This bike is the reincarnation (continuation?) of the Surly Ogre we have posted earlier in the gallery. Mr. Orge was unfortunately stolen after getting a mountain bike makeover with Shimano XT 1x10 setup. The Ogre was stolen the night of the makeover!! Unbelievable but true, however we had this beautiful Disc Trucker sitting in our shop, a frame that we mistakenly ordered for one of our employees.
It turns out that the rider likes 56cm bikes and had plans to build a new touring bike anyway since his Orge lost it's touring persona and became a mountain bike. I guess the theft pushed the plans forward? Either way, this bike was created and it has a really nice spec. Notably, we are using the TRP HY/RD disc brakes which is our first experience with them and so far are impressed. Some of the other new tech we are using is the Shimano Alfine dynamo to the new (tiny!) Busch and Muller Lumotec Eyc T Senso Plus. It puts out the same power as it's bigger brother, but less in size!! Very nice piece. We also picked up a pair of the Velocity Blunt SS rims, new for 2015, and installed 28c Gatorskins. They look so good! This bike is otherwise running a full SRAM Rival 10sp group with a Salsa rear rack and Racktime TopIt front rack. Enjoy.
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Another Surly Straggler, a very cool build for daily city riding. The bike features SRAM Rival22 mechanical for the shifting and drivetrain. The wheels are Sun Ringle Inferno 23 rims built to the new Shimano CX75 hubs, which are amazing hubs. For brakes, we went with the Shimano CX77 disc calipers. I think the pictures do the majority of the talk here though. Take a peek!
This dude has been hanging out in the drafts for a little while. The pictures are worth 1000 words. Super nice touring and commuter build.
This bike is a really special edition. I will get more info on the history of the frame, but I can stick to what I know so far. Frank Herety was a custom frame builder and built this bike for a customer who had it sitting for years. Until it was brought back to Richmond, this frame lived it's bike life as NOS.
The owner was looking to do something a bit differently with this build rather than a standard period correct Campy groupset. This bike features an internal 5 speed Sturmey Archer rear hub with front and rear drum brakes....let that sink in for a minute. Our main concern with this build was to not damage and reduce the amount of clamping we had to do on the 24K gold plating...the rear triangle and front fork are gold plated. One of the innovations we engineered can be seen in the last photo featuring a pulley and a pulley cover made of a nickel. This eliminated the need for an additional cable stop on the gold. Other features of the bike are the Soma Lauterwasser handlebars, which are replicas of the actual Lauterwasser bars. The seat is a Selle San Marco Roll Ti. The crank is the finest example of the NOS Campy Super Record crank I have ever seen. The pictures really will tell the rest of the story. Enjoy! Hey, Justin here. Check out my new commuter, a custom built 2014 Surly Disc Trucker. I built this bike to replace my beloved Puch which is also pictured. I'll start with a little bit about the Puch... A few years back I found the Puch frame and fork on Craigslist and bought it and an old Sugino crank for $20. The frame had a stuck rusted bottom bracket and headset which took a lot of work to remove but the work was worth it because I ended up with what would prove to be a magic commuter that set the bar high for all my bikes. It had a rough life by the looks of it, but I like to think the many different builds I put it through made up for it. Unfortunately, after putting over 3,000 miles on the weathered Puch, the derailleur hanger became fatigued- ready to snap, so it was time to upgrade.
Enter the Surly Disc Trucker. Originally, I planned to swap most of the Puch's components onto the Surly, but that eventually went out the window because blood red frames need all black. I strived to use all gloss black components with little or no branding and as you can see, I was successful. The end result was what intended it to be, a modernized version of my all-time favorite commuter. The Surly was also a serious upgrade. Aside from the obvious higher quality frame, I upgraded from an Acera mix-match 7 speed drivetrain to Shimano 10 speed drivetrain with Dura Ace bar ends converted to thumb shifters with Paul Comp Thumbies. One of the biggest upgrades was the jump from V-brakes with Kool Stops and Tektro levers to hydraulic XTR disc brake calipers with XT levers. The only things I kept from the Puch were the Lumotec dynamo light, Shimano Alfine dynamo hub, fenders, Civia Pizza Rack, and the inner chainring. Now that it's done, I have to say I wouldn't change a thing. The Surly looks great, rides beautifully, and it's good to go for thousands of miles. Sam was riding a Crack'n Fail and finally decided that steel was....hmmm....real. The other mechanic mentioned a small company he had heard of called Traitor and threw their name out there. For Sam, it was love at first sight.
We set up a dealer account and off we were. So why this frame? Because of the dropouts. Sam's first intention was to build a single speed bike as a commuter and potentially, down the road, upgrade to a geared bike if he wanted. The dropout pivots and can allow for a single speed setup without sacrificing the benefits of the vertical dropouts, namely the wheel can't slip under the MASSIVE wattage Sam puts out. Well, things changed when a full SRAM Rival groupset came available for a real attractive price. Sam built his wheels up with a Hope Pro 2 Evo rear hub and basically had to do nothing additional to make a SRAM Rival build happen. So highlights of this bike? Hope Pro Evo 2 hubs built to American Classic 101 tubeless rims. TRP Parabox hydraulic brakes stop this rig. Obviously a lightly used SRAM Rival group powers this machine. Whisky full carbon fork keeps the weight down. 3T, Thomson, and FSA, and Selle Italia can be found around this bike as well. Super nice build ready to train on the road this year and race hard next year. This is the reincarnation of another Surly, a Long Haul Trucker to be exact. The original bike is unfortunately not up here, but this one is so we're batting .500.
This bike was basically a frame swap from the LHT, except for the tires. That was actually the main motivation for the change of frame was the desire for massive tire, for which a massive Maxxis Hookworm 26x2.5" tire was chosen. This customer finds himself on fire roads more often than not and prefers a more stable platform. This bike exceeded our expectations in terms of comfort and actually ease of build. We kept thinking there should be some incompatibilities, but nothing. Surly does a great job of keeping the critical measurements and diameters the same between model that frame swaps like this are cake walk. This should be a great bike for years to come, or at least until the customer decides on a new Surly model! This bike. This bike is the first of what I believe to be many Stragglers that will leave the shop. This bike lived up to it's namesake too. Surly took their SWEET time getting these things shipped out. Either that, or Surly overstated how quickly they would be ready for consumers. Either way, this customer was super patient and waited for this bike. And it was worth the wait.
This is the 'Her' bike in what I can only call a 'His & Her' set of Surly's. This customers' husband finished his Surly Pacer (see it here) in June, shortly before she fell in love with the 'Glitter Dreams' Straggler. Plans were made at end of September and finalized just before Thanksgiving to bring this bike into reality. There is a lot going on with this bike, so I will try and keep it simple. SRAM Force 22, Chris King, Thomson, Stans NoTubes, Paul, and Hope. The most unique feature of this bike is the Hope V-Twin hydraulic converter. It is a super nice piece of equipment that converts the cable pull to hydraulic force, giving all the power and convenience of hydraulic brakes. This build is simply amazing and here's to hoping the customer will get many great years of use from it. Customer Testimonial: "oh my god it's like riding on a cloud it's absolutely awesome thank you" I was looking for a new commuter and knew of 2 things: disc brakes and fat tires. There were a very few bikes on the table, including the Surly Straggler, Traitor Ruben, and the Jamis Aurora Elite.
Surly just introduced the Straggler which would have been awesome because I was already riding a Cross Check for commuting. But I already had a Cross Check...why have 2 of the same or very similar bikes. Then the Traitor came to my attention, but I am widely unfamiliar with the company. Finally the Jamis Aurora Elite was the winner. Why? Reynolds 631 steel. Disc brakes. Geometry. Matching fenders and rack. It came equipped to ride. I was sold. But I can't ever just ride things stock so I upgraded. I took the 4 year old Brooks off my Cross Check, swapped the Deore cranks off my Surly for lower city gearing, upgraded the shifters to 105 STI units, and then slapped a TRP Parabox hydraulic converter on the head tube. My experience with this bike is that it is one of the best commuters and light touring bikes I have ever owned. It is a stable ride with a longer wheelbase than the Surly Cross Check. Handling is very predictable. The bike can handle weight without any rattles in the front end. And the hydraulic brakes are just an added bonus. If you are in the market for a touring bike and have been looking at Surly's and Salsa's, I would put the Jamis Aurora at the top of the list. It comes better spec'ed at a lower price point than other similar bikes. With 3 models including the similar Bossanova, this should be your next commuter bike. This bike was brought in by a new customer of ours for a little more than a tune up. After a short discussion of hippies, we hammered out a few build options and arrived at an awesome new build.
The first thing to fix was the decade-old Manitou SX Ti fork. This generation of Manitou forks was great for being light, but terrible for retaining oil and general functionality. We went for a new RockShox Gold 30 Air. Then there was the disc upgrade. New wheels and brakes were needed. Durability and low maintenance trumped weight weenie specs. A new set of Sun RynoLite's paired to a set of Deore hubs rounded out the wheels. For the brakes, you can't go wrong with the set-it-and-forget-it functionality of Shimano Deore hydraulic disc brakes. To round of the package, the customer wanted to eliminate the low-normal rear derailleur (it shifts backwards, it is so bad) and replace it with a new XT derailleur. New shifters and new frame bearings make this perform as good as a new machine (or at least better than any hippie bike in Richmond.) |
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