Back in town

We survived Vegas, and there is never a better time than Interbike to make lots of new friends and catch up with old ones.

We won't go into any serious coverage, because there is no shortage of that sort of thing on the interweb already. Favorite so far: Urban Velo's coverage. Just the week before Interbike we got a visit from Brad from Urban Velo when he swung by our office, and he is an all-around solid guy. We ran into him at the show but didn't get a chance to grab a beer; he was off to post web coverage. Brad and Jeff are a couple of the hardest working guys in the bike business, and when you grab (or download) a copy of Urban Velo, it shows.

We had an opportunity to meet some of the awesome folks behind all kinds of different projects. Shorty Fatz was on hand with a bunch of their beautiful and unique hand-built frames. They were sharing a booth with Phil Wood.

Soma saddles and forks on three of their bikes (they dig our straight-blade track fork)






















Ortlieb's booth was full on innovative and well-executed products. They had a new medium brown colored version of their Back Roller Plus which will look great with a classy touring build or a more rugged "get lost in the mountains" build (as well as being highly functional). Their removable harness allows panniers to be used as an off the bike backpack is another awesome feature, and watching them demo how the whole assembly snaps together quickly made me wonder what I had been doing commuting without the system. We of course can't neglect to mention the awesome treatment they gave our Buena Vista frame:























































Those are actual wooden rims, and Chris over at Ortlieb took the time to fill in the lugs at the seatstay junction and crown with silver paint, as well as some gold on the Nitto S-83 lugged seatpost.


A couple of us were riding bikes around the show, and getting them there was a time-consuming and costly affair. Here is a box marked fragile with directional arrows, and the subsequent care shown by baggage handlers. (This resulted in a couple spokes getting broken on a DA track wheelset):



Couple random videos from Vegas:

Pro men's crit final corner, last lap where the race leader goes down for the lose:



Jason from Superb, barspinning his department store cruiser that he happily returned at the end of the week:



How can you talk about Vegas and not mention racks? Hey-oh!

More seriously, we brought home some of the new Gamoh front cargo rack.

- Tough black powdercoat
- Wood slats
- Bottle opener
- Made in Japan