via Downhill Berlin

Derek from Lahr Cycles posted the development photos on his homemade bike frame at the ride monkey forums. It’s really interesting to see that you don’t need much to create a working model, from here, it can only get better. Way to go Derek. Check the finished model at the forum thread.

This month was full of extremes, apart from the adventure of building a new forum for Letsevo and my new more aerodynamic hair style, I was fortunate enough to join two good friends onto another adventure, Crossing the Alps between Italy and France. Together with Jochen and Johannes, we biked 363.34 Kilometers, climbing a total of 13935 Meters during 8 days of our tour that started in Pinerolo (Italy) and ended the Mediterranean city of Ventimiglia, also in Italy.

It was the second time I rode such tour, the first time me and Jochen crossed the north east of Spain together with Basti Hess (very missed), also amazing. This time we also went freestyle (no camping tents) just sleeping back and the faith that rain wasn’t going to pour, and it almost didn’t.

We crossed the Alps everyday, switching from “Bon Giorno!” to “Bonjour”, rustled ourselves between hardcore uphills and hardcore downhills, following the paths and tips from a tour published at Mountain Bike Magazine.

Thanks to Jochen, our GPS data from the tour can be seen in Google Earth making it possible to travel back exactly through the trails we made, how awesome is that? feel like traveling to time? Make sure to turn on “Show Terrain” feature.

Download .KMZ file (google earth) from our tour, you have to have Google Earth installed in you computer to be able to navigate.

My thanks to Jochen for organizing the route and to Johannes for bringing the cooking utensils, also Mark Assies for the sleeping bag! and Timon Rutten from Hans Struik Fietsen Shop for hooking me up with some bike parts I needed for the tour.

Where should we go on the next tour??

[View with PicLens]

As I was riding my bike at the Mountains close to Frankfurt I had a chance to see this amazing bike made completely Wood.

The maker of this piece of Art is the Engineer Reinhold Eichhorn who works at Braun electronics. He did the whole work buy hand at his home workshop. And you could tell that his is not playing by taking a closer look at the saddle, It hiddenly screams “No pain no game”.

We are trying to convince him to show some of his building technics used on this bike.