Custom Track Bike

This bike was super fun to build because of its simplicity… track bikes traditionally don’t run brakes or have gears. All we had to do was the layout and design, then build it! No troubleshooting weird bits and pieces, just making a pure bike in its simplest form. The owner of this bike wanted to have something similar to a couple bikes available in the production market, but wanted the upgrade to a tapered and integrated head tube. Also, a seriously burly set of forkends (track dropouts) to keep things stiff and centered up while riding fixed gear. Plus, when you get a custom frame you can tweak the numbers to be just what you want them to be!

The owner opted to keep the frame unfinished for the look of a raw steel bike. It’s not the most permanent finish, as clear coating it will preserve things for a while but they almost inevitably begin to crack and chip in time. The patina that can develop over the years can be quite lovely itself, so as long as you know what you’re getting into, it’s not undesirable for some folks.

We also decided to go with a top tube badge instead of a head tube badge, and we like the deviation… it may be a feature that appears on many bikes in the future! Also, settled in on an official serialization sequence with this bike; Month, year, order of frame within that month. We only built one frame this February, so this one is 0224001. It seems unlikely we will ever build more than 999 frames in any given month, so this seven digit system will be a nice way to keep track of where each bike sits in our custom build history.

Oh yeah, a Richard Sachs bottom bracket casting… because why not? One of our favorite east coast traditional builders, and an inspiration to always value the classic side of what custom bikes are.