Around Interbike time last year, Chris Chance popped back onto the scene with a comeback announcement. Then, in January, he relaunched the Yo Eddy on Kickstarter, raising more than enough funds to roll back into production. Now, we’ve got your first look at what his most popular model’s renaissance looks like and why he’s back in the game.
“Whatever we did back in the day created a ripple,” Chance said. “Turns out there’s still a ripple. And I found that I still had a passion for building bikes.”
“The first thing we’re offering is the one model people have been asking for the most. That’s the Yo Eddy, and had it never gone away, this is what it would be like today. Modern geometry and features, but it still feels like a Yo Eddy, which is to say it really connects your body to the bike. People called it telepathic handling.”
It’s a steel frame, using custom drawn True Temper tubing. And they’re waiting on that tubing and finishing a bit of tooling so they can get production started. Chance says things will be up and running in a few weeks.
The frames will be offered for both 650B (red) and 29er (day-glow yellow) models, with both frames being very similar to each other.
That includes a shared 433mm chainstay measurement, which forces the 29er to lose the chainstay bridge and tucks its rear wheel up very, very close to the seat tube. That probably limits the 29er to a 1x drivetrain only since there’s virtually no room for a front derailleur clamp.
Retail will be about $1,700. Geometry is built around a 12mm fork and has internal dropper post cable port on the seat tube, so it’s made to rock. $500 for the fork, which they call a Yo Eddy design since they were the first to make a fork like that; others doing it nowadays call it a segmented fork. It uses 1″ straight chromoly tubes for legs.
Retro, hand drawn graphics adorn the new model as a nod to its past. Speaking of which…
This purple Yo Eddy is from 1991.
It had fatter seat stays than most steel bikes of its day, a trait that carries over to the 2015 edition, too. It also had a larger diameter down tube than its predecessor…
…the Fat Chance Wicked. This black one is from 1986, so it was quite evolved from the first models Chance built starting in ’82.
So, what does the future hold?
“We’ve got plans for a fat bike, cyclocross bike, gravel bike and Slim Chance road bike,” Chance told us. “We’re also working with David Earlo at Sotto Group, who’s helped Yeti with some of their bikes, to develop a carbon full suspension mountain bike. No word on whether it’ll carry on the Shockabilly name.”
