Holly’s City Bike
Holly was inspired by another city bike I made recently (this one for Linda), and she wanted to get something similar for herself.
She was looking for a few things: low gearing for climbing hills, with plenty of range for cruising as well; a platform rack for carrying a basket, bag, backpack, or purse; dynamo lighting with a USB charger; and fenders.
And mostly, she wanted something mostly upright and very comfortable for long meandering rides around town.
The bike I built for her is a classic diamond frame, with rim brakes, long chainstays, low bottom bracket, and slack headtube. The geometry is in fact the same as the last city bike I built (though the size is slightly different).
The original design proposal. The bike ended up looking very much like this.
This is the second bike I've made with custom laser cut fiddlehead dropouts (the first was shown at Made last year). I really love the way they've turned out both times. I'll plan to use these dropouts on every rim brake bike I build.
(This is a good reason to get rim brakes on your fiddlehead. I'll pair rim brakes with QR skewers and vertical dropouts, and you can get the custom fiddlehead dropouts too.)
Custom fiddlehead dropouts! These are vertical dropouts only, and I love pairing them with rim brakes.
Holly wanted a paint job inspired by the autumn in the pacific northwest. She lives near a bunch of oak trees and she loves the forest. So we decided to make an oak leaf themed bike. I bought some small black oak leaves from Etsy, pressed them all flat then formed them so they'd wrap around the bike's tubes, then I attached each one with silver solder. This was a pretty time consuming process, but they turned out so well!
(I owe thanks to local frame builder Bradford Smith for the idea of finding little brass embellishments on Etsy.)
I love the way these little oak leaves turned out!
More of those oak leaves! And the “fiddlehead” downtube logo is polished brass, silver soldered to the frame.
For maximum city-riding comfort, this bike has Velo-Orange granola bars, Velo-Orange grand cru brake levers and seatpost, a Brooks Cambium saddle, and 37 mm Panaracer Gravel King tires.
To handle everything that Portland commutes can bring, I've included Portland design works full metal fenders, painted to match. The drivetrain is a a 165 mm Sram mountain bike crankset with a 32 tooth chainring, paired with an 11 speed 10-42 tooth cassette. The wheels are Hifi Mix Tapes, with a Shutter Precision dynamo wired in to a Sinewave cycles beacon 2 headlight and a Busch & Müller micro taillight.
There is a custom mount for the headlight built into the front platform rack. And another custom mount on the stem for the Portland Design Works bell. The dynamo lighting wiring is all internal - it runs through the rack to the headlight. And the taillight wiring runs through the rack, then through the frame, then along the rear fender to the taillight.
The headlight tucks out of the way under the rack.
Very city-bike cockpit. With a few more oak leaves.
So clean!