Home Made Bike- Swiss Edition

Burly & curvy! I like it!

Just needs a badass fender!

Wish they had shots of the linkage... curious about how well the suspension works, it looks like a nice compact and probably pretty stiff design...

how did yo make the down tube... i'm trying to figure it out, but can't without super nice machinery...

The downtube isn´t hydroformed, it´s bent, just like the rest of the tubing. No huge tricks and expensive machinery (in a relative sense) here, just good craftsmanship. Am I wrong with suspecting that that´s a VPP design? The amount of metal below the BB does hint at another pivot down there. Looks pretty light aswell.

I too make my own frames. Not so much to come up with the latest and greatest suspension design, but because I'm two meters tall. That's 6'7". I always used to buy Large or XL frames, but they were never quite long enough in front and usually had too much standover for proper shreading. Then I learned to weld steel at work and started making my own. First I made a hardtail based on the geometry of my large Chameleon frame, but with a longer front end, steeper head angle and 15" chainstays. I dented that at the Fun Spot and made another out of a damaged prototype Solid Bikes MTB frame. I cut off the front end, rotated the rear triangle forward to lower the BB and made an even longer and steeper front end. Next, I made a front end for my old school Bullet that looks the same, but with the length of an XL and the standover of a small. I also moved the main pivot up the downtube to shorten the chainstays to 16.5" for quick handling in the tight stuff. It also helps it pedal more like a hardtail. For my most recent and favorite bike, I initially bought a used SWD which was misrepresented as a ridable bike but turned out to be one of a batch with wack geometry that should never have seen the light of day. Thanks Justin! So i made my own front end with the help of Hank Mathison at SWD. That bike was killer, but a bit heavy with the steel swingarm, so I acquired a Bullet 2 rear end in a trade and milled out my front end to accept the BB style pivot thanks to Todd at Black Cat. As it sits now it has very Euro/ My crazy geometry with a 62.5 degre HA, 13 5/8" BB, 16.25" chainstays, 27.5" downtube, and gets 9.5" of travel. I'm new to computers and hand draw all my frames, so I don't yet know how to send pictures, but I'll post them when I figure that out.

that thing is bad to the bone

check this out, German company by the name of Leak Cycles
would love to shred one of these bad boys



facebook page right here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/LeakCyles/147124732004044

That's pretty rad. They need to work on cable routing (see area under bottom bracket).

Check this out... http://www.rockmachine.us/en/core/whizz-90.html

Interesting. Looks like they share a similar linkage design.

It's his latest bike. He started with frame building about 8 or 9 years ago. Always just making the frames for himself and some good friends. No commercial use, just bikes meant to be ridden hard!
He started out with a single pivot bike back in the days. The one you see on the picture, as one guy suggested correctly, is a VPP design.
I saw the frame being finished and had a short sit on it while the frame was still hot back in December, felt really nice. Unfortunately no riding report since I had to leave back to Taiwan after X-Mas again.

The guy's a great downhill racer, riding on the bikes he built! Search for Bjoern Aeschlimann. This is real mountain biking spirit!

Cheers

Tineler

P.S. Check out the www.rennshop.ch website for a lot of other cool stuff as well. Some real good guys are involved in the site, the actual real shop behind the site, and the frame builder