650B and Groovy

This idea for this frame dates back to February 2008, when I attended the North American Handmade Bike Show in Portland, Oregon. When I arrived at the show, in my mind I'd been tossing around the idea of having a custom frame built around the 650B wheel size. For those not familiar with bicycle wheel sizes, a traditional mountain bike wheel is about 26 inches tall when a tire is mounted on it, in the late 1990's a larger 29 inch wheel was introduced and I've been riding this wheel size for the past couple of years. More recently the 650B wheel, which is an older standard used on French touring bikes, has started to become more popular and measures about 27.5 inches tall with a tire mounted.

I met Rody Walters (who builds under the name Groovy Cycleworks) the summer of 2007 in North Carolina, and I knew that he was going to be at the Portland bike show. I'd had the opportunity in North Carolina to briefly ride a 29er frame that he'd built and I really enjoyed it. I wanted to check out his booth at the show, and talk to him about the possibility of him building me a bike. At the show, I was blown away by a frame that Rody had on display - the frame had many neat details, and the retro splatter paint job made my jaw drop. After talking to him, I decided that Rody would build my frame. A couple of days later he had a $500 deposit for the build.

I quickly worked out the details of what I wanted from a frame, and in the summer took measurements to send to Rody. The frame itself didn't take shape until the fall of 2008 when Rody started the build process. It took him longer to build than the typical frame, as there were several extras that I wanted: internal rack, custom rack, bottle opener, extra water bottle bosses, canti bosses and disc brake mounts, etc. By the time all of the work was done and paint was applied it was December of 2008, and then the bike sat waiting for a custom crankset (which se still in the works) until February 2009.

My goal for the bike was too make it versatile, durable, and fun. The bike was the ability run disk or rim brakes, it is designed to be fully-geared but has an eccentric bottom bracket (EBB) so that it can easily be switched to single speed use. The components were all picked because they're durable and problem free.

-el 2/26/2009