The Radavist

Oftentimes, we find the best bikes for us at the most random times. Andrew shares his build of this beautiful FW Evans with us on this week’s Readers’ Rides!

Two years ago, my wife and I bought our first place in our hometown of Franklin, TN and the space dictated we’d have enough room for one bike each. Since then I’ve been building swiss army bikes with varying degrees of success, usually overkill, and it’s only been in the last few months I’ve been completely honest with myself about what the bike will encounter…

We’ve all had that one bike. A bike that we get on the cheap, as a “beater” bike but end up spending most our time riding it. Ptrutz got this bike almost 20 years ago and it still, to this day, supplies them with joy…

Nothing compares to the ride quality of a steel full suspension. Believe us when we say that! Jakub builds bikes as a hobby, under the handle Switch Craft Cycles and for this week’s Readers’ Rides, we’re featuring his self-made steel full suspension bike, all the way from the Czech Republic. Check out the full build details below, with words by Jakub…

We love a good basket bike over here at the Radavist and Galen‘s Ritchey Breakaway build really exemplifies that! Check out the full build details below, with words by Galen…

This week’s Readers’ Rides comes from Ben and features his beautiful Bantam Randonneurring machine. Check it out below with a full build spec and with words by Ben!

It’s not often you get photos like James’ in the Readers’ Rides email box. It’s not the bike shots I’m talking about either, check out that rider portrait! So good. Let’s let James describe his Temple prototype in his own words for this week’s Readers’ Rides…

For this week’s Readers’ Rides, we’re featuring Steven’s own, self-built Slug gravel bike. This one is very detail-oriented so we’ll let Steven do the talking…

Here’s my bike, my only bike. After working in the Cycling industry for several years, I realized that I had far too many bikes, and I’ve subsequently sold off all but this one. The story of Slug is pretty random, and I’m not necessarily the one to tell it. I will tell you about the bike, however.

This bike is a real stunner and one that I was hoping to document before I left Los Angles for Santa Fe but never got around to it. It was one of those “I’ll document it the next time it’s in the shop” moments. Carson‘s Funk La Ruta+ is a real gem of a bike and the dude puts in work on it, maintaining trails for the Mount Wilson Bicycling Association. Let’s check it out with Carson’s own words describing this idiosyncratic steed…

While we’ve been working chronologically on these Readers’ Rides submissions, when I saw Samuel’s email, titled “What about shaved faces and skinny slicks?” I had to peek inside. What I found was a truly unique Readers’ Rides submission, so we bumped it to the front of the queue with words and photos by Samuel. Enjoy!

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? 

This week’s Readers’ Rides features Marko‘s Karussell, a frame builder from Slovenia, gravel bike with photos by David Krevs from Karussell and words by Marko, himself. Enjoy!

So this is my only drop bar bike at the moment and I wanted it to be as versatile as possible so that I can use it for road rides, gravel grinding, bikepacking, and even an occasional cyclocross race. I have two sets of wheels for it – 650b with wider tires for bikepacking and harsh terrain, and 700c for everything else.

This week’s Readers’ Rides is one wild rig! Timothy‘s Diamondback is a great example of how vintage bikes can keep rolling for decades and can be quite fun to build out, much less ride!

If you need a rugged machine look no further then the Diamondback bicycle family from the ’90s. Overall great construction, pretty strong and made from USA True Temper tubes. This example was customized by Jeffson Bikes around 2004 and has an adjustable BB and disc tab welded on. The paint is my own doing after I could not stop looking at a Cooks Bros cruiser with a sunset fade. I did this with spray cans, and the homie made me some custom stickers that represent my bad back I had while building this bike.

The clean lines of a modern touring bike are hard to resist and for this week’s Readers’ Rides, we look at Jouko‘s Brick Lane Bikes Hitchhiker build. These frames are capable beauties, with a solid Columbus Cromor tubeset spec. Check out more details of this classy and timeless build below.

First of all, we’d like to thank all of you who have submitted Readers Rides builds to be shared over here. The response has been incredible, with hundreds already in our email box. I’m not sure how often we’ll be posting them but I figured we’d start it off this week with Tom’s Singular Peregrine fat tire randonneur…