West 5 Cycles
Cycling, fixed-gear bike building and life on two wheels onlyArchive for Cool kit
Classy Fixies
Work has geared up a notch and I’m finding that in between that, getting out riding, and procrastinating about some big bike overhauls (to deal with the all the muck gathered when riding in too much rubbish weather!), there is less time to write blog posts.
Also a constant feature of our conversations at home is what colour scheme we should spray the old Raleigh we recently bought off Ebay for a whopping 6 pence total. See the 6 Pence Wonder. Still undecided the debate is turning towards a metallic lush orange, but wheels, tyres, saddle and handlebar tape is still up in the air. Where better to find inspiration than good ol’ FixedGearGallery which has had a smattering of excellent fixies posted recently. Below are some of my favourites:
Moabiker's Softride
Shaun Quah's Raleigh
Lance Meyer's Schwinn
Paul Overton's Puch Mistral
Bryce Mintie's Bianchi Pista Concept
Vi's HK
Belt-drive fixie scoops awards
Eurobike announced the winners of the Eurobike Awards 2008 yesterday evening on the Fashion Show stage. This year’s competition attracted a record 362 entries from 27 countries—up substantially from last year’s 269 products. Altogether 66 products were chosen as award winners, with ten of these selected for Gold Awards for outstanding design performance.
An international panel of experts judged entries in a range of categories. New this year was the selection of one entry for the Green Award for environmental protection and sustainability. This went to the Jetstream hybrid e-bike from Riese & muller.
And in the catgory of: Cruiser/Design bike the winner is the Five Star, Singlespeed Bike with a Belt Drive by FIXIE Inc. Trying to look for this online leads me nowhere apart from Flickr, where I have managed to find a photostream of it. This’ll no doubt be a 2009 addition to Fixie inc.’s catalogue I suspect. For Fixie inc, go here.
Belt-drive Fixie
Whatever next you may wonder? But this is not the irrational dream of a man in a shed somewhere, but a big name bike maufacturer pushing the convention of bike design and introducing a new take on what the tried and trusted drive mechanism at the heart of bikes for over a century, should be.
You may argue that all this innovation is purely the result of designers spending too much time at the recent Annual North American Handmade Bicycle Show, or perhaps it’s just a desire to challenge the norm and experiment with what the bike of the future could be. I can’t help but be excited though – it’d be great to try it!
More on the Trek Distict
