The Radavist

When a frame builder has access to an in-house graphics department and paint booth, great things happen. Thomas from Horse Cycles‘ partnership with Ben Falcon has really paid off. Ben’s paint mixed with Horse’s frame design and construction delivers show-stopping road bikes like this.

No matter how high tech the road bike gets, nothing beats the lines and elegance of a classic road bike. For this year’s NAHBS, Bryan of Royal H Cycles brought this beautifully-lugged road bike with equal parts practicality to functionality. At first, I didn’t even notice the Di2…

Remember that DeSalvo dream bike NAHBS contest? Well, here’s the winning bike concept. Mike’s offerings each year are usually clean, minimal road bikes but this year, it was a special treat seeing a bike like this in the DeSalvo booth. This dirt drop frame features the Fox AX “gravel” fork, a KS LEV dropper, Sim Works To Smile dirt drops, color-matched PAUL and White Industries. A few builders brought bikes like this to the show and personally, I’m into it.

I say this a lot at NAHBS, but when I saw this big and beautiful Northern Frameworks single speed MTB in their booth, I exclaimed “HOT DAMN!” This bike is for a tall rider and I love seeing how builders balance the proportions of large bikes with modern MTB geometry. The client spec’d all brown anodized PAUL and White Industries, to complement the rich, copper paint.

A few weeks back, around the time of the Giro x Radavist collection drop, Mosaic reached out, saying they had the perfect bike to display the goods with at NAHBS. I was into it, Giro was into it and I think you’ll be into it. This GT-2 build by the Colorado-based builder features a geometry more tuned for long day dirt rides and lightweight bikepacking, custom Spectrum-powdercoated decals with matching OD green King Kages, and a set of custom bikepacking bags from Colorado’s JPaks Bags. The beauty of the JPacks frame bag system is the nesting frame bag that fits under this partial frame bag, allowing you to either run bottle cages, or an additional bag for storage. You can see this bike for yourself at Houston’s Bicycle Speed Shop.

Brookyln’s Weis Manufacturing first made an appearance here on the Radavist not too long ago. With their asymmetrical seat stays and robust dropout design, the look and feel of their framesets felt very unique to me. After seeing their bikes in person, it further solidified this. While their construction is top-notch, I couldn’t help but be drawn into their Splatter Track finish, which was executed perfectly, in my opinion anyway, by the paint shop at Horse Cycles.

Breismeister Bicycles is a frame builder out of Queens, New York and for this year’s NAHBS, Doug, the owner brought along this beautiful 650b road bike made from Columbus Max and featuring a bi-lam head tube, Pacenti fork crown and a loud, vibrant paint job. The colors on this bike are just too good!

The team from Stinner Frameworks brought one of their most outrageous paint jobs to this year’s NAHBS. I always find it ironic that disruptive patterning attracts so much attention, but that’s what happens when you cover a single speed mountain frame entirely with Splittermuster 31-inspired graphics. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation leading up to NAHBS at Stinner, with the paint job alone taking four days to complete. Each layer of patterning took 5 hours to just peel and apply the mask. I’m not usually one for fancy paint jobs on a mountain bike, but this bike is complete insanity. Then, to up the ante, the same pattern was used in the custom Yanco bags.

Let’s not get too caught up on the finish, however. Even though this bike is shown with a rigid fork, it can be converted to a hardtail configuration with the Cane Creek Angleset headset, which adjusts the head tube angle between .5º and 1.5º, enough to allow the use of an appropriate travel fork. For now, however, the Whisky fork and cockpit, Whisky rims, Chris King hubs, along with the Thomson dropper makes this a lightweight and completely capable single track assault vehicle.

Kris Henry from 44 Bikes knows how to craft a beautiful, functional tig-welded machine that will live by the brand’s mantra of “Swear to Shred.” This Huntsman road bike features clearances for WTB Nano tires, Shimano flat mount brakes, the powerhouse group that is Ultegra, and a geometry tuned for road riding of all substrates. With a paint job by Jordan Low of Hot Tubes Paint, it’s got plenty of pop!

NAHBS isn’t always about $3,000 paint jobs, expensive carbon components, and electronic shifting. For Squid Bikes, their paint jobs cost more in time than they do in materials and the sky’s the limit for their designs. This year at NAHBS, the bike that jumped out at me was this tracklocross fixed gear built with Paul Components and White Industries, using their ‘cross bike frameset. There’s even a nifty little stash container built-in to the handlebar end to keep things even sketchier… but still safe. This bike beckons for some #RubberSideUp action.

We’re kicking off NAHBS this year with a unique build by Kentucky’s Stanridge Speed. A client in New York City contacted Adam about building a him a unique track bike, prompting Adam to design and construct an homage to the 3Rensho Broad Axe, a frame from cycling’s heyday of experimental design. For the build, Adam used various tubing specs and construction techniques, a custom-manufactured Phil Wood left hand hub, ENVE hoops, FSA Olympic-spec Vision Metron cranks, FSA Metron 5d bars, and paint by Jordan Low. As far as track bikes here at the show, this one takes the cake…

When you’ve got a good thing going, why change it? For Saja, he loved his Breadwinner Holeshot singlespeed ‘cross bike so much that when it came to buying a hardtail mountain bike, he looked to the Portland-based framebuilders yet again. Breadwinner has two mountain models, the Goodwater and the Bad Otis, with the latter being a more trail-ready and rowdy big brother to the slimmer, while still shreddy, cross country-oriented Goodwater. The difference between the two mountain models come down to head angles and fork travel. The Goodwater touts a 140mm fork and a 67.5º head angle, which delivers a more than capable bike, suitable for our mountains here in Los Angeles.

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

We all have our favorite authors, our favorite books, and our favorite quotes. Many of these anecdotes for travel or life’s great lessons can be applied to cycling. For Mason, he was drawn to the writing of Jack Kerouac. Particularly, On the Road. This quote became his mantra for his new Stinner Gibraltar road bike. Mason selected one of Stinner’s “Vault” paint options, Paradise, and requested the Team Dream Team Chubby Bobcat to be added to the wild paint scheme. This little detail, along with his Kerouac quote really brought the whole build together. Not to mention the SRAM Red eTap, Boyd Wheels and Quarq power meter cranks. The whole package was assembled by Simon at the Cub House.

Straight up road bikes still do it for me, especially when they’re this clean, this light and this local. I love seeing all the Stinners on the roads of Los Angeles, both paved and unpaved.

Enjoy this bike, Mason!