For our Readers’ Rides today, we’re featuring Emily’s Cross-Check, her first “real” bike purchase and she built a looker! Let’s check it out below!
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Mid South 2022: Austin Reviews His Surly Midnight Special
Most of us who attended Mid South this year are still coming down from the high from this year’s event. I know I am, and I didn’t participate in the run or ride. I came to town to help District manage the flow of builds and repairs for the weekend. For those who heard, I am the guy who lost the tip of his finger. It’s doing fine, by the way!
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Readers’ Rides: Dann’s Custom Surly Ogre Rando
This week’s Readers’ Rides comes from Dann and features his Surly Ogre Rando bike build. Dann wrote a lot about this one so enjoy the deep dive!
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Surly Ghost Grappler Drop Bar Touring Bike
With so many brands tossin’ their crusty, salty caps into the drop bar touring bike ring, Surly decided to do the Surly thing and offer something a little different with the Ghost Grappler, a 27.5×2.5″ wheeled, steel chassis, horizontal track ends, multi-surface tourer with a lot of stack for a comfortable riding position. Looking at this bike, you might be compelled to compare it to the Salsa Fargo, the Otso Fenrir, the Moots ESC, AWOL, and Kona’s Sutra ULTD. The Retail is set at $1899, pending availability with supply chain shortages. Check out more at Surly.
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The Radavist’s Top 10 Readers’ Rides of 2021
2021 was an exceptional year for our Readers’ Rides series, which we first began posting back in 2011. Last year’s readership-submitted bikes ran the gamut, much like our Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles, but Readers’ Rides is 100% audience-submitted. We love receiving submissions each week so if you were on the fence about submitting your ride, perhaps this list will motivate you to break out the camera. This list was compiled by web traffic and comments. Let’s check out the Top Ten Readers’ Rides of 2021 below, in no particular order…
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Donate For a Chance to Win a One-Of-a-Kind Surly Midnight Special!
Bike supply chain shortages got you bummed out? Love the Midnight Special but can’t get yer grubby mitts on one? Well check out this contest Surly is running with Full Cycle, a non-profit organization that uses bikes as a way to support and feed houseless youth in Surly’s hometown of Minneapolis, MN.
Read about how you can win this bike at Pillsbury United Communities!
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NM Bikepacking Summit: Mike from Broken Spoke’s O’Leary Built Minimal Rack
One of the things that caught my eye at this weekend’s NM Bikepacking Summit was Mike, the owner of Broken Spoke in Santa Fe’s custom-built O’Leary rack for his Karate Monkey. Mike really wanted a better way of carrying his essentials, rather than a bikepacking saddle pack. His goal for the rack was to have it be multi-purpose, both designed to carry traditional panniers or as a framework to strap Nalgene bottles to, while allowing for a bedroll or tent to be strapped to the rack’s platform. Depending on how you’re traveling, this opens up the use of a dropper post as well.
Mike went to O’Leary, a custom builder here in Santa Fe, to hash out the design and he whipped it up in a matter of hours. Minimal racks like this offer a simple solution to a very common problem and I thought the readership would be intrigued by this. Check out a few more photos below!
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Readers’ Rides: Surly Midnight Special Review – Christopher’s Raw Custom All-Road Build
This week’s Readers’ Rides comes from Christopher in NYC and his Surly Midnight Special which he customized. It’s a real beaut, so let’s check it out in detail below!
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the 2021 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co and Paul Component Engineering Sierra Trail Chasers Benefit SBTS and SORBA
It’s no secret that Pale Ale is Paul from Paul Component Engineering’s favorite beer, and this will be our 4th year collaborating on a custom bike for Sierra Nevada Brewery to show off at Sea Otter and give away to a lucky winner. This year we decided to raise the bar by building up TWO bikes, and using them to help out two of our favorite trail stewardship!
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Everything Ryan Wilson Packed for His Turkish Bike Tour and Six New Favorite Pieces of Gear
Narrowing down my setup for Turkey was a bit tricky compared to some of my previous trips. In particular, because half of my gear that I was using in Central Asia was stranded in Nepal on lockdown, I’d have to try to piece together a rig using older equipment I had lying around as well as a handful of new additions to round it out.
To start, I picked up a Surly Bridge Club. I originally had intended only to have it as a do-it-all bike while I was home, but when I found out I was heading to Turkey, I was intrigued to see how an off-the-shelf $1150 bike with entry-level components would fare compared to higher-end setups like my 44 Bikes Marauder and Tumbleweed Prospector. I’ll post my full thoughts on the Bridge Club soon, but in the meantime, here is my full kit list along with six pieces of gear that stood out in the Taurus Mountains.
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Bike Touring is About the Oasis: Beau and His Surly ECR are en Route to Mexico City
Bicycle tourists are some of my favorite subjects to document. Especially ones that ride by their own rules. When a fella named Beau Walters dropped me a line on Instagram on Sunday, asking if I was free to meet up in Santa Fe as it was on his touring route from Boulder to Mexico City, I naturally obliged. Little did I know what I was getting myself into!
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Readers’ Rides: Josh’s Arctic Monkey
For this week’s Readers’ Rides, we figured it’d be nice to celebrate snowfall as large swaths of the country we hit by their first big winter storm. Here’s Josh’s Arctic Monkey, shot atop a beautiful coat of snow. Read on for details and a write-up by Josh.
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Not a Yeti: Gravel Jesus’ Surly Midnight Special Pro Fro Tribute Bike
The mid of March is usually a time where you think about the upcoming season and what kind of adventures you are going to tackle during springtime. Suddenly, the world is closing down, throwing everyone into the status of the unknown. Leaving us with restless and raving minds. Diving into the world of bikes has always been a great way of escaping reality for me. Let it be physically or virtually – if you don´t have the chance for some saddle time.
I was blessed to have the chance of getting my first taste of ultra-cycling at the Atlas Mountain Race last February. The harsh brutality of the Morrocan rock fields brought up the first ideas for this project. Rocks and smaller stones hitting my frame and rims for hours let me think about how I would repaint my bike after the race.
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A Look at the New Agave Products Handlebar Bag: the Arroyo Backpack
One of the joys this website has brought me over the years is helping out small companies jettison their products into the world. From component manufacturers, apparel brands, frame builders, and yes, bag makers, there’s something special about watching a brand bloom over time and having been a part of that process. Last week, I met this fella named Jeff at Sincere Cycles where he showed me a new prototype bag he’s developing under the moniker Agave Products called the Arroyo Backpack.
Jeff and Agave are based in Austin, Texas, my old stomping grounds, and so this project plucked at my heartstrings a bit. Read on for a more in-depth look at the Arroyo Backpack…
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Readers’ Rides: Ben’s Modified Karate Monkey
Ben from Heath Creek Cycles shares with us his customized Surly Karate Monkey with some details we think the singlespeed readership will really appreciate. You don’t have to go full-custom to have a customized bike! Check out a few quick words from Ben below, along with more photos from Josh Kowalski, who manages Continental Bikes in Duluth, MN…
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A Different Kind of Maker: Jacob from Bread Shop Santa Fe and his Surly Cross Check
We visit a lot of makers here at the Radavist. From frames to components to bags. 2020 has put a lot of that on momentary pause, yet I’ve enjoyed meeting cyclists serendipitously since moving to Santa Fe, many of which are small business owners. One of those is Jacob from Bread Shop. He and his wife Mayme, along with his brother Zac run a small bakery that’s big on taste. We’ve been buying loaves once a week from Bread Shop and this week I met up with Jacob to shoot his Surly Cross-Check.
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Throw the Parts Bin At It: Morgan’s 26+ Surly Pugsley
Considering I’ve reviewed three Surly bikes here on the Radavist and have loved every one of them, it’s a bit surprising that I don’t have one of my own. Thing is, we live in a two-bedroom apartment, and our family collection has room for three bikes each not including cargo bikes: slow, medium, and fast (still slow by many folks standards).
Review bikes come for tryouts, but in the past two-and-a-half years, none which have been able to displace our collection, which includes my Kona Unit (slow), our Soma Wolverines (medium), and my humongous Rock Lobster (OK, pretty fast). There’s a slim chance that a bike could be added, but for the right bike it is possible, and that’s where this story begins.
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Surly Overhauls the Disc Trucker
The Disc Trucker is Surly’s disc touring bike and this year, the brand revamped it a bit, adding a bunch of crucial details:
Updates:
-Dynamo routing on the fork, plus three-pack mounts on the blade and every braze-on you’ll ever need for racks, fenders, water bottle cages, and more
-12mm thru-axles for a stiffer feel and increased stability when fully loaded
-Shortened seat tube and slightly sloped top tube for improved stand-over clearance, plus increased stack height for a more upright and comfortable riding position on those long hauls
-Spec’d with the Truck Stop Bar and tubeless ExtraTerrestrial tires for dependable handling and traction
-Flat-mount disc brakes
-Frame sizes 42–56cm are available with 26” diameter wheels, while frame sizes 56–64cm are available with 700c diameter wheels
-Clearance for 26” x 2.1” tires with or without fenders, or 700c x 47mm with or without fenders
Check out this video for all the info and head to Surly to see more.