News / Fairdale Feed from FairdaleBikes.com

      Somewhere up on the most likely cold and rainy streets of Seattle our team rider Seth Holton is making a living riding bikes around. Ryan Worcester visited him and took some great photos for us.     Seth’s Weekender bike is a full on Weekday machine.   Seth was our jedi guide on the Seattle to SF trip.   Now that we have XL Weekenders in stock we just updated Seth’s ride to a frame that fits him a bit better. Here he’s adapted a Large to work well enough. …and keep your butt dry.  

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Uploaded a little book of a few months worth of drawings. Check it out below…

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To launch the R+D section we’re starting pretty tame, but I’m sure some folks will find it very useful. We set our friend Janice up with a new Weekender bike and we are going to document her experience with it. She rides her bike for transportation everyday but says she doesn’t know a lot about bikes. We actually think that she has a lot to teach us about bikes by helping us remember what it’s like to not be immersed all day in the bicycle industry. We figure we can show her some cool ways to make the bike more comfortable for her, more functional and more fun. Adding racks, fenders, adjusting the fit are all relatively simple things to bike nerds like us, but can be a bit daunting for riders who haven’t ever worked on their own bike or who don’t know those options even exist. We’ll help her customize her bike into a machine she’s happy to ride everyday, and in return we’ll have the educational experience to see our bikes though the eyes of one of our customers.

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I’m not even gonna’ try to hide it anymore, the people I put on the Fairdale team are really just plain awesome people. It just so happens that their lives are tied to a cycling and that they are really good bike riders. They’re the kind of people you’d want to hang out with even if they didn’t ride bikes… We’re way stoked to announce our new team rider Leif Valin. Truly one of the funniest people in existence and has a lifetime of cycling history. From BMX to bicycle portaging like the photo above, Leif does it all. Further more Leif is going to help us out in the R+D department. His experience designing bikes, riding them and wrenching on them will be great for us to add to our design department. Check out his team page here and some Leif videos below. Check out some real bike mastery. Amazing riding from Leif. . Human Bike Link. . Magic wheel to bicycle transfer: . skateboard/magic wheel/skateboard: . skateboard/magic wheel/skateboard:

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Even after spending half my life as a professional bike rider I still feel overwhelmed when I walk into a bicycle shop. Such an overload of technology, sizes, springy things I don’t understand, and a dizzying array of prices. On one level I think it’s all pretty amazing. I can nerd out with the best of them on all the cool new gadgets and spaceship bikes. On another level I find it all a bit discouraging. I have to say that most of my best memories about bicycles stem from the simplicity of the bike ride. There really is something special about riding a bike… I’ve spent far too much time trying to figure out what exactly it is. Your body powering you, the natural balance, the peacefulness, and the forgetting of everything that complicates life…. some combination of those things and probably more…. I truly want Fairdale to bring some of those irreplaceable moments I’ve been given to other people. As the “bike guy” amongst my group of friends I was always asked for bike buying advice. I never had a good answer. I couldn’t recommend the performance first designed BMX bikes I made my living on to a friend who wanted to ride to work, nor could I suggest that my friend who wanted to ride around the lake buy a race inspired road bike. To be honest my favorite bike to ride was a 1950’s basket bike I’d found in a dumpster. It’d been mistreated and abused for years but still happily rolled along, broadcasting smiles through me every time I rode it. I could hardly suggest to my friends that they go searching through dumpsters for their dream bike! It seemed to me that so many bikes were simply caught up in the technology race, dorky, or not durable. Fairdale bikes all are designed to keep it simple. Of course we understand that different riders have different demands for their bikes and different concepts of what simple is.  And… as our line grows you’ll see we also understand and enjoy pushing the limits of bikes. Our near 30 years of BMX roots shine here because you could hardly argue any bike is more simple then a single speed steel BMX bike, yet few can perform on such a high level. Those are good sensibilities to hold on to. Don’t complicate things where you don’t need to. We’re starting a new R+D Section of the website so that you can see what we’re up to. We have some fun ideas planned that will be both good fun and educational for us, maybe for you to! Click HERE to check out Janice & her Weekender.

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Hope you all have a fun vacation!

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Our popular Weekender 1×9 complete bike is now available in Small thru Extra-Large sizes!

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This weekend Monty and I loaded up my Weekender + BOB trailer and hit the road. I had found a bike route out to Palmetto State Park and thought it looked like a good adventure. 67 miles seemed doable at a leisurely pace since I had a whole day to it. I printed out some map instructions which were pretty complicated. Thankfully I had maps on my phone so occasionally I stopped to make sure I was on the right path. With all adventures I was not without a few hiccups. Amongst them being that I was pretty “over-geared”. Both in that I don’t have any cool light weight camping gear and my bike’s gears were a bit high for the terrain. Although the route was relatively flat a lot of it was on sandy, wash-boarded dirt roads. With all the weight I was carrying I spent a lot of hours in my smallest gear going very slowly. The one downside to the BOB trailer is that it’s difficult to ride out of the saddle with a dog in the back. So I ended up spinning away in my low gear plowing through the sand. The route out to the park was very calm and peaceful. Almost no traffic and quiet farm land on both sides of the roads. I often went near a hour without so much as a single car going by. Drivers were all very friendly as were the few farmers I ran across working near the road. The packs of dogs that charged off the front porches of houses I passed were another story! Mostly they were just friendly dogs running out to see who was riding through their neighborhood. A few barks and running along side me for a while and they would head back home. One pack of 8 chihuahuas chased Monty and I for a long while and seemed dangerously attracted to my front wheel’s spokes. Luckily, despite a few suicidal leaps, none were hurt. One group of pitbulls was dangerously aggressive. The further they ran along next to me the angrier they got. I’m convinced my calves were starting to look like steaks as they started to snap at me. I suddenly felt very alone way out in the middle of nowhere.  On this sandy stretch of road I simply couldn’t out run them, but then I remembered my waterbottle. A quick squirt across the nose and the dogs peeled off looking comically bewildered and completely dispirited. It was really funny. A slightly hair raising situation turned instantly to comical. The dogs looking as if I had done something far worse then sprayed a bit of water at them. I rolled into Palmetto State Park around 5PM. Just enough time to get my tent set up and gear organized before night fall. The park is small but very pleasant. I also lucked out as the warm 80 degree day cooled to a comfortable sitting around the fire 60 degree evening. Below I […]

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To view our 2013 print catalog, click HERE. To download a PDF version of it, click HERE. Our Print catalog is available for you to flip through or download. Check it out! Featuring some great photos from Sandy Carson.

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Went for a little test ride with a grip shift Weekender I built up. I’m on the fence with the grip shift thing. I found myself getting confused shifting the front and rear derailleur around while testing them out. You know, that parking lot cruise where you shift through all the gears to see if they’re working? However, once I got going and settled down into just the occasional click up and down I really started to like it. I’ve always despised grip shift because it seems a little dorky for some reason, but this SRAM X9 shifter I’m trying is really nice… and it’s cheaper then an X5 trigger shifter. I’ve put a few friends on the bike who are normally confused by shifting and they’ve found it to be intuitive and easy to use. Hmmmm… like I said, on the fence. While contemplating the minutia of bicycle parts I’ve doodled a Hampire! Or Vampster…. I’m on the fence about his name too! One thing I’m not on the fence about it our new recycled Corgi bag. It’s a great way to be earth friendly. Coming soon.

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