We'll get up and get it get a shot Joe. Why don't you stand right in front of the pique
house? Oh my god. Is that your bike? You gotta stand in front of your bike. This is my bike.
This is on video? Yeah, you're famous. What's that? What's that Joe? It's Link. Is that
Zelda? Legend of Zelda right there? 8 bit generation? Yeah, that's my protector. Check this out.
He's putting me all the time. Constantly. Protects me from evil forces. This is Joe's kit. A life.
He's looking at the steeze right there. The steeze. Hatter Coaters. Hatter Coaters
steeze. Yes. You can do whatever color I want. What is that? My paint. Put some sparkle in there.
There is sparkle in there. There it is. Yeah a paste to be president of sugar coat. Damn right it does.
That's my employee Marty Walsh.
Yeah, I'm his bitch.
Yeah, but Joe's head of powder coating.
We have a side business called Sugar Coat, which we powder coat bicycle frames and really
anything.
Joe's powder coating the letter E for superb bicycle and Boston Mass.
Today's YouTube video is brought to you by the letter E, and you can have a bicycle.
Whoa, cool.
So this is powder coat, which is different than paint.
Powder coat is actually, it's the same material as paint, but it's like in plastic form, so
you spray it dry.
It's electrically charged, so it sticks to the metal.
And you basically just spray the whole thing, stick it in the oven, cook it.
It's like easy bake oven for adults.
It's awesome having purple boogers at the end of the day.
Yeah.
A few geek house head badges.
The previous head badges were all hand cut by me, but these new ones are water jet cut,
stainless steel.
And then we spend about a half an hour polishing each one of these guys.
But these will be going on all our new bikes, I'm really, really psyched on them.
This is the old geek house head badge.
They're all hand cut out of brass.
It's a design that I was taught how to do these by Mike Flanagan and Ampike.
Very similar to his style of head badge.
It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to each one of these, so it'll be nice to have something
that's a little different.
Both curved tubes are made by True Temper, and they were distributed by Henry James.
We ended up buying the last 10 of them that they had, and they were going to be pretty
much done.
True Temper stopped making them, but after many lengthy discussions with the guys at
True Temper, we finally convinced them to go in with us and the distributor and remake
these.
So these are now going to be available again through Henry James, and they'll be as an
add-on to any of our bikes.
So Marty, what's this blue and pink and neon green cross bike going on?
Yeah, these are our Team Cyclocross bikes.
We're doing an 11 person Cyclocross team.
It's going to be regional, facing the northeast.
And this is one of our guys' bikes, all completely done, first one completely built.
We have our jerseys here, which are kind of the early 90s ridiculous neon style.
Does this certify you guys that the street cred, is that the hipster?
No, PBR, they're hooking us up.
Man, they're giving us a bunch of beer, and they're definitely one of the main sponsors
of the team.
We also got Miracle of Science here from Cambridge.
And one of our other, we got two beer sponsors, actually Pretty Things, a local brewer making
really high-end delicious beer.
And then our title sponsor is Boston Rock Gym, which is a rock climbing gym right outside
of the city.
They are our title sponsor, they're hooking us up with a bunch of stuff, and they're actually
going to give us use of their Dodge Sprinter van.
So we have an 11 person van to kind of take to races, which is going to be pretty sick.
We got guys at True Temper and Alpha Q hooked us up, SRAM.
We got a local rep here, Northeast Cycling, Sale Solutions, SDG, which I'll be at at SDG
Inner Bike booth with one of the team cross bikes.
Kane Creek hooked us up, man.
Those guys called us out of the blue and just told us they wanted to sponsor us, and we're
totally psyched to have them on board.
We got Velocity on a bunch of the wheel sets, and then of course Thompson components really
hooked us up on some stems and C-posts for the team.
Hey, we need to get some Thompson C-post clamps coming out, the new ones.
I know, I know.
They're just releasing them.
Yeah, they're on order.
So.
Yeah, I can't wait for those ones.
I'm on that waiting list myself.
And also notice the Kane Creek 110 versus the Chris King, which is industry standard.
Yeah.
The Kane Creek 110 is kind of like the headset they're competing with the King against.
I believe they're 100% made in the USA, C&C down in North Carolina or something like that.
So it's a real high-end US-made headset.
And then we get the new head badge on the front of this all shined up.
Yeah.
We just touched down in Wendham, Massachusetts.
We're here at Chris Igelhart's one-man factory, and here we go, I'm going to go visit him.
Chris Igelhart of Igelhart fame here, and we are in his temple, in his temple.
So we just touched down at Geek House Bikes down at Harvard Square, and there's a little
15-minute train ride up to this part of Massachusetts.
But they do share one common trait.
They are both custom handmade bicycle makers here, and they both actually carry a fork,
and they make forks that are called New England segmented forks.
And I believe Chris has probably the most steeze of coining such a term, so I was hoping
to probably pick his brain.
These kind of things you don't see, I believe it's called the alien ears, you just don't
see those things.
Those are trademarks of Igelhart.
I make bikes to order pretty much one at a time.
I take measurements, and I have a fit system in my living room, this whole house is a bike
factory, and then I build the bike according to spec and what the person's needs are.
Everything from mountain bikes to track bikes, to cross bikes, to road racing bikes, to touring
bikes, to just around town, whatever bikes.
What would differentiate your forks, and with your background and experience, from what
someone else maybe creates?
I don't know.
There are a few people making segmented forks, that was even a segmented unicycle, I saw
the other day advertise.
But this isn't a new design, this style of fork was made probably over a hundred years
ago when the original bike boom started, but at Fat City we were trying to get more width
out of the crown, we were using a box crown, which is on that whole red bike up there,
and this just gave us more room and also accommodated for suspension clearance and crown clearance
on the down tube.
But this fork, I don't know, I feel like I've made a lot of forks, so I think it's the leading
edge of your ride.
I've got it within a quarter of a millimeter for centerline when I'm done with it.
I really like the stunt.
What's up with the disc mount here?
Is that, with this long, long?
Well, this is something that Paragon Machine Works had, I really like the look of it, so
I incorporated it in it.
This is actually a touring length disc fork for a builder out in I think Washington state,
and I just sort of like this look.
It's really more for a unicrown fork because there's some stresses on a unicrown that are
different over the disc tab than with them.
And these almost look like rear dropouts the way they're cupped.
These again, this is another way of doing this particular fork that I made.
These are Paragon Rite Dropouts, which are named after the Rite Brothers.
Wow, this is the style of dropout that they made on their bikes.
Joe Brees went on to do it back in the early 80s with the Breeser Drops.
California?
Again, California.
The Paragon is from Richmond, California, the Iron Triangle Gangsta.
This is a similar sort of, this is a Breeser drop, but it's based on the Rite Brothers
design.
That is cool.
And Mark Nordstadt.
I actually, Dave Garoot made the first pair of these back in probably the early 80s,
and then Paragon also made them for its also.
I'm building a bunch of cross bikes right now, and they all get this kind of dropout.
Usually I saw the Islet off, but this particular guy wants Islets.
Fenders.
Yeah, Fenders are a rack.
Islets give you more variety, which a lot of people aren't aware of, and they really
don't weigh anything.
It's just a cool factor of looking at the race bikes with most people.
So Chris is working on a cross team, Geek House is working on a cross team.
It's cross season.
It's cross season.
Yeah, it's cross season.
It's cross season.
Here in September 2009.
Yeah, this is the time of year again.
So you're a bit, you know, if you look online, Chris has a pretty prevalent following, especially
on MTBR, to community forums.
Idleheart Forks, they're definitely what people consider the premier fork as a leading
edge.
Yeah, yeah.
And going into 2010, what do you see as the trends for what you're making, what you're
being commissioned to make, because you are a custom bike builder.
I'm doing the Oregon Manifest at the end of the month, up in Portland, Oregon, and that's
a construction heirs contest, and we got a ride with a six pack for 77 miles over dirt
road mountains.
Do you drink the six pack as you're riding?
At the end.
Oh, at the end.
You get to hold on to it.
But it's glass.
So you can't break it.
Wow.
So my next bike, after I make these cross bikes, is a bike for that, which I gotta really
brush on.
But I think transportation is finally making a call for it, because people want to make
a less of a dent on things, and they're finally realizing the bicycle does it the best.
So commuter bikes with little handle fenders, it would be a single speed or a fixie.
Now testing the Strimmier-Archer 3-Speed, right, right now, I've got a bike out back
up in the...
So NAB's the North America Bicycle Show, right?
Yeah.
The Thorford Handmade Bicycles, all the boutique builders.
You actually premiered a carbon drive, and the Strimmier-Archer, is that the Strimmier-Archer?
The Strimmier-Archer.
SX3, the internal...
Yeah.
It was vaporware at that point, but they sent me a hug, and I put it on my fixie, and it's
a gas.
It's a gas?
You can sit down and get up a hill.
I mean, great for San Francisco.
Chris, thank you so much.
Well, thank you.
All right.
Chris, I go hard.
All right.
I go hard.
What do you think, do you want to have it first?
No, nothing.
I do.
I guess it'll be good.
It'll be good.
It'll be good.
Huge stock, you know.
Right?
I mean...
Yeah, there's stock.
Yeah.
How about...
There we go.
Is it in the steel?
It is in the steel.
Yeah.
Richie breakaway.
It looks like a 59 or 60, huh?
So we got Marty from Geek House Bikes.
We're here in Boston, Massachusetts.
We just had lunch, I guess, here, and then we saw another Eigelhardt.
And if you guys don't know, Boston, Massachusetts is just jam-packed with builders.
You want to list some of your neighbors here in Boston?
Sure.
We've got...
One of the closest is independent fabrications in seven cycles.
We're also good friends with the guys at Icarus Bikes, which is Ian Sutton and Brian Hollingsworth
at Royal Age Cycles, Brighton Union Square in Somerville.
And then we've got Ant Bike Mike out in Holliston Mass, Eigelhardt, the North Shore.
We've got Matt Budd, who's local, too.
Richard Sox is out in Western Mass.
We've got the guys at Circle A in Providence.
There's a lot of builders around.
Nice.
I'm probably forgetting a bunch of them, but...
We're here with Marty.
This frame is actually pretty interesting right here.
Wow.
Some new step brush.
This is going to be a ladies' step-through frame.
The first one that we've done that has a curved top, too.
And we actually did some internal routing on this one, too.
So it's going to have front and rear disc brakes and a rear 8-speed alfinae internal hub.
Both of the cables are internally routed there.
Coming out the back.
And we also braised on these decorative head tube rings.
Yeah, more like it's like Hetchins there.
Or Hetchins-like.
Yeah, we get a lot of our dropouts and bottom brackets from Paragon Machine Works at the moment.
What's the deal with your monkey t-shirt, Marty?
This is a Circle A Cycles Providence Rhode Island.
These guys are good friend of ours.
Whenever we do high-end painting, these are the guys that we go to.
We do power coating in-house, but if we want something with some paneling or some different detail, we go to those.
This is what I see when I think of D-Cos.
I see this fork, crown, tapered, handsome, and very modern.
I unfortunately can't take too much credit for this fork because this design is probably about 30 years old.
It's from Fat City Cycles.
They used to make a mountain bike fork called the Yo-Eddy.
So this is our track version.
It's called the Yo-Marty.
So you just put together a new England segment fork for a single speed 29er.
This is custom commissioned.
Even with this busy schedule with this cross bike team, as you can see here, it's this personal rig.
These are the new brand new Geek House fork drops.
They're completely CNC'd out of 4130 steel.
We design these ourselves completely in-house.
I did all the industrial design on the shape and the cutouts, and had a friend who's an engineer do all the drawings.
These are actually made down the street in Cambridge.
And these are supposed to match our rear brake and brake pads.
These are our built-in track drops.
They actually have an integrated chain tensioner.
The wheel's not in it right now, but there's a little dial wheel goes in here, and they're drilled through so that you can adjust the chain tension really easily.
What is this metal we're looking at here that's been loaded together?
Yeah, this is a stock pursuit fixed gear frame.
It's made out of double-butted Dettachai Varus tubing, which is our base tubing that we use.
We also have upgraded frames that can be used with Columbus Life or TrueTemper OX Platinum.
Dettachai being the preferred steel at Bianchi?
It is.
Yeah, this one's, the front end has been welded.
We need to put in a seat stay, ridge, and finish welding the rear drops, and then it'll be ready for power coding.
