Blaise’s TD3 full custom build

A couple of years ago we built a lovely Traildonkey 2.0 for Blaise. At the time it was easily the nicest Donkey we had built. Blaise kitted that bike out with XTR Di2, Easton EC90SL cranks, Rodeo 2.0 wheels, and pretty much all of the other nicest things he could find.

Blaise hammered his bike and rode it to its maximum through some pretty brutal, wet East Coast conditions. We’re not entirely sure how many bottom brackets he killed while riding the bike but suffice to say it was a lot.

Cut to two years later. Blaise’s TD2 found a home with a new owner and he came back to us looking to up the capabilities of his gravel bike with a TD3 build. This time he wanted to personalize more so the first task was to design a personalized custom paint layout for the bike. We weren’t in a rush because we were waiting for SRAM to make AXS Eagle and AXS Red parts available separately. Blaise requested some unique colors outside of what is being done in the mainstream these days so we pulled these colors from a photo of the sunset that he sent over.

 

The first draft of the layout was nice, but Blaise asked that we extend the design to the inside of the downtube and rear triangle. The completed design ended up here:

Blaise requested a few extra personalized details on this paint, one being his kid’s initials on the top tube near the head tube, and the other was to nickname the bike Trailwonkey in a nod to it’s Washington DC home. We sent the naked frame across town to Altitude Composites for paint and he executed the design wonderfully.

 

Next up: The build. AXS parts arrived as did a whole bunch of other generally lovely components. One of the most interesting things about AXS builds is how easy the bikes are to put together. The only lines that need to be routed are the brake lines and that makes these bikes a dream for Sheldon to have in the build stand.

The complete bike is a thing of beauty and before sending it off we were sure to cover as much of the frame as possible with custom cut 3M frame protector. Word on the street is that Blaise is pretty hard on his bikes…

 

Traildonkey 3.0 // Hometown Trails

Having come back recently from Dirty Kanza I was struck by the sheer energy and growth that the gravel riding genre currently has. There were a number of new gravel bikes announced at the race itself, each eager to have or gain credibility in the genre. Watching it all made me think about our bike and the more I thought about it all the more I was amazed at how we’ve been swept along by this gravel wave. Reflection also reminded me that our bikes didn’t start with gravel, they started with Trail. Ours is a story that intersects with gravel but also but also deviates from it whenever a trail can be found leading away from a dirt road.

Traildonkey was born in 2014 in Denver, Colorado. At the time we were spending a fair bit of time riding on paved roads but had begun to detour onto the local trails in and around the foothills of near our city.

Traildonkey 3.0. Green Mountain. Denver, CO

Green Mountain, Mount Falcon, Lair Of The Bear, Colorado Trail, and Table Mountain. These were our original Lab. These were all singletrack playgrounds that factored more and more into our regular rides. Why? Because variety breathed fresh life into what would otherwise have been routine. At first we took our road bikes off road because these were road ride detours. Then we took cyclocross bikes because we needed bigger tires and better gearing out in the dirt.

Traildonkey 3.0. Green Mountain. Denver, CO

Eventually we decided that we wanted to have a go at developing a bike around the exact style of riding we were doing: A little bit of road, a little bit of singletrack, and anything else that looked fun. We wanted quick on the road and agile on the trail.

Traildonkey 3.0. Green Mountain. Denver, CO

We developed Traildonkey around Colorado riding and Colorado trails first. We made it for ourselves and only later decided to start a bike company so that we could offer the bike to others who had since started eying their local dirt and needed a worthy steed.

Since then gravel has caught on in a big way and we’re excited about all of the people and diversity that it has brought into the mixed terrain genre. Traildonkey loves gravel riding and racing but here in Colorado we still continue to ride them on our local roads and hometown trails exactly the same way we did when we started in 2014.

Every bike has an origin story. This is ours.

Build Profile: Caletti Scrambler + Rodeo Spork 2.0

One of the best parts of running Rodeo is being able to make it a company that is a part of a community. That community is made up of team mates, bike owners, and ALSO other bike makers and builders. On one hand it could be said that we should be pushing what we make as hard as we can to the exclusion of all “competitors” but I disagree with that entirely. I think we should make bikes and parts that we love and believe in and that we shouldn’t make bikes for everyone out there. Other bike companies make different bikes with different vibes and different ethos for different people. Weaving plurality into our brand makes us stronger, more creative, and gives us a much better story to tell.

When I ride alone I don’t tend to push myself very hard, but when I ride in a group it raises the level of my riding as I try to keep pace with the larger peloton. I think something similar happens when you’re a part of a community of other builders instead of feeling like you are at war with them. In the same way that you can high five a friend for sticking a breakaway or winning a bunch sprint it is also possible to high five another builder for making a bike so beautiful and rad that you wish you could have built yourself.

So with that in mind we’re featuring this Caletti Scrambler on our site. The overlap between Rodeo and Caletti on the bike is that it uses our 2.0 Spork – which makes me super happy to see, but beyond that the bike is worth nerding out on in all of its detail and glory.

Caletti sent over these images, but then we noticed that they did a writeup on the bike as well on their site so we’re reposting it here. Caletti’s contact info is at the bottom of the page if you’re interested in having them build something like a Scrambler, or many other types of bikes, for you.

Caletti hand builds each of their bikes, from scratch, in Santa Cruz, California.

Photos by Peter Thomsen

Scrambler!

The mixed terrain rambler.

This Donut Box Pink Scrambler has been released into the wild and it’s new owner has already gotten it dirty on some long mixed route rides. It’s like a cross or gravel bike, but designed for flat bars with a longer top tube and appropriate head angle – quite a different animal than just slapping a flat bar on your old designed-for-drop-bars cross bike.

Sometimes we use an Enve Gravel fork, and sometimes we use this Rodeo Labs Spork. Both fit big tires (700x50mm Schwalbe pictured), but the Spork has bottle bosses on the legs, which make it great for bikepacking, with capacity for extra water or use a “many things” cage to carry gear.

These new Santa Cruz X Chris King carbon wheels are super nice: wide and only about 1400g for the set, while still very strong, they make the bike extra quick. The shallow profile keeps it comfortable.

Even with a dropper post this bike is only 21 pounds without pedals.

Flaanimal // Flaamingo 105 build

We’re expecting our 2019 Flaanimals to begin arriving in Denver the first week of May, so we thought that it would be a great time to post a gallery of this 2019 Flaamingo build that we brought to Sea Otter Classic for display at our booth.

The Flaamingo color has a tan main frame color so we thought it would be cool to accent the build with polished Ritchey Neo Classic and Shimano 105 components. Natural bar tape and saddle colors also flow nicely with the overall aesthetic.

A Flaanimal 4.1 can be built in the lower $3,000 range. As shown the build would climb another thousand or so with our 2.0 carbon 650b rims laced to pink anodized White Industries hubs and we now offer our 2.0 factory hubs in a similar shade of pink anno.

We shot this bike in the middle of the desert in Nevada on our way to Sea Otter. What better place to shoot a Khaki bike than in the desert?

That Ritchey Classic saddle pairs so nicely with those WTB Venture 47mm 650b tires.

It is amazing how good Shimano 105 has gotten with this latest release. The shifter ergonomics are so excellent, and Shimano’s hydro brake feel is tops.

We see so many black parts on bikes these days, but three cheers for silver / polished if you want your bike to stand out from the crowd.

Our Ride. Explore. Create. icons are on the the top tube of every bike we make.

That’s a proper stance. Brooks bar tape has got to be the best looking tape out there and it feels and wears very nicely.

We went with solid painted head badges on our 2019 framesets to make them just a bit more in your face. This pink pops!

Flaanimal is a mythical winged alpaca AND a creepy dude standing in the middle of a desert road.

Spork 2.0 // The SS Donkey

650b single speed donkey

The fourth featured build for Spork 2.0 is an in house build.

When we moved into our new office in January 2018 I found an old prototype Traildonkey 2.0 frameset that hadn’t been seen any use in over two years. Putting a perfectly good albeit old frame out to pasture seemed like a huge waste to me so I thought that it would be fun to simply use it as a canvas on which to experiment with paint. I spent a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon sanding it back down to raw carbon, a process I found strangely therapeutic. When it came time to lay down some paint I hit a wall. I had no idea what I wanted the frame to look like or what I wanted to use it for.

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Spork 2.0 // Wild Card Bicycles

When we were thinking of how to launch Spork 2.o we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to make this about more than just Rodeo bikes. We wanted to have other builders involved. We posted a simple message on Instagram asking builders who’ve used our forks in the past to get in touch if they wanted to work on a special project with us. It was important to me that everyone we collaborated on this project with had previously built with our Spork 1 as a way of keeping the project “in the family”. A number of builders responded, but in one case a test rider for a builder reached out to us instead of the builder. He said:

“My name is Lanier Nichols and I test ride frames for Jay Sandefur, creator/owner/builder/brain/etc. of Wildcard Custom Bicycles. Jay doesn’t do social media, which is why I am contacting you and not him.”

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Spork 2.0 // Pachyderm Cycles

We don’t do product launches without first telling a story. Rodeo’s products are and will always be a result of our story. So if you came here to see Spork 2.0 I hope you don’t just scroll down to the photos. I hope you stay for the story.

Daniel Schauman is a frame builder hailing from Chicago, Illinois who as history would have it was the first ever builder to buy a Spork 1.0 from us and include it in a bike he build for himself. This was 2015 which to me seems like a million years ago but is in fact not that long ago at all.

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Greg’s 650b dropper Flaanimal 4.1

How much of a bike’s design and build spec is hype and how much of it is function? Those sorts of questions get discussed endlessly on the internet almost by default every time a new product or specification is launched. “Gravel” is a hot word these days. Is it marketing or is it popular because people are having fun? Is 1x hype? Is 650b hype? Are dropper posts on drop bar bikes an incredibly desperate attempt to sell people new gizmos they don’t need?

It is very personally important to me as the founder of Rodeo that our bikes be grounded in function, not hype. But I’ll never be an impartial voice in the matter because by nature I want to sell bikes therefore I may be biased towards sales and profit. That said I sleep great at night knowing that every bike we sell is built exactly for each customer and that we only recommend how to build our bikes after we’ve had a great conversation with each customer about how they want to ride their bike and what they want it to do. You build a great bike not by telling a customer what they need, you do it by listening to the customer describe who they are, how they ride, and what their goals are for their bike.

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