What happens when you leave a Specialized Aethos in the hands of the brand’s fixie-fanatic designer, Erik Nohlin?
Well, this is what – a fascinating fixed-gear conversion designed and custom-specced for long-distance randonneur rides, replete with disc brakes, dynamo lighting, a rack and 3D-printed saddle, all based around a 585g S-Works Aethos frame.
It’s a bike that speaks wholly to Nohlin’s love of fixed-gear riding – “no other form of cycling gets me into that deep state of meditation,” he says – and also pays tribute to his friend, Metin Uz, who died in May.
“When trying to make sense of this tragedy, I realised that the best thing I could do was to continue Metin’s fixed-gear legacy and build up my new randonneuring bike in his memory,” Nohlin told BikeRadar.
The bike – dubbed the ‘Randonnaethos’ by Nohlin – is made possible, in part, by an eccentric bottom bracket and a smattering of home workshop hacks.
That included drilling the seatpost (warning: this will void your warranty!) to route the dynamo wiring – “it snakes through the post, seat tube, down tube and down the fork” – and adapting the Aethos’s existing derailleur hanger.
“I machined the derailleur hanger to use only the upper part that indexes the hub in the dropout,” Nohlin wrote in an Instagram post documenting the build. “When the standard thru-axle slides out of the [hub], the wheel pops right out by gravity. This enables a very fast flat fix with no need to tension the chain or re-position the […]
Continue reading the original article at: www.bikeradar.com