Texas Custom Bicycle Show Sneak Preview

This coming weekend, October 16th and 17th, is the 3rd annual Texas Custom Bicycle Show.

I have been lucky to attend all 3 shows now, and I have a feeling this will be the best one yet. On Saturday the show will be at the Austin Music Hall, and on Sunday the show will take place during a Cyclo Cross race. Exciting.

Its a bit of a family reunion in my living room at the moment, as I now have the past few builds on loan from my very  gracious customers. With all of the glossy paint, shiny components, and downright sexy Gallus-ness, I have to keep my welding shades on when I enter the house.

One bike, however, will be shown without paint. This is one of the last builds to roll out of the shop. The bike was made for the Colonel himself, co-owner of Colonel’s Bikes and long time friend of Gallus Cycles. The bike is a little unusual, have a look:

The Colonel with his Gallus Travel Bike

The bike is a 20″ wheel travel bike. The main design criteria was to make a travel bike that was extremely easy to pack. The small wheels accomplished that along with the S and S couplers.

Practical Meets Bling: high polished S and S couplers

Once you do something like sticking on small wheels to a bike, that then opens up a Pandora’s box of other design considerations/constraints. The biggest concern was that we wanted the bike to handle as close to a regular size wheel bike as possible. This was a combination of balancing the wheel base, fork offset/front wheel trail,  and pedal height. There is not a plethora of small wheel bikes to study/steal designs. Luckily I went to school for this kinda thing, so through a lot of number crunching, tweaking of the geometry through computer models, I was able to come up with a suitable design.

Long Head Tube

One of the issues that also came up was how to structure the front end of the bike. There was essential 3 options: A)short fork/regular head tube/long stem, B) long fork/regular head tube/regular stem, or C) short fork/long head tube/regular stem. After discussing it with the Colonel, we decided option “C” was the best.

Though it looked like everything worked on paper, we really didn’t know how it would handle till after it was done and on the road. That’s part of the reason why we have built it up before getting it painted.

And I am happy to tell y’all it rides very nicely, and that’s feed back from the Colonel, who as a long time cyclist, former mountain bike racer,  and shop owner has plenty of notches on his seat post.