A big bike with big tubes

I believe this is the longest it has ever taken me to build a bicycle. It’s the polishing of stainless steel that will seem to eat away every minute spent at the workbench. It’s worth it though in the end. I worked with Ryan on every aspect of this one. He is an industrial designer by trade and his requests were very tasteful, so sharing the vision of the finished bike was not hard. The bike is a 61.5cm road/commuter with super oversize Columbus tubing and the new Richard Sachs Sax Max series lugs. The crown (which is not a Sachs) was carved and polished to match the lugs. The front and rear dropouts are from Paragon and were polished as well. The rears had the bottoms polished by Ryan’s request to alleviate paint chipping over time. The custom stem has a nice polished stainless ring that flows seamlessly into the Star stainless headset and into the stainless head lug. The cable hanger on the stem was fabricated from the STI cable stops that were originally part of the bottom head lug and polished to match the rear.

The geometry of this bike is more relaxed than most large frames. The seat tube angle of 72.5° and the long chainstays get Ryan into a comfortable position on the saddle without having to feel every bump over the rear wheel. The downfall of using this oversized tubing is that there are very few seatpost options out there. So I ended up getting a Nitto S67 31.6mm oversize seatpost, machined it down to 30.6mm on the lathe, and then re-polished it (there was plenty of meat on that post to remove 0.5mm from the wall). The rear rack is a tiny custom with stainless toe strap guides to hold down that jacket when it gets too warm. And the paint is an understated cactus green with pearl topcoat and yellow details.

Ryan has worked in bike shops over the years so he picked out all the parts and did the build. I just had to install the fenders, rack, stem, post, and lights on there. The fenders, which are Berthoud stainless, were polished up as well. The lights are Supernova and the dynamo is a polished Shimano DH-3N80 to complement the White Industries rear hub. The brakes are the polished Paul Racer Mediums with very low profile mounts.

The full slideshow of 73 pictures goes through the whole build process over the last couple of months. It was definitely a good exercise in polishing and patience.