KLUNKERZ

[faceplant]

Just a heads up. Klunkerz is on sky 419 extreme tonight at 9.00pm

Steve

 

[ti-fat-man]

stumbled across it right now <virgin 527>
and spaming for parts on RB & bay
now my wife deffo thinks i'm sad :shock:
'get-us-another-beer-love'

 

[longun]

ace,think the wife has a better understanding of my passion now lol

heres to all the repakers thankyou

 

[scant]

I was surprised the koski brothers werent mentioned more.

 

[Repack Rider]

I was surprised the koski brothers werent mentioned more.

It would have been nice had they been better represented. It's not Bill Savage's fault that they were not.

The sons of a bike shop owner, the Koski brothers (Dave, Don and Erik) were on the ground floor of klunker development and knew as much about building offroad bikes as any of the other now more well-known Northern California builders from that time, Scott Nicol, Steve Potts, Tom Ritchey, Joe Breeze, Charlie Cunningham et al. As our contemporaries and peers and as lifelong bike mechanics, they were the first people we turned to when we needed to order special products, primarily drum brake hubs. A manufacturer even inquired as to why one small shop needed most of the tandem brakes they made!

While the Trailmaster was a fine bicycle, getting one was impossible and you could expect to wait a year or more for one. No bicyclist in the world is that patient, and the Koski brothers, whom I have known since they were about ten years old, missed their opportunity to be more influential at a time when the pace of off-road bicycling development was measured in months, not years.

 

[scant]

thanks for the info CK

was the mert lawwill pro cruiser as long a wait as the koski trailmaster?
its obviously a lot less well known than the breezer & ritchey, yet occured around the same time? In the specialized anniversary handbook theres a quote from mert along the lines of: when I saw the specialized I knew my time was up..
you posted this link yourself on mtbr VRC a while back.
http://oldmountainbikes.com/catalogs/ri ... index.html

Its amusing to see that ritchey modified seatpost in that link.. the SDG I beam is pretty much a copy!

What kind of period was steve potts first involved in frame building? He was featured a lot in the film.. maybe I missed the dates mentioned part?

thanks for info

 

[kaiser]

Fantastic is there a book to go with the film? Some of the pics are amazing. Also watched Lords of Dogtown in the afternoon so have had my big slice of 70's west coast .

 

[Dr S]

Fantastic is there a book to go with the film? Some of the pics are amazing. Also watched Lords of Dogtown in the afternoon so have had my big slice of 70's west coast .

Many of the pics and stories are on CK's website. Grab a beer and something to eat and spend an evening taking it all in- it's ace.

Si

 

[Repack Rider]

What kind of period was steve potts first involved in frame building? He was featured a lot in the film.. maybe I missed the dates mentioned part?

Steve Potts entered in the post-klunker era. In 1981 he and Joe Breeze took a MTB tour of New Zealand, which was Steve's first experience with the bikes. They rode Joe's frames, but Gary and I outfitted them because we had the parts supply. Several of the photos of Steve in Klunkerz were actually from that NZ trip.

After that, Steve was hooked, became friends with Ritchey and learned from the master. Within a year or so he started building bikes, which would put it around 1982 or 1983. A couple of years after that he became a principal partner in the original WTB, with Charlie Cunningham and Mark Slate.

Some of the people interviewed in the film are well-known now, but were less influential then. In my not at all humble opinion, as soon as the Ritchey bikes hit the market, they became the template for every other bike, with the possible exception of Charlie Cunningham's bikes. The reason was partly the clean design, and partly because Ritchey out-produced every other small builder (hello, Koskis), and had the most product out there the earliest. Gary and I didn't do a bad job of marketing either. Check out this article from 1981.

Charlie didn't start making MTBs until several years after the Ritchey was introduced, and made so few that his primary influence seemed to be on Klein and Cannondale.

 

[Repack Rider]

was the mert lawwill pro cruiser as long a wait as the koski trailmaster?

Mert's design sucked, sorry to say. The ProCruiser started life as the original Trailmaster, and the Koski boys subcontracted the frame building to Mert's motorcycle facility. Before long Mert was making the same bikes under his own brand name, and the Koskis had radically changed their design (and their subcontractor) from the ProCruiser style, which was actually a turd to ride. The ProCruiser frame design had more motorcycle influence than bicycle influence, which is what you might expect coming out of that shop.

I'm not sure how long you had to wait for a ProCruiser, or even how you got one.

I know a few ProCruiser owners, but the bikes are far more collectible than they are rideable. They did not influence the market in the slightest, and submerged without a ripple. To my knowledge, no one ever won a race on a ProCruiser, while just about every race in California in the early '80s was won by a Ritchey rider. That will do a lot to influence the direction of the market and of the design.