Ground Up Designs’ Eric Baar brought his brushes and was pinstriping and decorating his bikes at the show. The sparkly racer above caught our eye for the garage-mechanic World of Outlaws motif, but the details made us stay.
The frame uses a reversed sliding dropout placement and unique turnbuckle bar to adjust tension on the belt drive. Click through for closeups of this and some other eyecatching bikes of his, Metrofiets’ crowd-carrying cargo bike, Paketa’s magnesium tandem (and others) and some beautiful paint from Zullo…
The turnbuckle pushes or pulls the entire rear triangle, which pivots at the top of the seatstays and slides on attachments underneath the bottom bracket. Also note the machining on the spider.
Nice disc brake guard on the rear. The “Hoosier” logo on the tires and all pinstriping was hand painted.
His 29er had alternating directional brushing to create a checkerboard sort of pattern.
Bass boat sparkle paint abounds.
METROFIETS
Metrofiets wasn’t showing anything new, really, but we do like their cargo bikes and handmade wood boxes. Apparently others really like them, too – they sold this bike right off the show floor.
PAKETA
Paketa makes their bicycles out of magnesium, which they say is light, stiff and absorbs vibration well, with additional material actually improving damping properties. Material selection aside, they had some interesting features on their bikes.
The tandem had a belt drive timing belt, but it was mounted on the driveside. Normally, the timing belt is on the non-drive side and uses a custom crankset with gears/cogs on both sides. This way, you can use any standard road crank:
They just had to make a bit extra frame clearance to mount the extra cog inside the small ring.
The mountain bike also gets a unique use of belt drive with a dual gear system that lets you swap ratios depending on the terrain.
Got a big climb to get to the fun stuff? No problem, and it’s lighter than an internally geared rear hub. Frames are built to use variable dropouts that are interchangeable to be run geared, SS, internal or whatever. This one’s split to accept the belt and has an EBB.
Their Scud road bike uses heavier duty tubing for heavier riders. Frame runs 2.5 to 3 pounds depending on size and build.
ZULLO
Zullo’s booth was unstaffed as I passed by, but resembled last year’s layout: Lots of frames showing off lots of custom paint.
The brand was started by Tiziano Zullo, who’s a little over 60 now but still works on some of the bikes, overseeing the rest of the production. He oversees all graphics and paints some of them himself, too.
