no assumptions here.) Well, Jim’s a unique guy and one that didn’t necessarily seek out the limelight like others in his day. That didn’t mean Jim wasn’t busy. In fact, in his ten years of solo framebuilding from 1972 through 1982, he built around 400 frames from Columbus and Reynolds tubing; he was the first US-builder certified to use Reynolds 753.

Second Time Around: 74 Allez Road
Photos and words by Erik Nohlin

In 2014, Specialized and Mark DiNucci released 74 numbered framesets as a celebration of its heritage of Specialized’s 40th anniversary. Each of these frames were auctioned to benefit the World Bicycle Relief. The red throwback frameset came with a custom designed kit including wool jersey, saddle, bar tape, bottle cages, bottles and a flask with the level of detail a company can only afford for something like its 40th anniversary. Mark DiNucci was rewarded Best Lugs and Best in Show at Nahbs for the work on this project. Nothing was saved to make this into a state of the art steel bike. Bryant Bainbridge, the other mastermind behind the 40th anniversary Allez, has described the project as “a black hole of cost” where both the tube set and lugs were designed and engineered from scratch.