A very special bike for a special guy! Markus gave me the first call about two and a half years ago, and from this initial call until this finished bike it was a really, really long process… Markus himself is a very skilled woodworking craftsman and also super interested in the fields of design and arts. In the process of planning his bike, he had many different design ideas and his general expectations were really high for this project. This is quite understandable, as he was, for the first time, having a beautiful and unique object created just for himself, while usually it is his job to make wonderful things for other people. But as we Germans say, “Gut Ding will Weile haben”, or in English, “Good things take time”. So I took it easy and took some time, and eventually all his and my ideas somehow came together. It became clear that we really wanted to make a colorful, bright, and happy bike! None of us who were involved in this project could know at that time how challenging all of this would become in the end. But finally we made it real, and here it is — the “Stripeoneur”!
The whole bike design is based on an original color scheme created by the famous British designer and bicycle aficionado Mr. Paul Smith, which was painted on a Porsche 911 from 1965 owned by Mr. James Turner. The biggest challenge for us was to transfer the stripe graphics onto the bike’s frame. For this, we made countless design sketches and created 3D models of the complete bike in order to produce perfectly matching CNC-cut masking foils. I can only imagine how hard it must have been to cut and mask all those foils on the actual bike frame, and Annetta Orlowski truly did a fantastic job. The next big challenge was Markus’ task to choose the perfectly matching colors from our paint system, as the existing Pantone colors could not be used by our painter Jacek Orlowski, who finally did an amazing job creating this master piece of art. Last but not least, Tine from Gramm Tourpacking had to jump into this project and create custom bags with perfectly matching colors and lines — and she probably hated me for my initial idea to make the bags in the same color scheme as the bike. It took her three frame bags until she was pleased with the result and everything was really 100% perfect. In the end, we all had to walk quite some extra miles for this project, but when the show bike was finally ready and Markus came to the Bespoked Handmade Bike Show and saw his bike for the first time in real life, it was all worth the extra effort we had to put in for his fantastic, happy, stripy bike! So lots of happy riding on this one, and always make sure to wear the matching socks, my friend, Markus ;)
Thanks so much to all the companies who supported us on this show bike, first of all Tune and Ingrid. Other fine parts used on this build are custom-made Fern / Allygn carbon rims, SON light and dynamo, B&M taillight, Gevenalle shifters, Hope brakes, René Herse tires, Velo Duo carbon fenders, Acros components, and of course all racks are made by our own brand, Allygn Components.
Photography: Florian Haeussler / FERN Bicycles.