What, you ask, exactly, is a wackbike? Well, apparently the wackbike is a sort of bike often seen on the streets of New York City that has been crafted - or rather crufted - out of various obsolete, undesirable, and unattractive parts. The design goals are simple - construct something from used, found, and scavenged parts that is of sufficient quality and beauty to survive the urban death maze of NYC. The finest wackbikes are contradictions - beefy utilitarian workhorses that simultaneously emote speed, simplicity and efficiency.

This is my attempt at the wackbike form. It is an old lugged steel Japanese mountain bike frame with all the braze-on bits sawed off and filed flat except for the front canti mounts. It is set up fixey for added hardcore-ness.

I built this for my main man kev-1, who will be cruising the mean streets of NYC on it. Godspeed John Glen!

Both axles are nutted for theft discouragement. The front hub is a Shimano DX with some scavenged solid axles and nifty track nuts. The rear hub is some kind of French track hub with a solid axle from another hub, the cones from a Shimano cassette hub and the seals from another crazy old parts-bucket hub. My local bike shop let me scrounge through an amazing stash of old hubs - stored in a stucco bucket and covered with ski wax - and ended up selling me 6 hubs for 20 bux. Aw yeah.

Urban cruising indeed

Anyone whose flipflops match thier outfit can model bikes for URBC any day :)