The Radavist

We’ve had a busy year over here at The Radavist. From the return to being 100% independent, launching our Group Ride subscription service, our Rad Bazaar marketplace, and adjusting to being a small business owner again, my free time has been limited. Yet, I can thank a few products for making my job and life easier this year, along with the albums that became the backdrop for my rides, so let’s check out my Favorite Products of 2023!

We’re here in Portland, covering the 2023 MADE Bike Show, looking for bikes that we thought you, the readers of The Radavist would appreciate. Josh and John have been scouring the halls of the show for bikes to document, and we’ve got Part 04 of our coverage for you to enjoy…

Thanks to 1-Up USA for sponsoring our continued 2023 MADE Bike Show coverage!

On the cusp of this year’s MADE Bike show, we’re getting the hype train rolling early with a note from Aaron Stinner on the recent updates made to Stinner Frameworks’ mainstay hardtail, the Tunnel. Then we’ll take a look at three custom-finished Tunnels for three takes on this classic mid-travel 29er. 

We’re here en route to the 2022 Sea Otter Classic after what feels like eons, and on our way to the event, we have been hanging out in Santa Cruz, California, at Caletti Cycles and the Chris King Guest House. This unique showcase features several framebuilders’ creations, all donning the new Chris King Wheelsets in road, gravel, and MTB. There’s a great mix of bikes from steel full suspensions, road bikes, a few tasty 29ers and a few surprises, so let’s check out the offerings below and a hefty gallery of the bikes and the hangs from the event…

In an ongoing series of beautiful bicycle builds coming out of The Cub House in San Marino, CA, Abbie Bender walks us through her custom Stinner Frameworks Gibraltar road bike build with supporting photography from Sean Talkington…

Once again, the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship is the beneficiary of Builders for Builders. Bicycle frame builders for bicycle trail builders. The formula is simple and effective! This year at the 2019 Lost and Found gravel race in Portola, California, the Builders for Builders raffle and fundraiser returned, bringing in the five builders offering up the winner of the raffle a decked-out, custom frame of their choice. You have from now until June 7th to donate $10. This donation enters you to win a custom bicycle from your pick of builder: Mosaic Cycles, Stinner Frameworks, Argonaut Cycles, Sklar Bikes, and McGovern Cycles.

Fire is nature’s way of redesigning. A way to rewrite the present landscape and while the process is painful, oftentimes, the landscape is rejuvenated. Coastal California is tricky though due to its chapparal ground cover along the mountainsides. You see, chapparal – a coastal low-lying shrub – is old growth and when it’s burnt, the soil loses its stability, causing horrific mudslides. Once the chapparal is gone, there’s nothing else to hold all that dirt together. There aren’t really trees or forests like in other parts of the country along these hills and mountainsides, rather the trees find refuge in the canyons, where they can be more protected, although, with the past few years in California, there seems to be no refuge from fires.

Like many of the local riding areas in Santa Barbara, Refugio burnt a few years ago in the Serpa Fire, engulfing the fire road and hillsides, charring it to the ground. As with most fires, mudslides followed, wiping out El Capitan Ranch in the process. Local efforts have brought the area back, making this epic dirt climb ridable again. Many people say it’s better than ever. Perhaps it was the rebirth of Santa Barbara’s trails and roads that prompted Stinner Frameworks to update their Refugio all road model. Or maybe that’s just a correlation I came up with, either way, a redesign, and improvement is always good when it comes to a bicycle frame, especially one that stays close to its roots, post-burn.

NAHBS is back in Sacramento this year and having only walked around the hall during setup yesterday, I can already tell the convention center is jam-packed with builders and brands from all over the US, yet it’s hard to deny the strong California presence. While Stinner Frameworks is not showing this year, Team Dream and Mavic Cycling are.

For the past few years, Chris King has opened their doors to the public as part of an entire weekend of events dubbed the Chris King Open House. This event’s intent is to be coordinated with a product launch of their new colors for the year, as well as to showcase what makes their operations tick, and to display a selection of custom bikes, built by some of their best builder customers.

the two new colors for this year: matte turqoise and matte mango.

This year, they sent out an open invite to 30 of their best builder accounts, offering up discounted pricing to them to build a bike for the show, passing on the discount to their customers. Out of those 30 builders, 17 showed up, and they were displayed alongside a Pegoretti bike, which we looked at on Friday. These bikes lined the halls of the Chris King factory, where visitors could look at their features in great detail, chat with the builders about their process, and if they were so inclined, purchase their dream bike.

I was invited up to the Open House to document these bikes for the builders and for Chris King, as well as offering up an ultimate dream bike gallery for you, the readers of this website. Please enjoy! Which bike do you like the best and why? Oh and if you’re interested in one of the bikes showcased here, be sure to reach out to the builders, who are linked in the bike descriptions below.

This year, I’ll be covering the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship’s Triple Crown events: Lost & Found, Grinduro, and the Downieville Classic. My intent with this is to grow the Stweardship’s presence, help them raise money and spread the stoke for the Lost Sierra. Jumping on board with this project is just the icing on the dirt cake!

“Custom frame makers Sklar, Stinner, Mosaic, and McGovern have teamed up with world-class component makers ENVE, Chris King, SRAM and WTB to create four unique and beautiful custom bicycles that will be raffled after the gun goes off for the Lost and Found Gravel race. All proceeds will benefit the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship.

Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship is a non-profit organization that builds and maintains multi-use trails in the Sierra Buttes, Tahoe, Plumas and Lassen national forests. Their mission is building sustainable recreation-based communities through stewardship, job creation and hosting world-class events. SBTS has donated an estimated 72,000 hours of volunteer labor, maintained over 800 miles of shared use trails and created nearly 80 miles of new trails since 2003.

The bikes will be exhibited at the Lost and Found gravel race and the raffle will be live, with $20 tickets, from June 2nd through June 15th, hosted by The Pro’s Closet. All donations and raffle ticket purchases are tax deductible.”

Check out more details on these bikes and how to buy a raffle ticket below!

The team from Stinner Frameworks brought one of their most outrageous paint jobs to this year’s NAHBS. I always find it ironic that disruptive patterning attracts so much attention, but that’s what happens when you cover a single speed mountain frame entirely with Splittermuster 31-inspired graphics. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation leading up to NAHBS at Stinner, with the paint job alone taking four days to complete. Each layer of patterning took 5 hours to just peel and apply the mask. I’m not usually one for fancy paint jobs on a mountain bike, but this bike is complete insanity. Then, to up the ante, the same pattern was used in the custom Yanco bags.

Let’s not get too caught up on the finish, however. Even though this bike is shown with a rigid fork, it can be converted to a hardtail configuration with the Cane Creek Angleset headset, which adjusts the head tube angle between .5º and 1.5º, enough to allow the use of an appropriate travel fork. For now, however, the Whisky fork and cockpit, Whisky rims, Chris King hubs, along with the Thomson dropper makes this a lightweight and completely capable single track assault vehicle.

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

We all have our favorite authors, our favorite books, and our favorite quotes. Many of these anecdotes for travel or life’s great lessons can be applied to cycling. For Mason, he was drawn to the writing of Jack Kerouac. Particularly, On the Road. This quote became his mantra for his new Stinner Gibraltar road bike. Mason selected one of Stinner’s “Vault” paint options, Paradise, and requested the Team Dream Team Chubby Bobcat to be added to the wild paint scheme. This little detail, along with his Kerouac quote really brought the whole build together. Not to mention the SRAM Red eTap, Boyd Wheels and Quarq power meter cranks. The whole package was assembled by Simon at the Cub House.

Straight up road bikes still do it for me, especially when they’re this clean, this light and this local. I love seeing all the Stinners on the roads of Los Angeles, both paved and unpaved.

Enjoy this bike, Mason!

We Built a Stinner Romero to Raise Money for Our Friend Edie Perkins
Photos by John Watson, words by Jonathan Neve

In April of 2017, while on a morning bike ride, our friend Edie Perkins was hit head-on by an SUV. She survived but is now paralyzed from the chest down. The day before the accident, Edie had taken delivery of a 50cm Stinner Frameworks Romero, custom built and painted in Santa Barbara, CA.

The frame ended up at Golden Saddle Cyclery in Los Angeles, and we had an idea: Build the bike up and auction it off, with 100% of the sale going to Edie’s recovery fund. We originally envisioned a “parts bin” build to help keep the costs low, but within a few hours of sharing the idea, a handful of companies stepped up and offered their help.

SRAM, Zipp, Industry Nine and Chris King donated everything needed to build the bike, and to top it off, Stinner Frameworks offered to paint the cockpit to match their frame and fork. None of these companies hesitated in offering their help; there were no questions, and nothing asked in return – just a genuine desire to help a fellow cyclist in need. A friend at SRAM said it best in an email: “When things like this happen, it really hits close to home for each and every one of us, regardless of direct association or not.”

While Golden Saddle may have a world-class parts bin, the generosity of these companies helped this build massively exceed our initial plans and expectations.

The crew at Golden Saddle built the bike, and we think it turned out pretty darn beautiful…

Zipp bars, stem, and seatpost have been custom painted by Stinner Frameworks to match the Romero’s frame and fork. Shifting and braking are handled by SRAM Force Hydro, and the Industry Nine AR25 wheels are wrapped with WTB Nano 40 TCS tires. A Chris King headset and bottom bracket in Mango are a perfect match for the Stinner’s custom paint, and will likely survive decades of abuse.

The bike is up for auction at eBay, with 100% of the proceeds going to our friend Edie. This is a great opportunity to purchase a beautiful, custom built cyclocross/gravel/touring bike while contributing to a worthy cause.

Detailed specs:
Crank: Force 1 GXP 170mm
Chainring: 40t
Cassette: XG-1195 10-42
Chain: PC-1170
Bottom bracket: Chris King Threaded
Rear derailleur: Force 1 long cage
Shifters/brakes: Force 1 HRD
Brake rotors: 160mm Shimano Centerlock
Handlebar: Service Course SL-70 40cm
Stem: Zipp SL Speed 100mm
Seatpost: Zipp SL Speed 27.2 0 offset
Third bottle cage under downtube
Wheels: Industry Nine AR25 Tubeless Road/Cross wheels
Tires: WTB Nano gumwall tubeless 700 x 40mm tires
Headset: Chris King InSet 7 headset

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You can also check out Edie’s GoFundMe page, or bid on this bike at eBay and see the full geometry here.

Our thoughts go out to everyone in California who have lost their homes, their businesses and their local trails to these ravenous fires. The boys down in Goleta, a small town outside of Santa Barbara, at Stinner Frameworks were lucky. Real lucky. I don’t think anyone needs to remind them of that. With the Thomas fire reigning in heat, as California’s second largest fire on record, the shop at Stinner was busy preparing their own fire. This Romero frameset was hand-delivered to the Cub House last Friday so that Eric would be able to spend his Holiday break riding the mountains of Los Angeles.

As part of Stinner’s “The Collection,” this magenta and cyan coat was done in-house at Stinner, at no additional charge. These “stock” paint options usually offer a bright, colorful option, paired with a more subdued variant. This year’s other option is a matte desert tan and grey paint job, similar to the livery on the Stinner Hardtail I reviewed earlier this year.

Eric’s choice in build kit on this stock-sizing Romero features a Deda F-64 DB fork, which offered me something different to document, in what is usually a sea of ENVE forks. He also chose a KMC chain to match the paint, along with a combination of silver and gunmetal components like Onyx Hubs and a Chris King Headset, with a Paul stem. My favorite, perhaps unintended matching bit is the SRAM Force protective film on the rear derailleur. I couldn’t bring myself to pulling that off, though.