Singlespeed & Fixed Gear - Jamis Sputnik review

I've built a few of these bikes over the past week, and on Wednesday the streets were clear enough to take one out on a fast test ride. Here are my observations and opinions:

The Good:

The frame is the best aspect of this bike, hands down. Reynolds 631, clean welds, thoughtfully designed track ends, w/ paul-style tensioners, simple brake bridge, understated paintjob.

Weight is 16lbs w/o pedals. Light! This is quite apparent when excelerating.

A very smooth ride- the combination of carbon fork, quality frame, and alloy cockpit add up to plush handling.

The hubs are Formula, which IMO are the best entry-level track hubs. Cartridge bearings, decent track nuts.

"No-name" parts are absent from this build.

Uncut steerer tube. Your first reaction will be "Ugly!" but then you will be happy that they gave you the option to cut it to your prefered height. This is really a big plus.

The Bad:

Alex rims, while double-walled and light, are not reputed for their quality.

The cog and lockring are not very good. Cog is stamped steel, lockring is soft aluminum. Be careful when you instal these.

Cranks are Truvativ, which means durable yet ugly.

The gearing is a bit steep for street use. Fortunatly the bike is light and responsive, but i would gear it down for daily riding.

Picky - They ship this bike with a chain that is too short! Any good mechanic will fix this problem when building, but pull the wheel off in the shop, just to make sure.


Overall:
Not only do they have the best product name(aren't we a little tired of Italian by now?) out of all the off-the-peg track bikes, but they feel much more like a "real bike" than the scores of entry-level rides on the market. Of course, at $300 over the other offerings, they should. I could see upgrading the wheels at some point, and you will probably want to swap out elements of the drivetrain, but this frame should last you forever. Depending on how much you need to modify, this may or may not be the best thing for your money. As I am a bit of a bike snob and require top shelf parts, so I wish these were availible as a frameset. Decked out with high-end bits,they would blow the competition out of the water. As is, they are a rock-solid value for the rider who wants a ready-made rig with more to offer than the Bianchi Pista.


(This is a quick reveiw, feel free to comment on anything I've missed.)

whoa ... thanks for the review.

I'm going to be in the market for a new bike over the winter and there are a bunch of choices for me to sort through, and this one is added to the mix.

i want to ride one of these so bad. my jamis MTB is great, and like you said about the sputnik, the frame is my favorite part of my MTB. Unfortunately around here, i doubt any of the shops will "carry" them...

How much are shops selling them for?

Sorry, forgot to mention that. MSRP is $825.

Ira, has your shop seen any of the Exile SS's yet, those are looking like a sharp rig with a sweet pricepoint....

Ira, has your shop seen any of the Exile SS's yet, those are looking like a sharp rig with a sweet pricepoint....

I haven't seen one yet, and probably won't. We are an urban shop and don't sell a lot of mtbs of any sort. I agree that they look rad though.

Ira, has your shop seen any of the Exile SS's yet, those are looking like a sharp rig with a sweet pricepoint....

I was just looking at the exile online and I agree, it is pretty sweet looking.

most of these companies should discount these bikes and sell them wheel-less because while they can shove 30 gears on a $500 Road Bike they don't know squat about how to build single gear wheels right.

saw one yesterday and would have to say its the most bang for the buck..
Could it be.... The replacement for the Bianchi pista?????

i want to ride one of these so bad. my jamis MTB is great, and like you said about the sputnik, the frame is my favorite part of my MTB. Unfortunately around here, i doubt any of the shops will "carry" them...

I remember the campus bike shop on Thayer Street sold jamis bikes. May sell them to those rich Brown/RISD kids.

Anyways, don't you already have a kick ass Paramount?

Ira, has your shop seen any of the Exile SS's yet, those are looking like a sharp rig with a sweet pricepoint....

we got one in our shop a couple of weeks ago and it is crazy awesome except that the remote lock out fork is a little wacky. hopefully it's just a rare glitch and the rest are right as rain. since it's an "early edition" i'm not sure if it has all the stock features that ones released in spring will have. the complete bike comes ready to run disc brakes only, whereas the frameset we recieved a week ago came with cati bosses. the exile frame also features the paul style tensioners which i have mixed feelings about on a trail bike.

jamis has always offered the most bike for the dollar. i like this new ride

It looks like the Jamis is going to be my next ride. It will just take me a little while since my apt. was just robbed of all my cash :(

I was checking out the one in the window today, Ira. I think they look pretty fine in person...very sleek.

Were I in the market for something ready to go, this'd probably be it. I bet you sell quite a few come springtime.

Thanks for the review! I'm shopping for a winter bike to replace my baulky, corroding hybrid, and fixies are most intriguing.

I see it comes with 700x23c tires. Can you tell if it will take anything bigger?

my fav bike ever was a jamis dragon. Jamis frames + Reynolds steels, +2 for the win.

I was sweating this pretty hard when I was in Rapid Transit the other day. Unfortunately, I can in no way afford bikes right now. So I'll stick with the Pista until the time is right.

I see it comes with 700x23c tires. Can you tell if it will take anything bigger?

Up to 28 for sure, maybe 32? I'll check on that.

how hard do you think it would be to take the decals off?

I want one of these as a frameset...BAD! My 2001? 853 Jamis Eclipse is an awesome bike. I like Jamis.

Wow, that's a mighty fine looking bike and a top-shelf review.
sadly, even my $300 conversion was too expensive...

my local shop caries it its a sweet bike off the shelf and looks way better then the pista...

almost 10 years ago, the guy at rapid transit (i think it was RT) told me that jamis offered new models at marginal profits, just to get footholds into markets. i wonder if this is still the case.

is the frame alone available?

I too have ridden the sputnik quite a bit and I will second that it rocks. also second that the gearing is a little steep but it's a rad bike. The fact that it is the nicest looking off the shelf fixed gear is nice too.

I am scraping some cash together for a pro-deal on the exile SS. I should be making the call by the end of feb. It will be my first bike with disc brakes and first bike with suspension. I will keep everyone updated.

I just bought a 2007 Sputnik last weekend in Toronto for CDN$900 with Tektro brakes, a handlebar swap to 44cm Bontrager flattop drops and an ACS freewheel from Cycle Therapy on Queen E...It is a matter of pride that I ALWAYS ride my bikes home from the shop I bought them...Unfortunately, I live about a 150km ride from Cycle Therapy...The good news is, you can pretty much get all the little seat height and handlebar height/angle issues solved over the course of such a long ride...

John at Cycle Therapy did a great job building up my bike for me...The wheels came from Jamis severely undertensioned, but he spent almost an hour and a half essentially rebuilding them for me so I wouldn't have any issues on the ride home...This was definitely the best assembly job I've ever experienced (including the "pro quality" assembly I paid extra for on my Lemond)...The brakes are still perfectly set up, the wheels are still round and true even though I rode home over some seriously washboarded gravel farmroads that had potholes big enough to stick my fat head into while wearing a messenger bag with 20 pounds of crap in it...

The frame is pretty cleanly built (which is more than I can say for the afforementioned Lemond) with especially nice lost wax dropouts with threaded adjusters, brazed on seatpost binder and a really nice looking brake bridge...It's black anodized with "decals" which look to be somehow printed directly onto the frame (decal peelers BEWARE...this is NOT the bike for you)...The plastic headtube badge looks a little cheap, but it'll probably fall off in a month, so it won't matter...The angles aren't as steep as I initially thought they would be, which yields a ride which is similar to the Lemond "classic" geometry...Which means it's equally as good over long hauls with a messenger bag full of crap as it is slicing and dicing with traffic...It does feel a bit harsh on the arse for a steel frame, but that could be due to the incredible bump-muting power of the Easton EC70 fork making the frame look bad...

About that Easton fork: It is stiff as hell...It mutes all of the bumps on the road...And it looks Uber-sexy whilst doing so...Oddly, the Easton logos stand out more than the Jamis logos on the bike...A couple of non-bike people have commented on how much they like my new Easton ride...As a bonus, the fork's steerer comes from Jamis uncut...So, for those of you out there who are suffering from back problems or who just don't like being hunched over too much, this might be a reason to choose the Sputnik over the competition...

The bike comes stock with Ritchey Comp handlebars, stem and seatpost...I swapped out the bars for wider Bontrager ones so I can't comment on them, but the stem and seatpost both look okay, are easy to adjust, and seem to work fine...Having used everything from the cheapest Kalloy up to high end Thomson, I can say that this stuff really doesn't matter too much and you won't notice it while riding...I have NEVER felt that a seatpost has ever hampered the quality of my ride...

I think it was Jobst Brandt who said you should always build wheels with the best hubs you can afford...He said this because the hubs will outlast the rims and you can always upgrade your rims on the second building of the hubs...Jamis must have listened to Jobst because the Sputnik comes with Formula cartridge bearing hubs which should last a long time...Unfortunately, the Alex rims are sort of cheap and they are made of pretty soft aluminum without eyelets in the spoke holes...Also, as I noted earlier, the wheels came from the factory with severe tension issues...If you're not shopping at a store that is willing to put the extra time into making sure the wheels are corrected or you're not a particularly good wheelbuilder, you might want to look elsewhere...The wire beaded Vittoria tires are better than I thought they would be, though they're considerably harder to get on and off the rims than Kevlar beaded tires...If you lack finesse with inner tube changes, see if your shop will let you upgrade to a tire with a Kevlar bead and save yourself some frustration...

The optional Tektro brakes and levers seem to be okay...The levers are Campy copies and the dual pivot brakes are Shimano knockoffs...They even come with cartridge pads which was a nice surprise...Sure, the bushings aren't as nice as what Shimano and Campy offer, but a couple of squirts of 3in1 oil on the pivots and you'll never notice the difference...I don't imagine they'll be as durable over the long haul, but at 1/3 the cost, what can you expect?...NOTE: there are no cable stops on the Jamis for a rear brake so, if you want to run them, you'll need to either run a full length of housing down the top tube and attach it with zip ties or use bolt-on cable stops...

About the San Marco Ponza saddle: There is stitching on the nose that ate through my thighs in less than an hour...By the time I got home, I had the worst case of chaffing I'd experienced in my adult life (and a ruined pair of brand new shorts)...For every bum, there is a perfect saddle, and the San Marco Ponza was MOST definitely not the perfect saddle for me...It has subsequently been replaced on my bike with a San Marco Regal Titanio which is my favourite saddle of all time...

Almost every singlespeed out there for the 2007 season seems to have the same RPM cranks...Cannondale, Kona, Giant, Jamis and others have all put them on their fixxies and singlespeeds...They sort of look a bit cheap and they're apparently quite heavy...That being said, they seem to be doing their job...I haven't noted a lot of flex in them...They are WAY too long for a fixxie at 175mm though...

Despite minor qualms, I'm extremely happy with the Jamis Sputnik as a whole...I wanted something for mixing it up in traffic which could also handle longer rides like it's initial voyage...It looks great, it's fairly light (20.5 lbs with brakes, pedals and freewheel) and it makes me feel like a better rider than I am...

OK...Enough typing...Now I ride...

I was able to test ride one (that was a little big for me) a few months back. It was pretty sweet and a good deal. The only problem was that when I tried to get one in my size, Jamis was sort of a d**k about it. Their response was "we don't know who carries it in San Francisco" and "we have no idea when they will get more". Called around to a few shops at the time and they also told me that they were having problems getting them.

Sounds like the distro is better now, but they whole customer service thing really turned me off. Would have bought one at the time, but, oh well...