Single Speed 29er Mountain Bikes Rock!
Have you ever wanted to design and or even build some Custom Mountain Bikes? Wouldn’t it be fun to have control over the aesthetics of the bike projects if you had unlimited budget constraints and plenty of extra garage space for a fleet of all the different styles of 29ers you could dream up. Bikes are fun because they can be so artistically diverse, but yet be so purposeful at the same time. Here is an awesome take on that individual artistic quality from a company named English Cycles, located in a mountain bike heartland of singletrack in the U.S., in the norhtwest state of Oregon! And happens to be located in the thick of a ton of extremely talented builders of custom mountain bikes, or any type of bike for that matter.
The owner and designer of these Bluetina 29er Bikes was focused mostly about performance, but a little bit focused on the aesthetic and styling too, huh– go figure on the end result. The goal was a very clean modern look. Their first option to get that modern result was by using an integrated seatmast, with a Thomson post modified to use an internal wedge – the seat height is adjustable by removing your saddle. The second option they used for attacking that clean look was to make the hydraulic hose routing fully internal, some painstaking detail here by routing the front brake line to enter under the stem to then go down the inside of the steerer tube, into the left fork leg and exits by the caliper. And a new take on the rear brake line that we at 29er CAFE haven’t seen before by entering it in the downtube behind the headtube. It then runs underneath the BB inside the frame before passing inside the chainstay to arrive at the brake. The third option for crafting design cleanliness is the classic one piece steerer-stem-bar. They have nicely curved the seattube to design for shorter chainstays and accommodate the bigger wheels on 29ers. There has also been careful shaping of the stays to allow clearance for the 2.25″ tires and the Gates Carbon belt drive ring. A Niner Eccentric bottom bracket enables tensioning of the Gates Carbon belt, with an intuitively cool custom split dropout to allow it to be fitted inside the frame. And they used post mount front and rear disc brakes, with 160mm front and the tight 140mm rotor for the rear. It has assymmetric seatstays to clear the rear brake caliper.
The parts kit was put together having a balance of durability and weight, with Chris King single speed hubs laced to Enve XC rims with Sapim cx-ray spokes, Race Face Zeus SL cranks and SRAM XX brakes. Claimed total weight is 18.5lbs.
