Turin Bicycles out of Chicago has added a few new frames to its bike collection, all steel and all ready for disc brake cyclocross action whether you want singlespeed or gears.
The Willy, shown above, is built from Reynolds 530 and gets an eccentric BB and straight steerer tube. An interchangeable dropout lets you add a derailleur hanger if you want to run gears, and standard external cable routing is in place. The Super Willy upgrades all of those features with some very pretty tube shaping, internal routing and tapered headtube…
The Super Willy gets Columbus Spirit tubing that’s heavily shaped on the chainstays.
A singlespeed-friendly dropout can be bolted on, or add a standard derailleur hanger to run it with gears. Note the fluted ports for both derailleur and brake cables/hoses and sleek inside-the-rear-triangle disc brake placement. Properly tapered head tubes are still rare on steel frames, so finding one as elegant and shapely as this on a frame from a very small shop makes it very special. Both versions of the Willy are meant for cyclocross, and there’s also a Columbus Spirit Super Hobo meant for fast commuting and touring.
The other big new project from the guys at Turin is Yo Lights. The headlamps are their first product that is a truly international design. Called the Holmes, it’s a bar mounted head light followed by Watson as a tail light.
The Holmes’ circuit boards come from Wisconsin, the bulbs from Cree in NC, the lenses were designed in Belgium and Italy, and final assembly is in China.
Light temperature is a bit warmer to improve depth perception and awareness of small changes in the road surface. This meant a more expensive and power hungry LED, but they say it’s worth it. The beam pattern makes a thick crescent shape, with duller output directly over the front tire and off to the sides. The idea was to have enough light at the periphery to enable your eyes to see where it’s going in a turn without being distracting the rest of the time. After all, our peripheral vision and turnable heads are used to look ahead of the curve when turning, but a bar mounted light typically only shows where it’s pointed…which tends to be much straighter than the actual turn we’re making.
Three versions will be offered with outputs of 400, 600 and 800 lumens.
