NAHBS!!

Well, the North American Hand built Bike Show was FREAKING AWESOME!!!

Let me start out with my favorite bikes, the road and track bikes from Zullo:



My first (and current) road bike is an Italvega Super Light which is also a hand built Italian bike. The look so similar that I automatically had an affection towards Zullo's bikes. The green track bike is freaking awesome. Too bad I'm not made out of money :/

My second favorite was the Bad Penny bike from Groovey Peacock:

I have a particular draw towards this bike because, again, it reminds me of my Motobecane Le Champion, Matilda. She is another one of my bikes. The bad penny looks like the copper counterpart to my chrome matilda.

I think more than just nostalgia, I like these bikes best because I like the thin frames. I know that you can get bikes that are much lighter with large carbon fiber tubes, but small steal tubes just look more aesthetically pleasing to me personally.

Groovy Peacock also had a couple of other really cool bikes:

I really like the guy's personal bike. He said that he built it as a reminder of his childhood when he would ride down the street to get fruit stripes gum:

I'm not really into the flat handlebars on track frames, but this one looks great. That peacock cutout in the drops alone makes this bike amazing!

Naked bikes had a really really cool bike at the show:
This bike costs over $16,000 dollars! 16,000!!!!! JFC, if I bought a bike like this I would never want to ride it! It sure is beautiful though.






There were plenty of examples of nice lug work:



Lugs always look a lot nicer then weld marks.

There were also some odd looking bikes like the bamboo bike from *coughcoughcan'trememberthenameofthebuilderanddon'tfeellikelookingitup*


And the space age dildo looking bike from another bike builder that I don't remember the name of:
Seriously, I assume its supposed to be a unicorn looking bike maybe, but when you see this:
it doesn't exactly scream mythical beast, it just screams.


Again, I'm not wild about straight bars on track frames, but this track bike does look pretty awesome
This bike was pretty awesome. The picture doesn't really do it justice. The wheels on this bike were massive:
Pretty cool.

I really liked this track bike as well (if you can't tell I love green bikes).
This particular bike is really cool because the stem and handlebars are one whole piece:It also had a mast stem. The seat post is actually really small and at the top of the mast, which allows the builder to run the break cable straight through the mast:

Here's a weird looking bike. I wish they had it on the floor so that we could take a closer look at it. At first I thought it was just a tandem bike with one seat facing backwards, then I noticed that there is a normal bike seat in the middle:
Out of all the bikes at the show, that one is the one that I'd most like to ride around.

Signal have a really nice commuter bike that caught my eye. I think the more my friend Eric talks up commuters with fenders and packs, the more I want one. Plus an endorsement from Simon and Garfunkel is always a plus:
Zullo also had a cool commuter bike:
If you look close you can see that the top tube is actually two separate tubes with the break cable running in between.

I took a lot more pictures that I don't really feel like pasting into the blog. You can check them out here.

-Chris