gomango

Was the frameset built in the U.S.A ?

Also, buy a membership. Necessary to post an ad.

trentschler

Well, here are a couple of stainless steel bikes built by one of my favorite American builders - myself!


Argento by trentschler2001, on Flickr


Columbus stainless tubes. Silver brazed. Phil hubs. White freewheel. by trentschler2001, on Flickr

mississippimud

Beautiful !

satbuilder 

Picked this one up a few years ago. NOS frame. Still in the queue to be built.

Vonruden

Nice Tesch!

Adding my recently squired JP Weigle and Bruce Gordon with new pic.

jimmuller 

Don't think I posted this one in this thread. Carlsbad Masi:

Vonruden

Very nice @jimmuller. Looks very fast

gomango

Agreed, sweet red bike.

merziac

The hell you say, blasphemy, "I no longer ride this bike" that needs to change straight away! Unknown to me builder until now,fabulous, very nice. No connection, but we could talk.

Uncle Stein

Send me an email harmless.eccentric@gmail.com

jr59

You have some very nice bikes, and just my size!

Vonruden

Thanks, you as well. I have a nice Zunow for sale and I'm considering selling my vintage Ritchey since I don't ride it much.

pcb 

Not a lot of Merz bikes around. I picked up a weird Merz from Sellwood Cycle in Portland, OR, maybe 10yrs ago? It had Nervex Pro lugs, which I hadn't ever seen on a Merz, and a seatstay-mount generator braze-on, and tiny headlight wire tubes brazed on the sides of the top tube brake casing braze-ons. It's hard to describe, but the frame had a kind of slap-dash feel to it, like something I would build for myself if I were a framebuilder, but not for a customer. I don't mean that in a negative sense at all, it just had a homebrew feeling.

Jim Merz joined the Classic Rendezvous list a few years later, so I asked him about the frame and sent him the serial number. Turned out my hunch was right, it was one of the first frames Jim built, and he built it for himself as a commuter. It was more than homebrew, it was built from two crashed Raleigh Pro frames. Early on Jim would get trashed frames from Raleigh and play with them. His commuter was the front half a Pro frame with a trashed rear triangle attached to the rear half of a Pro frame with buckled top/downtubes. And he threw on a bunch o' braze-ons for lighting and such.

To Jim's credit, even though he was very excited to find out this sucker still existed, he didn't try to snatch it from my hands. But he did let me know that if I should ever think about selling it, he'd want to be first in line. I figured it couldn't ever mean more to me than it would to him (Jim's house in Malibu burned to the ground one wildfire season, and he lost just about everything), so I sold it to him right away. A while later we met for the first time at CR's Cirque. Jim had the bike with him, but he had taken the torch to it again to remove the weird bits, and then had Keith Anderson paint it for him. It looked incredible, and I immediately regretted selling it to him. Well, not really, but you know what I mean...

Before, when I owned it; note the genuine Merz Tripelizer middle/granny ring:


After Jim got it back:

pcb 

Can't remember if I posted my Kelly Bone Stock geared build yet. Tig'd steel, but steel. light and fast. The frame color is a deep, dark blue that's very close to black. The blue's hard to see even in sunlight, so I to brighten these shot considerably to let some blue creep in.

I've also got the Bone Stock's sister or cousin, a Kelly Knobby-X, also tig'd. Just posted a coupla pix on the "C&V Gravel Grinder" thread, but here she is again. Chris calls this color "Toothpaste."

Kelly Bone Stock:




Kelly Knobby-X:

merziac

[QUOTE=pcb;18629667]Not a lot of Merz bikes around. I picked up a weird Merz from Sellwood Cycle in Portland, OR, maybe 10years ago

I do know exactly what you mean. Such a cool story, which does not surprise me. I like nothing better than hearing about these sort of fabulous creations coming full circle so to speak. It of course brings up many more questions, were you in PDX, how did you know about Jim, etc, yada, yada, more cool details please. If you follow my postings back to page 11, it just scratches the surface of this one , which was his first purpose built for himself and just like yours, is not really the same as when he built it. It also came from Sellwood cycles as did the other one that I actually got first.

Vonruden

Thats an awesome story @pcb!

btw, love those White Bros cranks on the Kelly, looks hot. I'm thinking about the same for my Hunqapillar.

gomango

+1

My favorite "modern" crankset by far. I have one that's destined for my Monstercross.

pcb 

Went back to read through your posts again, very cool you wound up with one of Jim's own bikes, too. And with his racks! He's mighty proud of those racks, with reason.

I've only spent a couple/few days in PDX, I discovered Sellwood's used bike listings on this thing called the internet. Being local to PDX, kinda makes sense they've had a bunch o' Merzes move through. It seems like a pretty cool shop from what I've seen on the interwebs. I bought one or two other bikes from them, and they sent me a Sellwood "Team S&M" cap.

I bought the Merz in '02, sold it to Jim in '09, saw it at Cirque in '10. I sold it to him for pretty much what it cost me, maybe $400 or so? I met him at Cirque, mentioned the frame, and without realizing I was the one that sold it to him, he said: "Yeah, some guy contacted me through CR and sold it to me for some ridiculously low price..." I told him I was, in fact, that same fool, and that if my finances were different I would have been happy to give it him for free. I think Jim's a great guy who's done a lot in and for the bike biz, so I didn't feel the need to profit from reuniting him with his frame.

Then he had to go make it all better and prettier and all... :^**

[QUOTE=merziac;18629912]

pcb 

Thanks, Jim's a good dude, deserves some blasts from his past.

The White crank kinda fell in my lap on ebay. Well, not really, that means I bid on it and won. The Knobby-X is an older one with bent chainstays, and it's tough trying to use cross-stock 34/36t inner chainrings. The drive-side crank has to sit way outboard for the inner ring to clear the stays, so the Q gets high and the chainline gets wonky. I really didn't want to go triple, I'm too lazy to shift 3 rings these days, and I didn't want to try to work a double on an ATB crank. All the double cranks I was sitting on were 110bcd, so 34t was the smallest I could use. I tried setting up a 110/74bcd triple with a 30t granny/42t middle ring and a chainguard in place of the outer ring, but the shifting sucked.

So I was thinking about maybe finding a TA Pro 5 Vis crank, when the White popped up on ebay. It's a 46/30, and the 30 is smaller enough to minimize the chainline probs, and it shifts easy, and it's a boutique-ey blingy thing that meshes OK with the Paul brakes and Chris King headset and Thomson post and etc, etc, etc. I did also get a White triple just in case the double didn't work out, but didn't have to use it.

I think I have a pic with the Ultegra double/triple chainguard contraption. Looked OK, but wasn't fun to shift:

merziac

Thanx for another chapter pcb, I love it, although I would not have let it go but good on ya and I know Jim is a happy guy getting it back.

merziac

[QUOTE=pcb;18637183]Thanks, Jim's a good dude, deserves some blasts from his past.

Agreed, so my next question is aside from a keen eye and very good taste, how did you know to buy one?

icepick_trotsky 

Taiwanese.

mississippimud

DITTO ! Thanks for sharing

livelikegold

There's some really beautiful frames in here. Glad I stumbled upon this thread. My landshark will get shipped to me in about a week. This Ritchey is by far one of my favorites.

YoKev

I can't remember if I've shared this yet or not, but here is the first 2016 picture of my Ted Wojcik roadie. Ya don't see too many of these.

It is all nearly DuraAce 7700, Cooks E2 crank with Real rings. Running tubular (1st bike tubular) on Velocity Escapes.

The bike is light, fast, and comfortable! Impeccable welds. Reynolds 853.

2016-03-26_06-00-15