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Any weenies have a Single Speed Road bike?

6K views 4 replies 3 participants last post by  1SPD 
#1 ·
I am looking to build up a single speed/fixie road bike, any thoughts or links?
 
#3 ·
I have one but it is just a POS Jamis to train on. Steel frame. The lightest thing on it is probably the handlebar tape! But it offers me something to ride when the trails are crappy.

As far as links goes, well it all depends on what you want. I mean if you are going for something light weight then you need to be looking for track frames made of alu, ti or carbon. If you want something classic then there are all sorts of old school Italian frames out there that have a horizontal style dropout on them. If you just want a POS to tool around on then check out thE bay.

None the less, you can either run something with a horizontal dropout, magic gear as posted above, or any sort fo tensioner set up just like a SS mtb. All depends on how far you want to go.
 
#4 ·
collideous-- Stunning. Period.

1spd. Currently I have 1 racing crossbike, 29er, 26er, 1 carbon ridley and a commuter kona cross bike.

I am selling the kona commuter and the hardtail 26" mtb and want to build/buy a fixed or SS for around town.

I now live in a nicer neighborhood in Los Angeles and I wanted a fixed or SS bike to get around on. There are a lot of places +-2 miles away from me. I don't really want to spend a ton of cash because I want to ACTUALLY be able to ride it and lock it and go to a store or restaurant and not worry about it (I know I know). My other bikes I can never leave alone in LA. I understand that WW forum is more for bikes like the one above.... Cost no object dream bikes. But that said I know there must be some clever people here who might suggest a simple (light) frame or built bike with flat bars, maybe only run the front brake.... etc...

Thanks in advance!

Ken
 
#5 ·
Well with all that said then my suggestion is to look for a used Alu track frame or even a carbon one if you can find it. I'll tell you a little story...

I was in Atlanta last year for a confernece. Everyday for a week I had to walk thru Olympic park to get to the conference center from my hotel. I saw the same black bike parked/locked up right across the street from the park everyday. Obviously someones commuter. On day two of my trip I remember walking on that side of the street and took a look at the bike. It was a specialized frame in black. It had been spray painted black on top of the already black frame color to cover up the large logo's on the frame but he left the "S" on the head tube. I could tell that it had horizontal dropouts and was was aluminum. But everything else just looked like crap on it. On the 3rd day I was strolling by again on my way back to the hotel and I got a phone call. I stopped to talk because ahead of me were all sorts of tourists making noise and I just happened to be next to this commuter bike again. I started looking closer at it and really noticed a few things. That was a Philwood track hub in them wheels and that was a Record or Chorus brake, Hell, that looks just like my Deda 0100 stem! Holy 5hi7! Those rims are carbon fiber!!!

The guy had individually hit just about every part of this bike with some black spary paint to make it look like a POS. From a distant, it just looked like a beater bike slapped together to ride to work in bad weather and what not. But as I really started looking at areas where the paint was chipped/scratched you could see that the parts were painted and mostly carbon fiber bits. I spotted the rims because of the braking surface and thought, "why the hell does this guy have carbon pads on his bike w/ alu rims". It worked. He had camoflaged the hell out of this bike. I am willing to bet that if everything was nice and shiny it would have been worth a couple of grand and probably gotten stolen on day one. On my last day there I happened to be heading back to the hotel around 5:30 and the guy was getting on the bike. I stopped him quickly and told him that I had been looking at it during the week and told him he had a really nice bike. He said I was one of two people in the past year that figured it out.

So, you can have a really nice bike and it can be really light, you just have to be creative with it. Wish I had a picture of this guys bike but I tell ya, it just looked like any other fixie out there.

So, if you are willing to hit some parts with some paint to take away some of the bling then I think the sky is the limit with what you can do.
 
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