The long mystery bikes (we sold ten) of a few years ago got me/us going on LW (long wheelbase) bikes. The ride is really good, but they don't fit in boxes well, for shipping. The dreamy ride of those bikes lead to longer chainstays on other bikes, and ultimately (well, maybe not ULTIMATELY) we got our own long chainstays, made to spec, and now we have more options for other bikes. So...liking the long CS and the LW bikes, in general.
In the trade magazine yesterday I read a guy from SRAM likes 27.5 mtn bikes because the smaller than 29er wheel "allows shorter chainstays." Missing the point. When the Mystery bike was going to go into production, it was going to be called the Appaloosa, a name suggested by Finn Taylor. I love the name and I love horses, although I've ridden one only once and it was scary. But Appaloosas are special horses---I guess all horses are, but I like the Indian connection to them, and the spots, and the name itself seems stretched out, so fit the bike. Then I/andwe-all-here thought that as good as the bike is, we'd never sell a hundred of them, and that's our minimum for a production run (and generally our maximum, as dictated by cash flow and risk and space to put 'em and dread of nervousness...). But in the meantime we had an Appaloosa headbadge made, and it's really nice, too. So we had badges and no bike and a newfound fondness for long chainstays. Then somebody here broght up the idea of a "canti-Sam," kind of like the "canti-Romulus" man of you know. The Sam is kind of perfect as it is, but cantilvers never wreck a bike and they have a place for sure, so we shifted that way. Then the cantilevers lead to why not a hair more clearance and nudge it toward the Atlantis? And then the long CS came into it all, and so what for a couple of days was going to be a Canti-Sam turned into a long WB canti-Sam, but at that point it's a different bike. (The canti-romulus was exactly a romulus with cantilevers.) We added 5mm to the fork length and upped the wall thickness of the top of the fork blades from 1.0mm to 1.1mm, which is half btw the Sam and the Atlantis... and then went for Appaloosa, which allowed us to use the head badge (we have 120 of them, or something.) But developing means at least one round of samples, and reserving production time at the shop, and then it also would have meant temporarily kicking out the Sam, which---how can we do that to a bike so good, and then also risk not having any bikes to sell in the Spring, something we can't afford, that would truly be a disaster. I think I said this on the Blug. The Clem will have the new wide Hunqa fork crown--flat and normal for us. That bike is also on hold, same reasons. Bill, you can come by and ride the bikes--anybody can. Call to make sure it's there, because sometimes it's not. The graphic above the plate of food in the blug is something else for another bike that will likely happen in mid-2016. If plans change or I get too impatient. On Friday, November 21, 2014 3:01:58 PM UTC-8, Bill Lindsay wrote: > > It looks like the new Hub-Area Rack is available, now with a hoop. Not > only that, it appears to be mounted to the front of a Joe Appaloosa. You > can see the rings and the tig welds at the headtube. > > http://www.rivbike.com/product-p/rmf2b.htm > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
