Brothers Jay and Jeremy Sycip have been building bikes for more than three decades. This year the Santa Rosa, California, company was showing off two mountain bikes at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, one an experiment in design, the other an exercise in new construction methods.
650b All-Mountain Hardtail
“I’m starting to do a little more with all-mountain hardtails: taller forks, slacker angles and higher bottom brackets,” said Sycip. Sycip built this frame for himself, it has a 13in bottom bracket and a 69.5° headtube angle. “I spend most of my time riding a mountain bike with an 80mm fork, so I’m interested to see how this one rides."
Like most of Sycip frames, it has the signature penny-topped five-piece seatstays. Sycip opted to route the rear brake line through the non-drive seatstay. The frame also has internal routing for the dropper post.
Component highlights include a 160mm Fox 34 fork, Shimano XT 2x10 drivetrain Fox DOSS seatpost and Chris King hubs laced to WTB Frequency rims.
Steel and Carbon 29er
At a glance this bike looks like a pretty standard steel 29er singlespeed. The raw steel frame conceals the matte carbon top tube and seatstays. Sycip has built a number of steel and carbon road and cyclocross frames. This is the company’s first stab at a steel and carbon mountain bike frame. It is also the first time Sycip has used an internal sleeve, rather than a lug, to join the steel and carbon tubes.
This build is not yet available to consumers. “We’re just trying it out to see what happens,” said Sycip.
The frame has internal routing for the rear brake and, while setup as a singlespeed, it also has a port for the rear shift cable so it can be run as a 1x10. Sycip spec’d a Beer Components eccentric bottom bracket in the PressFit 30 shell to tension the chain. The most notable components on this build are the carbon/ceramic composite brake rotors made my Kettle Cycles.
We highlighted Kettle Cycles' new rotors last fall and will have a pair in for test shortly
