This year brought about the return of the Handmade Bicycle Show Australia, and we had our mate Andy White from FYXO on the ground documenting some of Australia’s finest handmade bikes. Part 03 of our coverage showcases 15 unique builds from the show, so read on for more!
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Vintage Bicycles: Juli Furtado’s World Championship Yeti C-26 – A Glued Together ‘Stud Mufin’
The late 80s and well into the 90s marked a sea change in mountain bike design. Suddenly bikes that were designed to ride fire roads and trails with no real intention were being hurdled down mountains at breakneck speeds. Competition between the brands within the burgeoning sport was fierce, and the race to produce lightweight racing bikes had begun. Perhaps the most infamous of these experimentations is the Yeti C-26, and today, we have some juicy photos of Juli Furtado’s C-26 WC race machine with an entertaining account of this bike’s genesis by Mike Wilk…
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Radar Roundup: Endpoint Night Moves Frames, Rat King Rack Teaser, Affinity Ti GP MTB, Mavic Sale, K2N Fundraiser, and Nowness NYC
Our Radar Roundup compiles products and videos from the ‘net in an easy-to-digest format. Read on below for today’s findings…
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An Epic Behind the Scenes Look at the Making of Impossible Route Season 2, Episode 1: Far West Texas
A year ago, I was sitting in a cubicle, drawing lines and shapes that would ultimately become bridges. A tedious job that encouraged daydreaming, so I spent a lot of my time distracting myself with podcasts, audiobooks and YouTube videos. I remember watching a series of videos called The Impossible Route and feeling like, “They’re out there living, I’m in here… not”. Now, don’t get me wrong, working a desk job in an industry that betters society can be incredibly rewarding, but I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t living the life that was right for me, which in my mind was filled with cycling, adventure, and photography.
Fast forward a year and some change, and I find myself on a three-hour Zoom call with Jeremiah Bishop discussing routes and logistics for Season 2, Episode 1 of The Impossible Route. The journey of how I got here can be saved for another time, but here I was, on the cusp of living. This is The Impossible Route from my perspective.
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Precision at Scale: A Baum Cycles Factory Visit
Editing the photos from my visit to Baum Cycles this February, an eerie feeling came over me. I knew it’d been some time since I last took photos with the ‘big camera’ at 7 Seabright St, North Shore. For some reason, it felt like a precise period of time. My suspicion was confirmed. 10 years.
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Radar Roundup: eeSilk Stem, Laufey Hardtail, Silver Cranks, Elephant Cargo Fork, and Art of the Grind
Our Radar Roundup compiles products and videos from the ‘net in an easy-to-digest format. Read on below for today’s findings…
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Eating and Riding Italy’s TranSardinia Trail
During the final weeks of October 2021, Bec and I teamed up with new friends, Tristan and Belén to ride Europe’s longest off-road mountain bike route: The TranSardinia Trail.
A lesser-known, 450-kilometre trail starting at Olbia (Italy) in the north and flowing south, the TranSardinia follows a crocheted masterpiece of natural forest trails, dusty shepherd tracks, and jagged mountain passes – eventually finishing in the city of Cagliari. With 13,000 metres of total climbing, stunning camp cooking, a broken derailleur, and some pretty gnarly descents down baby-head strewn trails, the TranSardinia Trail kicked all our asses… in the best possible way!
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Taneika Duhaney Recaps the Inaugural 2022 Girls Gone Gravel Festival
It should not have been a grand revelation to anyone in the cycling world when hosts of the Girls Gone Gravel podcast announced that there would be an eponymously named Girls Gone Graveling Festival in the cycling mecca of Bentonville, Arkansas this past April. Kathryn Taylor and Aimee Ross organized and led the three-day gravel cycling event which was intended for novice and seasoned gravel cycling enthusiasts. The event promoters stressed from the beginning “it’s not a race.”
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Readers’ Rides: Emily’s Cross Check
For our Readers’ Rides today, we’re featuring Emily’s Cross-Check, her first “real” bike purchase and she built a looker! Let’s check it out below!
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Sean’s Beach Club Discless Road
Beach Club. What is it? Are they serious? Rim brakes in 2022? Hot pink and white? Wut in tarnation are those Los Angeles city slickers at The Cub House doing? They’re doing what they want, and to be honest, we dig it. Beach Club began as the side project hustle of Danny Heeley and Sean Talkington from Team Dream and The Cub House. They wanted to make production bikes in the USA for people who still care about rim brakes, steel tubing, and lookin’ good. We already looked at the flagship livery a little while ago, and at the LA Invitational this weekend, John photographed Sean’s build. We think you’ll all agree deserves a full-n-fat gallery on this lovely Monday. Check out more below!
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Radar Roundup: Velo Orange Restocks, MAAP PAAM, AirTags for Your Tires, New Phil Wood Bottles, and Fastest Known… DOG?!
Our Radar Roundup compiles products and videos from the ‘net in an easy-to-digest format. Read on below for today’s findings…
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Flex Appeal: A Long-term Review of the Passchier Gump Bamboo Handlebar
We’re living in the golden age of handlebar comfort. Never before have we seen such diversity, originality, or inclusivity for riders as right now. For a lucky few, long days behind an ultra-wide curly bar is analogous to lounging in their favourite La-Z-Boy. For others, a backswept alt-bar with more hand positions than the kama sutra offers the perfect perch to grind out those backcountry miles. But for so many riders, comfort on a long ride is still a thing of legend and fairy tales. With the laminated bamboo Gump handlebars, however, Passchier of New Zealand claims to have found the key to both comfort and performance.
Continue reading for our thoughts on how the Gump handlebar holds up after many months of trail riding and touring…
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Vintage Bicycles: Steve Cook’s 1980 Cook Brothers Racing Cruiser
We’ve all heard the term “Klunker” before, but as a modern misnomer in cycling, it’s been used to refer to coaster-brake actuated cruiser bikes. This, my friends, is a true-to-form klunker, using gears and brakes, but it was built upon a cruiser chassis. For today’s Vintage Bicycles tory, we have Tasshi from Vintage MTB Workshop sharing the story of Steve Cook’s personal Cook Brothers Racing Cruiser, so read on for all the nitty-gritty on what makes this wild bike so unique and how it would shape the future of mountain biking…
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Between a Rock and a Willow: 45 Hours on the Stagecoach 400 Cycling Route
A boulder stops me in my tracks. There is a dry creek bed below, a huge boulder ahead, but no trail to be seen. I put my bike down and try to think logically. First I inch my way around the boulder to see whether the trail will somehow materialize. It doesn’t. I then walk as far to the left of the boulder (west) as I can, hoping I will find a way around. Nothing. I backtrack a ways to see if I missed a crucial turn. I didn’t.
The rock is an impenetrable vertical bridge. I’m suddenly repeating ‘YOU. SHALL. NOT. PASS!’ over and over in my head. Am I Gandalf or the Balrog in this situation? Or Frodo? Or an orc? Hard to say.
And there in my periphery goes that damned black animal again, wildly running away into the sandy night just past my vision. It’s roughly the shape of a boar but it runs like a gorilla. I’ve seen it a half-dozen times at this point, though, so nothing to be concerned about. It’s harmless.
It’s mile 335 of the Stagecoach 400, I’ve gone over 36 hours without sleep, and I’ve been stuck at the transition to The Willows for over 30 minutes.
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Radavist x Komoot: Silver Linings on the East Devon Trail
Katherine Moore, a zoologist by training and a cycling writer by trade, has just launched a new bikepacking route through her home turf in East Devon. Besides the gorgeous coastal tracks and sleepy wooded trails further inland, quaint thatched villages, and colorful seaside towns, the East Devon Trail features a twist: linking up nature reserves and bird hides along its 115-mile length. While the release of this accessible weekender trail has been the cause of much excitement, its development sprung out of a much darker and unexpected place.
Note: This article is part of a sponsored partnership with Komoot. We’ll always disclose when content is sponsored to ensure our journalistic integrity.
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Then and Now: Suntour XCii Vs. MKS XCiii Pedals
With the pandemic driving up prices of vintage mountain and road components, many people are turning to modern recreations of these staple parts to finish out their build projects. Whether it’s a Salsa Pro Moto stem or in this case, Suntour’s legendary XC “bear trap” pedals, there are modern components inspired by these classic components but how close are they to the original? In this post, John looks at what makes the XCii so unique and how close the XCiii comes to the original…
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Marley Reviews Her Velo Orange Piolet
When the call came from Shimano that All Bodies on Bikes was greenlit, the hunt was on for a bike. I needed something that could run the sweet components they were providing us with, and that was ideally suited for bikepacking. Sure, I had my trusty Surly Straggler, but I wondered if there was something else that could do the job better. …
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Radar Roundup: Lost and Found Returns, RAR Zine, PEdALED, Kailey Kornhauser Shares Her Kona, and John Rambles on Out Of Collective Media
Our Radar Roundup compiles products and videos from the ‘net in an easy-to-digest format. Read on below for today’s findings…