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I’ve owned and sold a lot of very nice bikes, but my custom Condor Cycles Super Acciaio was my all-time favorite. My ride or die. Literally, and it did. It died when a car did an illegal left turn in front of me. The top tube and down tube folded like a paper solo cup.
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.
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!
Anytime a reader sends in their self-built frame to our Readers’ Rides email box, we drop everything and check it out. So far we haven’t been disappointed! Adam sent in this gorgeous road bike that he built at the Metal Guru Framebuilding Workshop, along with a story and parts breakdown, so let’s get to it!
Today’s Readers’ Rides comes from Knoxville, TN and is from Matt who shared his Viner Super Rad…
When I was a kid, there was a poster of a white Lamborghini Countach SL5000 on my bedroom wall. An object of unobtainable desire. Thirty laps of the sun later, the poster now hangs in my Dad’s garage, and I’m no closer to owning one.
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 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…
For this week’s Readers’ Rides, the first of 2022, we’ve got Joseph SY Ng’s build from the Master Build Course at The Bicycle Academy. This one’s a beaut, so check it out in detail below!
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!
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.
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!
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…
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.
We love seeing how cycling frames and components are made and perhaps that’s what motivates our Shop Visit series? This video was sent to us by a reader and they are right, this really is right up our alley! Check it out to see how TIME makes its in-house carbon fiber frames…
We just featured the boundary-pushing Full Enjoy from MONē Bikes in Monday’s gallery of unique builds from this year’s Sedona Mountain Bike Festival. Then, not twenty-four hours later, Cjell announced that his new El Pebblito gravel framesets were available for sale.
Read on for more!
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.
Pine Cycles – which we featured at the ENVE Open House this year – debut frame the RASA is designed to accommodate 700×35, 650×48, and 26×2.3 tires with disc or rim brakes. Custom dropouts, featuring 3 separate interchangeable inserts make the RASA the world’s most versatile bicycle…
