Owning a bike company budget bikes are the only bikes I ever get to ride.
Scavenging parts bins and looking for cast-off tubes in the tubing piles and hand me downs from friends let me put this thing together last winter-


The frame is the custom geometry I always run for myself, at least in terms of contact points. I mellowed the bike out a little bit for a lazier feel(slacker angles, lower bb, slightly longer stays) the fork is something that a customer with a longer headtube cracked the steer tube on(don't do this). The Ultegra stuff came off a CX bike I'd given to one of my riders 2 season previously.

Thomson stems just float around at a place like this, the Selcof post, god I don't know where it came from and the SLR was stolen from my BMX race bike
The fulcrum wheels are something I keep. They're fantastic.
Brakes are Durace 7400(8 speed era).
It was a pretty fun bike and pieced together out of stuff I had. The most important thing with any bike is that it fits right, nothing to complain about there. I prefer my personal bikes to feel a little peppier so the frame went into the hand-me-down pile.


I'm really much more a fan of the aluminum bikes so when I got this Skeletor production frame back for a warranty issue(cracked seatube) I ran some bead over it and re-reamed it moved most of the parts from the Ritchey to it while that frame was down for repairs. It's one of my production frames, but, big secret, I always make a production size identical to what my personal custom numbers are. One of my distributors had 105/Velocity a23 wheels for unfathomably short cash so I picked a pair up to have around to check tire clearance on rear wheels. They ride great too and for me, being semi-crusty, the ride of 32 butted spokes 3x with a Shimano hub in the middle of the whole shebang is second nature. The new Enve fork on there has been replaced by the cracked Edge fork. Can't let the bike get too fancy. Parts-bin Selle San Marco saddle, ubiquitos Thomson post, base-model Syntace stem, etc. I like the Fulcrum cranks enough that I scrounged enough money to buy them wholesale and that's a lot of money for a starving bike maker.

The bike that I have more miles on than i can even fathom is my Ritchey from 1995.

A solid 6 seasons of full-time elite level MTB training and my primary bike every winter until I had the oppourtunity to start building bikes for myself.
The American classic post and Ringle stem have been there since day one.
The rear wheel in this picture is a total piece of **** that an ex-roomate left in my basement. I normally run a velocity deep v 32h 3x on a re-spaced deore mtb hub.
Front wheel is a close-out bin 16h Ritchey hub on a deep v 16h radial. One of the best riding wheels I own. The Turbo was in the trash at a bike shop.
The Ultegra cranks have been on this bike since 1999. 9 speed Durace DT shifters are cheap and super reliable and the 3t Rotundo bars and Sram aero levers were scrounged from my parts bin. That frame has somewhere over 175,000 miles on it, maybe 200,000 at this point.

The frame itself has been under the torch twice. Once to fix some pinhole rust spots

on the chainstays and once to fix a massively bent deraileur hanger.

The bike I am riding right now is one of our new production models with the equivalent of our base-level Apex build kit.

I'm proud to be able to offer a $2350 complete bike with an American made frame, full 3t cockpit Enve 2.0 fork and Velocity A23/105 wheels and even Michelin ProRace3 tires that's not full of crappy stuff and make a little money off of it.

I'm hoping that I can put together a new frameset in the next few weeks to throw the parts off the Ritchey on to. I'm thinking slimmer 90's style aluminum tubing, horizontal toptube with a tig-welded unicrown steel fork with 1" steer tube would be awesome. If I'm not racing I have no desire to use integrated shifters. The price isn't worth it and frankly, I prefer the reliable feel and crispness of (cheap and light) Durace downtube shifters in 9v or 10v flavors. Last time we built a new aluminum frame for me I couldn't find anything to use for the lever bosses for the shifters. A bunch of calling around finally got me a pair that I can use on a new frame and I'm excited as heck. For the cost of tubes, consumables and heat treat I get to have a new ****ty bike to ride the crap out of!