The Radavist

Today we’re elated to present our Radavist Edition Sklar Super Something bikes. We worked with Adam Sklar to create two unique and exclusive paint finishes, which we’ve dubbed “Burgundy Something” and “Super Splatter,” and have five build kits ranging from a coaster cruiser to an ENVE-clad race machine. These are available today, shipping from our parent company, The Pro’s Closet, in our Radavist shop.

There’s a lot to go over here, so let’s get to it!

We’d like to think we’re pretty alright at photographing bikes over here at The Radavist. The steeds we choose to document reflect our audience’s preferences and capture distinct trends in bicycle design. Yet, each year as we reflect on all the builds that have rolled through this cyber showroom, we’re always surprised to see what the Top Ten list reveals. This year, we’ve got a good mix of bikes, outfitted with flat and droopy bars, running rubber across the size spectrum, and made of steel, aluminum and yes, even carbon. Let’s get to it!

The Sweet Spot from Bozeman, MT-based Sklar Bikes is a steel hardtail mountain bike designed to be a venerable quiver-killer. Built around 150mm of front suspension, with clearance for up to 29 x 2.8 tires, its geometry embraces builder Adam Sklar’s mantra of “fast is fun, but fun is fun-er.” Sweet Spots were Adam’s first foray into offering a small batch frame design and sizing, which he hopes will make his bikes more accessible and faster to produce.

I picked up a Sweet Spot of my own earlier this spring after many years of searching for the perfect hardtail. Due to a few requests I had to make it even sweeter, it turned into a custom project that retained the established Sweet Spot geometry and material selection. Below, let’s take a closer look at my build in addition to a brief interview with Adam about these bikes and his design/build process!

Earlier this year, I was thinking about how cool it’s been to see Adam Sklar grow his brand. I met him very early in his framebuilding career and in that time, he’s accomplished a lot. He now has production designs as well as still taking on the occasional custom touring bike or the like.

A few years back, he mentioned that one of the things he doesn’t like about framebuilding is how expensive his bikes are. With that reflection, Adam began looking at getting small batches of Taiwanese bikes made and offering them in addition to his standard, US-made bikes. The Taiwan bikes would be considerably more affordable but still have the Sklar Bikes DNA he’s known so well for.

The Super Something is the first offering that is made in Taiwan and I got to see Adam’s personal build up close and personal at this year’s Ruta Del Jefe. Let’s see what these bikes are all about…

While I pull together our Ruta Del Jefe coverage for tomorrow’s post, I wanted to share with you a bike that has eluded me over the years. I’ve long admired Jordan’s Sklar Bikes 29er tourer but never got a chance to document it because before I could, it got stolen! Jordan got it replaced by an identical bike and in some form of celestial serendipity, my path crossed with Jordan this weekend and I got to relish the experience of photographing this lovely machine!

We joke that time is a flat circle in cycling all too often. Gravel bikes are just ’90s mountain bikes, etc. Yet, we have to accept that we’re in an era of electronic shifting and yes, suspension forks on gravel bikes. This tech, however, is nothing new especially not for RockShox, who for the 1994 Paris Roubaix unveiled a suspension fork on team Lemond GAN’s bikes. In that same year, Mavic even had some Zap electronic groups on the exact same bikes.

Now, 27 years later, we have my Sklar gravel bike which is familiar to most of you, with a suspension fork and electronic shifting, under the banner of SRAM and RockShox’s new XPLR lineup (explore, not explorer). While I haven’t taken on the Hell of the North, I have spent a lot of time being a weirdo in the woods on this kit and have a really fun review to share with y’all, so read on below.

It’s that time of year again! ENVE’s Open House, aka the Builder Round-Up and Grodeo event is this weekend in Ogden, Utah, so I packed up my bike portrait kit and drove up through beautiful summer monsoons to document a selection of bikes from this year’s event. Check out a thoroughly documented stable from the Round Up below, beginning with Chumba, Falconer, Firefly, Mariposa, Scarab, Sklar, and Tomii…

With the snow melting and the season ripe for desert ramblings, Kyle Klain took his 2016 NAHBS-built Sklar fat bike and converted it to 29+. After spending all winter with fat-bike 26+ tires, this Sklar has undergone quite the transformation. This weekend while celebrating my 40th birthday in southeastern Utah, I documented Kyle’s stunning build in the morning sun. Check it out in detail below…

Today on the Radavist, we’re featuring a bit of unobtainium. Those of you who might have heard about this brand before know that the first batch of frames already sold out. For those of you unfamiliar with Rangefinder, it’s a collaboration be Adam Sklar of Sklar Bikes, Hubert d’Autremont from Madrean Fabrication, and the painter Jonathan Pucci from Cicli Pucci. While the frames are gone, the process is what’s important and that process was documented with 35mm rangefinder cameras. We’re featuring the Mystic Project book which has over 100 images, slides, project text from Nicholas Haig-Arack, and final bike photos in a really special Reportage, so enjoy.

Each year I like to look at our content in its entirety and reflect back on bikes that took you, the readers of this website, by storm. Back in the mid to late 2000’s it was all fixed gears, then came the gravel bikes, the tourers, the MTBs, and the kooky, eccentric builds you’ve come to enjoy checking out in full-res detail. We’ve got some incredibly talented individuals contributing to this site and their hard work is something I cannot express my gratitude for enough. Going back through the 2020 content here at the Radavist, I am amazed at what we were able to accomplish all things considered.

For this year’s Top Beautiful Bicycles of 2020, we have compiled a great list of ten bikes, ranging from rim brakes to fixed gears, basket bikes, and more. This list is based on web traffic, commentary, and social media chatter, and each of these builds really brought something unique to our content. We omitted bike reviews here but included production bikes. Oh and I hope you like baskets!

Let’s jump right in!