The girlfriend bike. Or in this case, the fiancé bike. It can be a tricky, slippery slope, especially when you’re kind of – ok really – obsessed with bicycles. When I bought this bike from Andy at FYXO last year, it came with a C-Record gruppo. Good for looking at, sucky for climbing hills – for Lauren anyway. We quickly found out that that 8-speed cassette didn’t have the gear range she needed to pedal up to Austin’s beautiful vistas…

This bike sat on my wall for about a year, collecting dust.

Something had to give. Then I got an email from Campagnolo. Turns out, I went to highschool with the PR head in Italy. Small world, huh? He wanted to get Campy on one of my bikes and I said “no way bro, SRAM all day”, or something like that. But… I had an idea. Let’s take Lauren’s Casati and swap out that old Rekkerd gruppo for some silver Athena 11-speed.

Days later, a box showed up. Inside was a full gruppo, complete with Campagnolo Athena cranks (50/34) and a 12-29 cassette in the rear. I contacted Ben at Velo Mine to see what deals he had on wheels. His hand laced White Industries wheels to H+Son TB14s are a steal.

There’s one mechanic in town that I take all my bikes to for maintenance and builds: Chris Chou at Mellow Johnny’s.

As any avid follower of FYXO will note, this gallery is inspired by Andy’s old bike build photos. Even the build is inspired by FYXO, down to the Campagnolo skewers on the White Industries hubs. What can I say, Andy’s got good taste…

The original build of this bike was 23lbs 10oz, this bike, as it’s shown in the final build is 20lbs. That’s impressive!