Ibis Heywood and Single Malt?
 

Does anyone out there know if the Ibis Heywood was just the prototype name for what would become the Single Malt? I found a review of the Heywood steel single speed mountain frame/bike by Mountain Bike Action in January 1999 on the RetroBike website:

http://www.retrobike.co.uk/gallery2/...2_itemId=10947

Other than this, I have never seen another reference to the Heywood. It seems like kind of a long break between this article, in Jan 1999 (so a 1998 frame project) to the 2000 Las Vegas bike show when the Single Malt was displayed.

Second question - did many of these single speed frames ever get made before the Ibis 1.0 closed up shop? I wonder how many Heywood's there are out there, and who has them. Perhaps Mr. Nicol could enlighten us.

There was a thread on MTBR where someone thought these single speeds were the same as the 26 "alphabet" bikes that Ibis made, but the latter were made in earlier - in 1998. So it seems like the Heywood prototype might have been part of the alphabet series, but not the Single Malts - unless Ibis kept them under wraps for 2 years...

Cheers,

Dave

some answers
 

A more digging reveals that these were two distinctly different prototypes.

The 1998 Heywood prototype used a convention single speed frame with rear-facing track style dropouts, the the 1999/2000 Single Malt prototype use conventional Ibis Breezer-style dropouts and an eccentric bottom bracket (EBB). A mouth-watering review of the apparently the only Single Malt in existence can be seen at Singletrack magazine's website:

http://www.singletrackworld.com/article.php?sid=164

This article and the previous Heywood review also show lots of other cool parts - a prototype Ibis carbon crankset, custom Chris King headset and hubs, etc...

Dave