Posted as a teaser less than a month ago, Firefly Bicycles has officially launched their titanium mountain bike.
Shown here is one of the first customer’s bike, set up for a Rohloff geared hub and Gates Belt Drive with 29er wheels. The design, like all of their bikes, though can be fully customized to set it up however you want, including 26″ or 29er wheels; singlespeed, geared or internal gear hub, mechanical or electronic shifting and more. You can even go retro and get a straight 1-1/8″ head tube rather than their 44mm “standard” offering.
Prices start at $3,800 for a full custom frame with complete bikes ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 and up. Pics, details and more when you click thru…
The standard frames will get their custom titanium dropouts. Designed in house, Firefly took them to PVD designs to whittle away any extra material. The result is this gorgeous set of 6Al/4V dropouts with IS disc mounts. They’re just 7mm wide and come in at a paltry 156.2g per set.
Firefly’s Tyler Evans says they went with IS rather than Post Mount because it let them “create the part as light as possible and reduce material that needed to be machined off, so it’s less wasteful. This let us create one compact unit.”
All of the frames get Firefly’s killer polished, anodized logo and graphics with a choice of colors. The rigid fork shown above is a custom Engin steel fork used to get the front of the bike really low, per the customer’s request. You can read more about the complete project for this bike on Firefly’s blog.
Graphics are mimicked on the seat post, too. A break in the driveside seatstay opens the frame to insert the belt transmission.
The 44mm head tube allows for inset headsets on 1-1/8″ steerers or an external lower cup for tapered forks. You should even be able to put in one of the angle adjust headsets. Because they’re full custom, if you know what fork you’re putting on there to begin with, they can tweak the geometry to accommodate it perfectly. Firefly gussets the downtube for increased strength to match today’s stronger forks.
A traditional bottom bracket is the standard option, but BB30 is an available upgrade.
Yes, they’ve actually built a 26″ hardtail…and with a 1-1/8″ straight head tube to boot!