Custom Fast Boy Cycles for SALE (@ezracaldwell) #letsride
From Ezra's site - This bike is currently for SALE!
Columbus spirit tubes with paramount lugs.
Campy athena 11 spd.
Paul Comp canti brakes.
Nitto.
Chris King.
Custom Fast Boy racks and fenders.
I should explain.
In 2010, I built Hill a touring bike. She got it in a pretty raw state with her coffee on the morning of her birthday.
She chose some colors and it went off to paint and came back looking quite beautiful, I thought. (It's quite possible that the color choices were unwittingly effected by the bedding! and even her hair?)
The idea was that as soon as I had the time I'd build myself one too, and we'd go and do some touring. In particular, we liked the idea of starting in the Seattle area with a visit to the infamous Timmy Corkery, and then heading north through Bellingham (Cory B!), to vancouver (Perfect Tommy), and on to Vancouver Island to see what the west coast Nova Scotia looked like.
This project got a little derailed when, in the late summer of 2010, I recurred and had to be rushed to the hospital for an evisceration! The surgery was followed by six months of chemotherapy, which I found much harder to endure than my first six month stint of the stuff. I was completely unable to work. I sent back a few down payments, and spent a lot of time on my back.
At some point in March, though, my white blood cells got low enough that they weren't able to give me the normal dose of chemo without risking.. well.. death, I guess. So, I got a few days less poison that round, and the difference it made was amazing. I took advantage of it and rushed out to the shop and managed to mostly build myself a frame in about three days.
The following day I was back on the poison, and the debilitating pain that it caused sunk back in until the end of treatment in May. I didn't get around to finishing the frame and building racks until the end of the summer, but it DID eventually become a bike. Sort of my dream bike, in fact. It has the last set of paramount lugs that I had. No more to be had for love or money. It has a shiny silver Campy Athena 11 speed group. Paul Comp brakes. Chris King, White industries, Nitto, etc etc.
The problem is that I designed the bike for the body that I had, and not the body that I've ended up with. The two herniated disks in my lower back (still no clue about how they happened during a period spent mostly prone) and the sciatic pain that they cause pretty much rule out long days spent in the saddle, even in the reasonably upright position that the nitto technomic stem allows.
So I haven't really ridden the thing. It's got a total of about 150 miles on it.
It's sad for me. And also sad for Hill. It represents the sum total of work that I managed to get done during my last bout of cancer treatment. It was meant to be the mating pair to Hill's bike, which would allow us to adventure around together. Pretty romantic, I thought. But Hill and I agree that it's even more sad for that bike with so much love (and money) tied up in it, to simply hang on the wall and not be ridden. It's a great bike for SOMEONE. Not me. And maybe I can use the money to build myself something that I WILL ride.
I'm about 5'8" and normally proportioned. If you don't have back problems, and like bike touring, this might be a great bike for you. I can make it available for test rides for anyone who wants to come for a visit.
So that you have a sense. If you were to order a bike like this bike from me, it would have a price tag in the $5500 range. I would be quite happy to get $4k for it.
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