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Keen is launching the Harvest III series this summer, adding to the Harvest series of upcycled bags with a line made from excess, damaged, or obsolete pre-consumer car airbags. The pictured backpack will be available for $120, with a messenger bag, tote bag and wallets also available made from the same repurposed airbag material. Available straight from Keen later this summer.
Archive for the 'Product News' Category
For touring cyclists, or people who just want to be prepared for anything, anytime, a portable cassette removal tool has always been an issue. Break a driveside spoke and you may need to remove the cassette just to extricate the broken spoke, let alone replace it. Carrying a chainwhip and cassette tool is a bit overkill, but a pocket removal tool is not. There have been a few of them over the years, but this one from European tool maker Unior is pretty interesting and very compact. To use it you remove the wheel, engage the tool in the cassette lockring, replace the wheel with the tool’s square edge pressing on the frame, and just turn the pedals forward to loosen the lockring. I wouldn’t use this tool on a delicate carbon or other thin-tubed frame, and you might want to place a piece of plastic or wood between it and the frame to save your paint. An admittedly rarely used tool, but when you need it you need it.
Budnitz Bicycles are made in the USA, and come from an urban riding upbringing. Their latest high end offering in the pictured No. 4, a gloss black finished steel frame featuring large volume 24″ wheels, disc brakes and a belt drive with either a single speed or 11-speed internal drivetrain. The split top tube and swooping lines give it a certain amount of class, the smaller wheels and short wheelbase the ability to fit into smaller city living spaces. Other parts spec is high end—think Chris King, Paul Components and custom Budnitz titanium bars. As shown the bike is $2800, see more at www.budnitzbicycles.com
It is no secret that the bike world has a large underground of craftspeople cranking out all manner of short run, handmade gear and clothing. It’s only natural that more places specializing in sourcing and reselling these pieces are coming along, such as BikeCraft which just launched. Coming from a line of shows going back to 2005 featuring local bike goods, the business has now grown to a full time site. Cycling caps, messengers bags and panniers, jewelry and art prints, all of it made in the USA. See more at www.bikecraftonline.com
Road Runner Bags just sent us a heads up about their latest design, the Evil Mini. It is a super simple, lightweight drybag with a single large compartment and an outer compression strap. The bag is made from Rip Stop nylon inside and out, with a waterproof zipper providing closure. It comes in at a mere 1.2 lbs, and is available for $65.
Lance Mercado is the man behind the SquareBuilt bicycle brand, a small custom shop out of a Brooklyn basement. He setup shop shortly after a UBI framebuilding course in 2007 and has been building bikes since, more or less specializing in steel street track bikes and recently getting into the bike polo market with custom frames, forks and bars.
Having visited a number of custom frame shops over the years, one of the first things to strike me about those that I’ve visited in New York is the use of space. It’s something unique to people living and working in places with such tight real estate—organized, modular, free from excess. SquareBuilt is located in the smallish basement space below Lance’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and has everything on hand to braze or TIG weld a frame and fork, along with the blasting and powdercoating equipment to finish the job. It’s a tight ship that cranks out a frame or three per week throughout the year, with a mix of full custom orders and “built to size” frames based on customer measurements and popular SquareBuilt models.
My introduction to SquareBuilt was through bike polo, first by noticing the squared off polo bars on a number of bikes in the general competition area and then through a few fully custom SquareBuilt polo bikes that showed up last year. The bars provide an upright position on the bike with the sweep to keep your wrists happy, and available for $80 in whatever clamp diameter your bike may require. The real story with the custom polo bikes out there is the one-off prototype coupler system shown in the later images below, consisting of six bolts connecting the overlapping, reinforced top and down tubes. So far so good, the bike has been going strong without any signs of trouble for a few months now—time will tell if the system works in the long term, but it is certainly an interesting approach to a popular but expensive option among travelers.
A great visit, and after showing me the shop Lance was nice enough to guide me to neighbors Johnny Coast and Horse Cycles (each to be covered in a future gallery). See more from SquareBuilt at www.squarebuilt.com
The North Face has been making outdoors clothing for some time, but has just gotten into the commuter specific bike clothing market this past year. Pictured is their $70 lightweight Synkros Hayes commuter shorts, with a rear pocket large enough for a u-lock, and 3M reflective thread woven into the textile pattern. They are more board-short length than the current short shorts trend, but that may just make it a wiser choice for most people not looking to attract attention in and out of the grocery store.
The North Face has also introduced the $75 Hayes Encore woven shirt, also featuring 3M reflective threads and a rear cape vent to help keep things cool on the ride.
See more from the Hayes line of commuter gear from The North Face at www.thenorthface.com
Bicycle registration systems are nothing new, but free ones just might be. BikeGuard is a program from MyAssetTag and is meant as a completely free registration system for each bicycle, providing a secondary serial number and individual website for each bike called up through the QR code in case of theft or accident.
Learn more at www.myassettag.com
From David Munson, Urban Velo friend and contributor:
Perfect for dressing up any wall, or instantly creating a theme for a room. Images look great on this high-quality poster, printed on heavyweight 7 mil semi-gloss paper using superior dye inks. Image size 16″ X 20″. Treat yourself or give as a gift.
Available for $24.99 at CafePress.
Rubena is a well known European tire manufacturer just now making inroads to the US market. The company made its first bicycle tire in 1928, and today produces 6 million tires and 9 million tubes per year in the Czech Republic. Pictured below is the cream colored V99 Cityhopper tire, available in 26″ or 700c x 2.0″ size for $22 retail or $31 with their flat protection and 3M reflective sidewall options. For even more flat protection, like the pictured 3.5 and 5 mm thick thorn stopping strips you’ll have to go for the pictured black V66 Flash tire, available 26″ and 700c x 28-40 versions starting at $16 for a basic version and moving up to $40 each for reflective sidewalls and 5 mm thick flat protection. See more at www.rubenatires.com
While any publicity is good publicity, it’s a shame that Volagi is best known for their now-settled dispute with Specialized and not the bikes that they’re putting out there. Unfortunately up until this weekend that was more or less the story I knew as well. Their Liscio road bike made a splash with the full-carbon and road disc brake fans out there, and I expect the same from the pictured Viaje steel bike pictured, as seen at its Sea Otter debut. The geometry is within millimeters of that of their all-day friendly Liscio road bike, but the production Viaje will be able to accept 32 mm tires with full fenders, 42c or so without. The Reynolds steel frame has Volagi’s Longbow stays that upon close inspection are not attached to the seatube, but only to the toptube. In theory this allows to the stays and seattube to flex independently to take some of the sting out of the ride over the all day rides this bike is meant for. Sounds good, can’t wait to ride one. On paper this is more or less my ideal road bike—aggressive geometry with an all day, ride anywhere design sensibility at home on the dirt roads I love to ride. I’d personally prefer the full carbon fork had an aluminum steerer, but I may finally have to admit to holding onto past prejudices too long given what is out there these days. Expect to pay about $1500 for the frame and fork when it becomes available, hopefully in August if all goes well.
From SE:
These unique looking headset spacers mimic the look of classic lock nuts from 1” threaded headsets of yesteryear. But take note that these spacers are indeed threadless and made for 1-1/8” threadless steer tubes of today. These headset spacers can be used to liven up the look of your bike, no matter what style bike you have. New school, retro, race, street, freestyle, you name it, these new & unique spacers will compliment any ride!
-10mm Stack Height
-6061-T6 Alloy
-Available in Black, Silver, Gold, Red, Blue
-MSRP: $5.50
Check out www.buysestuff.com
Anyone who has ridden with me knows that I have a certain love of front racks. Around town or on a more formal bicycle tour, I prefer having as much as possible on a front rack. Not only can you see the cargo, I find that the bike handles better with cargo biased to the front as opposed to the rear. Wald baskets have been go-to solutions for everyday cargo since almost forever in bicycle terms—it’s safe to say that they know how to make a basket, and how to listen to their customers. The Ewald’s 257GB front rack is the latest offering to come from the 107 year old company that is still in the hands of the grandkids of founder Ewald Pawsatt. Seeing that countless big city food delivery drivers have hacked their delivery baskets to hold pizza boxes Wald took those general dimensions to create this rack. Fit to hold a 20″ pizza box, the rack is also well suited to anything else you can tie down as a capable flatbed with a short fence to help keep boxes on board. The legs are adjustable and fit conventional bolt-on axles or fork eyelets, but the newly designed bar clamps are the real story. For a long time Wald racks only fit one size bar, but that is set to slowly change with the introduction of this rack. The clamps fit bars from 22.2 mm up to 31.8 mm, and are extended to sit further from the bar for more brake and shifter clearance. They’ve also been upgraded to metric fasteners. While surely destined for countless delivery bikes, I expect to see this Wald rack on plenty of consumer level porteur style bikes that are actually being used to carry something. Available in any color you like as long as it’s gloss black, the rack is so new that it isn’t on Wald’s website just yet. Expect to pay about $50 for it from your local shop. See the whole line of Made in the USA baskets and racks from Wald at www.waldsports.com.
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