Firstly: hello! I've been a bit of a lurker for a while now and find these forums absolutely brilliant! I hope I can become as useful a member as some :-)
My name's Ryan, I live, work and play as a mechanic and charity fund raiser for Sustrans in Bristol UK. I also work at one of the City's better known and I believe better quality bike shops part time, and am currently in the process of starting up a Bicycle Cafe for advocacy, culture, and care of all Bristol Cyclists...I'm 27, and before becoming a mechanic used to think I'd work in theatre: bikes are much more fun!
Meet Ivor (all my bikes have names...)! He's been my Trusty Steed for the past two years, has been stolen by local yobs, found by the police, taken me along bike paths of all types, commuted with me every day, done a couple of small tours but is yet to come on 'The Big Adventure': that's for another time!
For now I'll just talk briefly about what I was and am trying to achieve from him and answer any questions people might have about the setup :-)
I was sitting drunk on cider one evening at the laptop musing as usual about 'the dream bike' when my eBay extraordinaire house mate came barelling into the room; I'd commanded him to keep an eye out for bargains that would help me achieve my goal and being the sort of chap who rides around on a custom built Indi-fab I'm happy for him to act as my electronic eyes in that realm: "Get on the internet now!" shouts he!
And...lo and behold, there sits an MK1 RST frame (with carbon forks!) for £175 buy it now from our good friend SJS Cycles; they'd found it sitting at the back of the warehouse a bit kicked up after it had been returned; you can't buy the MK1's new anymore (can anyone tell me what the primary differences between this and 'modern' RST frames are please?) so even more of a find! It was only an hour into the listing, it was a steal for the price (RRP£800 incl the forks!): i jumped onto my bank account and frantically decided what I'd put on this frame: Rohloff was out of the option (cash limits), an Alfine 8 speed would do alright for a while, I'd always wanted to mess around with sturdy, low maintentance brakes and a friend had sung praises of Magura HS33's, SJS no longer had any 26"
32 hole Rigida Grizzly's in stock (I was fooling myself that I'd turn it into a proper 'Sports Tourer'! More on that later) so some SunCR18's would do the trick, the wheels were handbuilt by myself, A Tubus rack, some mudguards, an experiment with the Thorn Comfort Bars, swapping over the ICKY carbon stem for a better angled alloy one and treatig myself to a SONdelux20 topped off the whole setup...bingo!
All that actually took place over the next several months whilst I scrimped and scraped to build the bike up and I only ended up with Comfort bars because I originally rode flat bars on Ivor until a friend who had ridden his Raven to India recently had his sitting in the box still and went with drops so I gave them a go when he gifted them to me. In the above photo's Ivor has the really nice 'Profile Design' bottle cages fitted and is equipped with Marathon Plus's ready for a a quick whirl around Northumberland: all in all he weighs in at a heft 14-15kg! Try going at speed on this machine and you
will become tired quickly (especially with the upright position!
All that had to change in the end and as the year went by I recognised that I still hadn't created the perfect machine for myself: changes were afoot!
(tune in soon for the nixt installment...!)
Yrs,
Ryan
