At this point, Ryan Johnson has done a little bit of everything. From building lugged bikes in college, welding and fabricating tube chassis, suspension, and roll cages for race cars and rock crawlers, to working for brands like Orbea, Ellsworth, and HIA Velo/Allied, Ryan has built up quite the portfolio of experience. But even so, Galaxy Gearworks sort of happened by chance.
After being enlisted to help with the closing of Guru’s Montreal factory, Ryan ended up with the opportunity to buy a large portion of Guru’s remaining metal tubing, tooling, and other bits. That’s essentially how Galaxy Gearworks got its start. After his wife got a new job in Vermont, the family relocated to the north east, and that is where Ryan has set up shop. At this point, it’s a one man operation, and that’s exactly how Ryan likes it. He plans to build full custom bikes, and while he has four “models” on the website, he says he will build anything that anyone wants – mountain, road, cross, gravel, dirt jumper, or otherwise.
This ‘Non’ was shown with the new Trust Performance Message really just as a show piece – which certainly drew plenty of attention. Though it wasn’t long before onlookers noticed the tidy details like the super clean brake hose routing through the frame, right up to the banjo fitting at the rear. Inside there’s a stainless sleeve for the brake line, and it pops out to route along the bottom bracket, but Ryan says he could keep it internal as well.
Because of the custom nature of the builds, the Non can be built as a geared frame, dedicated single speed, fully rigid, etc. This particular bike was built for one of the founders of Competitive Cyclist. The frame will clear up to 29 x 2.4″ tires with 430mm chainstays, and the frame will fit a 100-140mm travel fork depending on the geometry.
Ryan said that this Gemini Dirt Jumper was built for the Builder’s Ball show, but it’s worth showing here since for me it was one of my favorites of the show. A lot of the bike’s details were built out of necessity – Ryan had a group of parts that he wanted to use, so he had to build around them. That meant creating custom end caps and dropouts to use the 15mm DT Swiss RWS axle up front and the older Chris King hubset with a 20mm front and 10 x 135mm rear. Ryan could have easily used modern parts with their corresponding standards, but as he said, he had a very tight budget for this build so he built the bike around the parts he had available. To me, that’s one of the best parts of custom builds – the creativity needed to make things work that you already have, rather than just assembling a bunch of off the shelf parts.
That, and the unique style from the one piece handlebar/stem, segmented fork, and integrated seat post clamp all combine to create one of the most interesting dirt jumpers that I’ve seen in a while.
Want a Galaxy for yourself? Start by sending Ryan a message to get started – and not The Message. That fork is headed back to Trust Performance…
