cycling ⁽³⁷⁾

Patrick October 19, 2020

My Road Handlebars Over 28 Years

Looking at the photos of all my road bikes since 1992, one very noticeable change is the handlebar, and in particular, the position of the hoods. On my early bikes, the hoods were extremely low on the bars. Thinking about wrist and arm alignment, particularly in that photo of my black Trek 5200, I wonder how it could have been comfortable. Well, I was a lot younger and rode just fine with that setup. The last couple of years, I’ve standardized my handlebar on all my drop bar bikes, and used a 44 cm wide Thomson KFC-One carbon handlebar. Before that, I ran 42 cm and even narrow 40 cm bars.

Patrick October 18, 2020

Old Road Bikes

I got into cycling with mountain bikes. After several years of trail riding, I and a few friends decided to do some road cycling as well. In 1992 I bought a Trek 5200 from my local bike shop. I rode it through the Jura and…

Patrick October 17, 2020

Old Gravel Bikes

I started gravel grinding years before it became a thing in Switzerland. At the time gravel-specific bikes didn’t really exist so my first two gravel bikes were pure cyclo-cross bikes. I did a bunch of gravel riding for seven years and then moved on in…

Patrick October 17, 2020

Old Mountain Bikes

An incomplete list of the bikes I've owned. Before the digital age I rode two different Muddy Fox mountain bikes, a Specialized Stumpjumper, a secondhand Litespeed and a tricked out Merlin Mountain, which I bought slightly too small. FortyFour Big Boy (sold) First ride Mar…

Patrick October 16, 2020

FortyFour Marauder

In May of 2017, I discovered a fine hairline crack in the seat tube of my Kid Dangerous. The crack started at the hole of the seat tube slot and ran towards the weld of the left side seat stay where it followed the edge of the weld for a little bit. The bike had been ridden 5'500 kilometers on rough Swiss single-track. Kris covered it under his lifetime warranty and began building me a Marauder at the end of the same month. For a one-man shop that has a waitlist and basically builds one bike at a time, he certainly made it a mission to get me back on a FortyFour.

My Kid Dangerous was one of the early client bikes Kris had built and it was an awesome bike. The Marauder got a bit of a longer front triangle and was the first frame Kris built with a T47 bottom bracket shell. I spent a good amount of time online to find a new paint. I loved the flat black on Kid Dangerous, but I sort of made it a habit to never use the same color twice. I wanted to stay with dark paint and settled with Casper Clear over Speedway Black by Prismatic Powders. There's no bike I could find in this powder coat. It's a finish occasionally used for custom car rims.

The look of the frame was and is mind-blowing. In the years between the Kid Dangerous was welded and the Marauder was built, Kris has improved his frames in every way. He added new tools to achieve a better build consistency, refined the build process and the time spent welding many frames are clearly visible in each single weld. Kid Dangerous had been an excellent bike. The Marauder is a level better.

Just like all my other mountain bikes, this single-speed was equipped with a Jones H-Bar handlebar. A cockpit change was made in August of 2020. In October 2017 I had to replace the wheels and while doing so, I finally made the jump to tubeless. Yeah, while I was an early adopter of 29ers, early for a Swiss to be gravel grinding and early again to fat bike, I was a total retro grouch when it came to running tubeless tires. Nox Composites Farlow and WTB tires made the switch fairly painless, though.