[dhfox]

1. Being a strong supporter of made in USA bicycle frames and 2. Guessing that next year's NAHBS would be located in a city too far away for me to visit, I made the drive across Texas to Austin to see for myself what these frame builders were up to this past year.

QUALITY - the details - wow - staring at the designs and shaking my head at the insane skills and craftsmanship needed to pull it off

UNIQUENESS - shockingly beautiful designs that in nearly all cases could not be mass-produced

PASSION - speaking with many framebuilders that are as fanatical about bicycles as you and I are, and of course, in most cases more fanatical!

So here are some of the cross frames on offer for you this year:

Richard Sachs CFR ATMO

Speedvagen

Cielo by Chris King

Vanilla by Sacha White

Tom Ritchey

Chris DeSalvo

Vertigo Cycles



Here are some more pictures from the above framebuilders, and others that were there too:

Richard Sachs has such a rabid following that you should be prepared for a seven year wait for one of his frames.

Vertigo.
He had a 29er, a 26er, an around town grocery getter (with handmade titanium racks) and a belt drive SS cross bike.
I spoke with him for 15 or 20 minutes and came away even more impressed than when I saw his internal ti hydrolic
brake tube routing on his 29er. (sick)

Headtube

Headtube detail - machined to his specs. It's hard to see the horizontal lines on the headtube
from the machining, but when you touched it with a fingernail, it was like the 'ridges' on an
old vinyl record, only at a much more precise scale. I thought it was very cool.

the chainstays...

and the seatstays were beautiful

seatstay detail: the thin line about an inch up from the dropout was the 'cut' in the seastay
to install the gates belt. You can see for yourself how precise his tolerances are.

Speedvagen/Vanilla had a huge booth. Very eye catching paint jobs but the true beauty was in the frame details.

Here is Vanilla (only custom frames, no production runs, limited #'s)

"V" dropout

pauls, enve, tubulars

arcs and curves

front brake cable routed through custom stem

dugast tubulars

tuned record levers

brake cable housing enters underneath stem, exits under stem (so clean)


Olive Green Speedvagen

handpainted Chris King hubs

dropout faceplate detail

handpainted pauls

rear brake routing, 'seatpost' detail

custom painted enve fork and stem

Golden Speedvagen

carbon saddle provides another canvas

 

[dhfox]

Rainbow Speedvagen

Completely wet painted.

pauls

and chris king hubs too

Ritchey

Cielo

the "Cielo" is polished chrome (it just looks black in the picture)

The top cap of the headset and the moots stem are one piece - beautiful tiny welds!

DeSalvo

DeSalvo's name etched/engraved on one side of the frame

Bilenky

Black Sheep from Colorado. I don't know if you'd call it cross but I think it's cool.

Peacock Groove had a lot of details to take in on their bikes

Sylvan wooden bike with Ti lugs. I didn't get a chance to talk with him about his bike unfortunately.


All the cross bikes were sick, but I can still choose one I'd take home...

The Vertigo.

And seven years from now, a Richard Sachs (once I put down a deposit )

In the coming days I'll post some more photos of the road/track bikes, the mountain bikes and the other bikes that defy categories. Thanks for reading. It took me a while to prepared this post.

 

[limba]

Awesome thread. I was hoping someone would do this somewhere on the internet.

 

[misterdangerpants]

Nice. I was also at NAHBS. It was my wife's wedding gift to me (got married in June). Best wife ever! To make it even nicer, my Igleheart 953 650B single speed was showcased at the event. Anyway, we were at the show on Friday & Saturday and met a lot of great people. My wife wants to go to NAHBS 2012 in Sacramento!

Here's one of my favorite bikes from the show. It's a monster cross and it's awesome!

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