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The Great Nutter Butter Discovery on Mount Gleason

Reportage

The Great Nutter Butter Discovery on Mount Gleason

Whenever I stop riding for a while because of work, or life, or hurting myself (usually while sleeping, etc, etc), I obsess over these big rides that I am going to do once back on the bike. Like many of you, I can easily spend hours looking at maps trying to piece together the “perfect” route. But cycling, like most fitness-based activities, can be fickle. It doesn’t care that you used to do it a lot.

That certainly doesn’t stop a brain like mine from dreaming. So when I saw my 43rd birthday on the calendar, a group text started with some friends. In the past, we’d done some really ambitious rides for my special day, like the ‘Clouds to Cacti’ ride, for example, featured here a few years back.

Bikes We Liked from the 2022 Sea Otter Classic

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Bikes We Liked from the 2022 Sea Otter Classic

The good ol’ Sea Otter Classic can be an overwhelming experience with its plethora of products and bikes. Here at The Radavist, we try to sift through the dirt to find the chunks of gold, which is what we did this year, profiling a selection of bikes from vintage, to new, including some randoms we found meandering the wind-blown aisles of this lovely event. Check out some beauts below!

State Bicycle Co: New Shirts and Undefeated Road Disc in Tie Dye and Pearl

Radar

State Bicycle Co: New Shirts and Undefeated Road Disc in Tie Dye and Pearl

State Bicycle Co offered up a sneak peek at its new Undefeated Road bike with a fancy tie-dye and pearl paint job. These new framesets have been re-engineered with Y9 aluminum which is 6061 aluminum with added titanium, resulting in a new alloy composition that allows for the thinnest possible wall thickness to be used. And yes, while the new bikes look great, we’re really excited to see those new shirts hit the market too! Check out the new Undefeated Road disc road and track bikes and the “It’s Just Bikes” shirts at State.

Beach Club Launches with Its Discless Road

Radar

Beach Club Launches with Its Discless Road

Beach Club grew out of Team Dream and The Cub House and offers Made in Los Angeles frames and stems by Darren Larkin

Discless road? Beach Club? This means rim brakes, cus rim brakes still rule and look the best when surfing the Earth’s surface because that’s what matters most right? In essence, this bike is like looking at the bike you remember loving in the early 2000s thru rose-colored lenses; lithe, comfortable, and intuitive, without the annoyances of non-compact gearing and 23c tires at 120 psi loosening your fillings over pavement seams, literally the best of then and now.

These frames are full Columbus Life tubes with Columbus Futura Caliper SL Forks and clear 30mm tires. Each frame is painted with painted logos designed by The Radavist’s Cari Carmean. No decals here. Read on for more…

The Radavist’s Top 10 Articles of 2021

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The Radavist’s Top 10 Articles of 2021

This year’s retrospective includes a look at our highest traffic pieces. These articles really blew up, bringing in a lot of comments, backlinks, social media posts, and traffic. While it should come as no surprise, most are bike reviews but a few of these galleries are seminal bits of Reportage. In this list are nine Reportage articles and one Radar, so let’s jump right in!

Radar

The Hill Climb Project with ISEN Workshop

When The Service Course caught wind that the 2021 National Hill Climb Championships was being held at the iconic Winnats Pass in the Peak District National Park for the first time in over 40 years, they could sense the perfect storm beginning to brew – and quickly got to work. A year in the making, this project is a celebration of everything we pride ourselves in – a passion for cycling culture in all its quirky guises, collaborating with a dream team of talented creatives from ISEN Workshop and yes producing head-turning, jaw-dropping steel bikes weighing in at 5.4kg and ready to fly.

See more at The Service Course.

The Radavist’s Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles of 2021

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The Radavist’s Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles of 2021

I hope your winter break was refreshing and that you got some miles in over the Holidaze. We’re back in 2022 with the first of our 2021 year-end recaps, beginning with everyone’s favorite: the Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles of 2021. Like years prior, I compiled this list by traffic, comments, and social media/backlink chatter, also omitting bikes from Open House/Expo style showcases. There are some real gems in here, so let’s get to it!

Riding as Ceremony: A Vintage Road Bike is All You Need

Radar

Riding as Ceremony: A Vintage Road Bike is All You Need

At some point earlier this year, I came down (again) with the vintage bug. I used to comb swap meets in search of a 58-60cm bike, NOS Campagnolo kits, hard-anodized wheels, and pantographed parts but it has been a while. Perhaps it’s because I feel so inundated with “new” tech announcements claiming “lighter, stiffer, faster, more aero” and at a certain point, it just gets to be too much. In the same way, I enjoy riding a rigid or a hardtail 90% of the time over a full suspension. Recently, I began to feel “tech fatigue” when it comes to drop bar bikes and have been looking at ways to simplify that riding experience…

2021 Philly Bike Expo: Swood Cycles Endurance Road+

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2021 Philly Bike Expo: Swood Cycles Endurance Road+

Stephen Wood, of Swood Cycles, has been making custom steel frames and racks in Richmond, VA for a couple of years now. At this year’s Philly Bike Expo, Jarrod Bunk linked up with Stephen to photograph his eleventh Swood frame, the “Irie” Road+. Below, Stephen offers a few insights into his trajectory of becoming a framebuilder and, paired with Jarrod’s photos, walks us through this stunningly detailed machine.

Radar

Bicycle Kingdom Ep.3: Riding in NYC – Major Taylor Iron Riders

In this episode of The Pro’s Closet‘s video series Bicycle Kingdom, we take a deep dive into the Major Taylor Iron Riders, a cycling club founded by two sisters in Brooklyn in the 1970s. The club’s name is inspired by Marshall “Major” Taylor, a cycling champion and the first African American cycling hero, and the Iron Riders, a group of infantrymen that were commissioned to ride bikes across the country to determine the feasibility of using bikes in warfare.

The Cub House Builds: Sheldon and His Custom Firefly Road Bike

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The Cub House Builds: Sheldon and His Custom Firefly Road Bike

What would your dream bike look like? For the team at The Cub House in San Marino, California, just outside of Pasadena, they specialize in curated, custom dream bike builds ranging from Firefly road bikes like this one to basket bikes and everything in between. One of The Cub House‘s most recent builds was for a customer named Sheldon who wanted to put a bit of himself into this custom machine. We’re lucky to host Sheldon‘s words below, so read on to see what he did and why with this specific build…