Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

I think that's probably a good thing :)

Geometry looks good to me

Wow, just looked at Marino bikes site. The price seems amazing. Even with the shipping cost, it's very very reasonable.

How are they do deal with?

As I understand it, from a reliable source, there is a speed over quality control approach to framebuilding.

On the Swedish Happyride forum there's 57 pages worth of Marino bikes, but as Hulsroy says it's not super uncommon that they have some QA problem, on the other hand, 57 pages are alot of frames. If I would order (canti-tracklocross 🤔) I'd find someone to share the shipping with and just take my chances.

I guess that is to be expected from a custom frame for circa $300, the upgrades to reynolds 725 are crazy cheap.

Could be worth a punt if you want something a little niche and are not super concerned with it being the most perfect.

Could be worth a punt

That’s my reasoning. As Såsen says, lots of happy customers as well as a few quality issues, all of which seem to have been promptly resolved by Marino, their go to behaviour seems to be to just build the person a new frame foc. I suppose a few issues are to be expected as they’ll build whatever the customer wants and not everyone specs a realistic geo.

Going for a solid yellow I think. Bumblebee style 😉

Well, excited to see how it turns out.

Are Marinos generally more popular in Sweden for some reason? Not much chat about them on here. I don't have instagram or frequent any other bike forums so I don't have anything else to go on.

No idea but they pop up used now and then and there’s that forum thread linked to above so not uncommon at least

There's a thread on singletrackworld.com about them. They also made all the frames for Sick and some for planetx.

I think this one was made by them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1A53k2SEdw&t=0

Yes! Geo confirmed with Marino and after fruitless trawling for shimano groupsets for weeks I found a lightly used SLX drivetrain locally today.

Another boring CAD drawing. Paid the deposit today, fingers crossed I get it before summer.

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Also bought a used tiagra hydraulic groupset for the kona commuter/possible tourer. Will need quite a bit of tlc after this salty snowy winter anyway and I’ve wanted to try drop bar hydro brakes for a while.

Well, despite the ‘silber’ labelling, a fourth of these spokes are obviously black. Sigh...

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Laced and semi-trued the front anyway.

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Front done. ~110kgf disc side spokes. Got the lengths just right, very satisfying.

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Bike24 don’t have the spokes I need in silver so they’re refunding me for the black ones. I could in the name of resource utilisation and common sense build the rear with half silver, half black spokes. But I’ll most likely slide down to the LBS and buy new silver ones instead.

Started tearing this down today, plan was to finish servicing and rebuilding in a day.

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But the slightly wonky rear wheel turned out to be due to a number of chewed up and bent spokes behind the cassette. I dimly recall dropping the chain there during a particularly horrid commute through the snowdrifts. Had to change 7 spokes in all, lucky the wheel hasn’t exploded earlier!

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Routing the hydraulic stuff went alright and the cheap (£15!) mtb calipers seem to fit.

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But then I ran into the inevitable snag. Didn’t know road hydraulics need a plastic adapter at the lever for bleeding. So now I have to wait for the £2 adapter thingy before proceeding. Perhaps just as well as I’ve started obsessing about ‘wandering bite point’ on shimano brakes and how it’s better to use moto fork oil of some sort (forgotten the exact name), which I’ve duly ordered and should be arriving this week. How I’ve managed to bike around with the wrong type of brake fluid so far is of course a complete mystery.

Dang, that new HT looks really fun! You'll have to come up here this summer and we can go out shred some semi-gnar together:

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Hey, thanks! You're up north somewhere right? I just might take you up no that offer, providing the damned frame gets built before winter sets in again. That Stanton looks awesome!

Well, as detailed in the disc brake thread I managed to break the LH lever when fitting new hoses for the Kona, so that’s on hold atm while a new lever makes its way here.

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Meanwhile I finally made it down to the lbs and got the rest of the spokes for the rear 29” wheel. As well as an epic set of fake moustaches. I’d quite like to be ‘pedaleur de charme” but realistically it’ll have to be ‘le veteran’.

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