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It’s no secret that Pale Ale is Paul from Paul Component Engineering’s favorite beer, and this will be our 4th year collaborating on a custom bike for Sierra Nevada Brewery to show off at Sea Otter and give away to a lucky winner. This year we decided to raise the bar by building up TWO bikes, and using them to help out two of our favorite trail stewardship!
Denis Carrier, aka L’ermitage designed this Paul Touring Canti camp stove as a fun illustration and Paul is asking the question:
If we made a camp stove out of Touring Canti Brakes like this, what would be a clever name? Hell, let’s make it interesting, whoever’s clever name gets the most likes, we’ll send ya a PAUL bottle opener.
Head on over to the Paul Instagram to leave your best comment!
Side note: Do you remember when we collaborated with Paul on limited editon purple Touring Cantis way back when?
Last weekend’s visit to Why Cycles and Revel Bikes brought with it a veritable overload of Beautiful Bicycles but one, in particular, stood out to me. Matt’s El Jefe build was one of the last bikes I shot on the trip but had such a wild build kit that I wanted to reserve it for its own gallery, so let’s check it out in detail below.
Our friends at Paul Component are looking to help out the team at Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship through a wicked giveaway! Check out the press release below…
When we saw the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship announcement that all events for 2021 were canceled due to Covid, we were crushed. Anybody who’s been to the Downieville Classic, Mountains to Meadows, or Lost and Found knows we LOVE supporting these events with our aid stations, and partying with some of the best bike weirdos in the world, in one of the most beautiful areas in the world.
SBTS rely heavily on these events to help raise funds and awareness for all the amazing trails they build in the Lost Sierra, involving, employing, and assisting the local small communities in the process. It’s truly inspiring to behold the hard and meaningful work they put in, and a cause we will trumpet until we’re out of breath.
What can we do to help? Well, we’ve decided to offer up one of our few remaining Limited 30th Anniversary Box Sets as a prize to one lucky person, chosen at random, who donates to SBTS by March 14.
Consider donating the amount you would normally spend for entry fees and this will help keep the trails and community in good shape for 2022 when we’re all back out there shredding and partying together!
So how do you win?
-Head over to the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship website and donate any amount you can afford.
-Forward the confirmation email you receive from SBTS to travis@paulcomp.com. That’s it! Paul will choose a winner at random after March 14th in some bizarre way, so stay tuned!
Want to see what the SBTS is all about? Check out our Reportage from over the years in the Related column below.
We’re not gloating but we do want to make a post congratulating the democratic process. Good on ya, America! That said, we have a lot of work to do to re-unite this country.
Intro by California Travis:
Every Monday at 11 am, the entire PAUL Component shop staff has an “All-Hands” meeting to catch up on any changes or shop news or projects. For the last few months, this has been in the backyard with masks and everybody yelling across the yard to each other. It’s weird but no weirder than our usual shop vibes. Last Monday, Paul announced that November 2nd is International Singlespeed Day. We all looked at him like “Huh? Says who?” Then he said it was him and his friend Amanda’s birthday that day, and it was Amanda’s idea, and why the hell not?
Having never created an International Holiday before, I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I got on the phone with a bunch of framebuilders and friends and said “Hey. It’s Paul’s birthday on November 2nd, and he wants everybody to ride singlespeeds. You down?” And of course, everybody said yes, I mean what the hell else are you going to do right now? So how do you join us? It’s pretty simple really, go for a ride on your singlespeed, wherever you live, post a photo on Instagram and hashtag it #InternationalSinglespeedDay, and wish Paul and Amanda a happy birthday if you want. Don’t have a singlespeed bike? Zip tie your shifters, or take the battery off your derailleur, maybe? Get creative, there are no rules!
Post your singlespeed bikes up in the comments too.
We asked Paul what the big deal is and this is what he wrote… Read on below!
Paul Component Engineering has a lifelong legacy of making parts you can rely on, for just about any bike. This legacy is only possible due to the fact that the team at Paul live, eat, dream, drink, sleep, and travel for all things bike! Part of their tradeshow and bike race fleet is this Sprinter van, which recently got a facelift thanks to Chris McNally. Let’s take a look at this van’s new vinyl wrap in detail below.
Today we dropped a big ol’ gallery of the Sierra Explorer thanks to California Travis and to compliment the photos, there’s even a video. Watch it here to give some more insight into this cool project. Remember, you can win this bike!
Is this an article written by Cjell, about a bike built by Cjell? Yes, indeed. Not too many other people around here to tell ya about it, so it’s me you’ll have to listen to.
My operation has a couple of facets to it. One being stock frames that I have the privilege of working with a shop in Taiwan. They’re faster and much better equipped to put together frames more efficiently, and their neighborhood is full of toolmakers, tube benders, casters, etc. The fact that they put up with me trying to keep up in the shop is a testament to their patience and capacity.
I guess this is a little embarrassing. I built this bike from a single part: the stem. When Paul released the first version of the Eddie Van Halen Boxcar stem, I just had to have it! To be clear, I am not a Van Halen fan.
The first-place prize for Sim Works’ Social Reform Benefit Raffle is this Doppo ATB tourer, built by Shin in Japan, and decked out with a selection of Sim Works, Chris King, and Paul parts. Let’s check it out in detail in order to ramp up support of this great cause…
Matt bought this classic Fisher MTB frame for $50 with the hopes of having a good ’round towner. Like all bikes, it’s going through various iterations over the years, with what you’re seeing now being the most current and arguably the best. I guess it depends how the parts bin and jewelry box are lookin’ ya know?
Paul Component Engineering makes a lot of cool stuff and the whole team over there in Chico is friends with many framebuilders. Real recognize real, right? For his latest bike, he chose Cameron Falconer to weld him up something special. Check it out here!
With the pandemic putting a halt to NAHBS and our post-NAHBS framebuilder ride/showcase in Sedona this year, we decided to pull something together with our friends at ENVE to commemorate their new Foundation AM30 MTB wheel launch. When ENVE moved into its new carbon manufacturing and testing facility, they worked hard to push the progression of carbon wheel design and manufacturing. Over three years later and thousands of hours developing, today they launched their Foundation Collection, a completely new wheel line that marks a new milestone in wheel design. In short, for those of us who aren’t interested in graphs or projections, ENVE launched a $1600 made in the USA wheelset and to help showcase these new wheels, we pinged three frame builders to showcase these wheels. The last in the series is Retrotec with a beautiful Funduro 29er.
Behold, a timeless diamond in the crust. The “cantibolt” is the “sign a waiver” lightest tubed-cantilever-1” threaded offering from Crust Bikes; the first name in Boastfully Poor Business Decisions Index Weekly. A riff on the Jan Mule that so famously/infamously dons just about every other page of Bicycle Quarterly; the Crust version has coincidentally received praise from its muse… the sultan of supple; the prince of planing himself… Jan Heine uuuuuuvvv Bicycle Quarterly.
The seed was planted last summer during a weekend visit to Cameron Falconer’s compound in Quincy to ride singletrack in Plumas National Forest, one of my favorite local playgrounds. I already had a 5-year-old Falconer hardtail that I loved and rode everywhere, and there was nothing wrong with it.
Well, there actually was something wrong with my bike on that Saturday (a component failure), so I borrowed one of Cameron’s personal steel hardtails to ride on Sunday. Luckily for me we ride roughly the same size bike. Cameron has experimented with quite a few geometries over the years since he made my last bike, and the loaner I was on happened to be one of his latest designs. We were riding big chunky rough stuff in the Lakes Basin area and I was bouncing through big rock gardens more comfortably than with my old bike, feeling a lot more stable, and by the end of the ride I was like, “BUILD ME ONE LIKE THIS.
That suntanned, SUNTOURist, king of the grandiose, the beausage factory himself, Mr. Ronnie Romance, aka Ultra Romance, really knows how to put a bicycle together, even a simple one such as a fixed gear. Yet we’re not talking a Kierin bike, those NJS-stamped sparkle machines, or even a British Path Racer. This is a bike designed specifically for a plump, rough and tumble tire, with a relaxed fit, eons past the aggressive saddle-to-bar drop bikes of yesteryear, yet somewhere in-between the monster-truck abilities of a tracklocross bike. This Madrean Fabrications ‘country fixed’ is unlike anything I’ve seen in recent memory… or maybe it’s just my old age.
PAUL and his team of merry machinists made yet another super-limited batch of Boxcar Stems – 5 of each size – as an homage to Eddie Van Halen’s iconic home-painted “79′ Bumblebee” guitar as it appeared on the back cover of Van Halen II and throughout their 1979 Tour.
It’s a little known fact that Eddie himself brought the original guitar to Dimebag Darrell’s funeral in 2004 where it was placed in his coffin and buried with him. Much like the guitar, each one of these stems is totally unique, artistically splattered in black and gold anodizing by Scooter himself. Somebody get me a doctor!