The Radavist

Part of the fun in restoring vintage bikes is the process and sometimes that process feels more like a puzzle than a transaction. From finding the correct components, to frame finish repair, and even saving a frame from a metal scrap yard! Nick Martin, shares with us the wild story about how he came to own a truly rare frame, a Breezer Series III, by rescuing it from a scrapyard in Canada! Read on below for this wild tale!

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…

We looked at the restoration of this 1984 Ritchey Annapurna through a series of videos earlier this year, and today, we’re sharing a full Beautiful Bicycles gallery documentation of it, along with a brief quote by Tom Ritchey himself. John takes a look at this esquisite emblematic example of the quality work leaving the workshop of Ritchey below!

The Tumbleweed Sunliner ($3775 complete) continues a long-held tradition of equipping a mountain bike with touring accoutrements. Since the mountain bike’s inception, people have been bolting racks and strapping bags to them, taking advantage of its beefy chassis and wide gearing to pedal deeper into rugged terrain than ever before. John has been riding the Sunliner all year in the Southern Rockies, both unloaded as a trail bike and loaded on camping trips. Read on for his thorough assessment of this timeless touring bike…

We talk a lot about the early klunkers, from Breezers to Cunninghams and Ritcheys, but what about the very first MTBs in the US, the coaster cruisers, aka mountain cruisers? These esoteric singlespeeds rely on a coaster brake hub to control their speed and were adapted from old Schwinn newspaper bikes.

Read on as John reviews his coaster cruiser, a Monē Bikes Small Batch Straight Bar, aka the SB2. These bikes are the simplest mountain bike you can ride: No hand brakes. No gears. Big bars. Balloon tires. This is peak coaster cruiser!

We’ve got over 17 years of Beautiful Bicycles in our archives and each year we like to look back at the previous twelve months of coverage and decipher what you, the audience, liked the most. To do this, we look at the page views for each and every Beautiful Bicycles gallery. Then we look at comments and internet chatter. Once we cull all this data, we’re left with a solid list of bikes. We love compiling this data as it helps us determine what bikes you like to see the most and thus, informs what bikes we document in the future.

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

Before we jump in, let’s take a look back: This has been such a fun process to undertake over the course of the past nine months. For those who are just tuning in, I bought a frame from Martin, owner of Second Spin Cycles, last year after he had acquired a substantial Fat City Cycles collection. Among his lucky haul was this Yo Eddy! in the team lavender livery with rack mounts, a pump peg, and some frame damage.

While the bike was in Rick’s care at D&D for some repairs and a paint respray, I began collecting period-correct parts from various sources. After re-finishing some of them and getting the bike back, I just finished the build this week. Monday night was the maiden voyage of the new and improved Yo Eddy! and I took some glamour shots here in Santa Fe, so let’s check this beaut out below!