My friend Matthew and I attended this past weekend’s Westminster, MD swap meet, getting up before sunrise on Sunday to get the jump on various other collectors, bike nerds, and 2-wheeled deviants. It was a fine swap, with huge attendance in the Carroll County Agricultural Center (half the room was taken up by a rodeo ring with bleachers surrounding) filled with a decent selection of interesting parts both old and new, as well as some fine bargains. I managed to steal away with a couple of exciting small bits — a Campagnolo 15mm “peanut butter” 15mm wrench for $3, a Campagnolo dog-leg saddle wrench for $2, and most excitingly a full Rohloff/Phil Wood wheelset setup with shifter and cabling at a screaming bargain — a setup that should provide me with an excellent set of Rohloff wheels without breaking the bank.

The hardest part about setting up the Rohloff is not the parts, but rather deciding “what kind of bike would this best go on.” Of late, I’ve been particularly fascinated from both an aesthetic and functional standpoint by “scorcher” and “porteur” type bikes — bikes that are set up in a more upright fashion that a standard road bike, but take relatively narrow tires and most likely have mounts for fenders, racks or the like. Kogswell makes a brilliant Porteur/Randonneur frame that fits the bill quite well, and Velo Orange deliver a fine frame (made here in NYC by Johnny Coast) as well. Somewhat terrifyingly, though, I’ve been engaged by titanium frames, in the same mold. The recent NAHBS show had beautiful bikes galore — track frames, randonneuring bikes, tandems and what have you. In years past I’ve particularly admired the work of the titanium builders out there — Roark, Merlin, etc. Sadly, I wasn’t able to make it out this year, but one picture in particular really did it for me.

Oh, my. Moots has made a frame called the Comooter that takes a Rohloff (!), has fender mounts (!!), and even has a generator hub in the front (!!!) with flat bars! Aiee! Sadly, Moots’ cost about a billion dollars (give or take a million) and thus is out of my budget for the forseeable future, lest I want to get a divorce. Sid’s Bikes here in NYC had the Comooter but without the Rohloff, but in this guise it totally makes sense.

Non-corrosive, strong metal, no paint to chip, custom built to fit the Paragon Machine Works dropouts that fit the Rohloff perfectly without the use of a chain tensioner… it’s like a dream. Ah, well.

This bike is aesthetically a bit more pleasing to me in terms of shape (I don’t love the bowed top tube of the Comooter) but follows the same lines — 35mm cyclocross tires, upright bars, etc. This is actually a Merlin track frame converted by Tam Pham into an homage to the 1993 Ibis Scorcher, a bike well ahead of its time — witness the review from Bicycle Guide in 1993 where the reviewer has to explain the difficulties of riding a fixed wheel bike. It’s interesting to me how everything old (the Scorcher was modelled after a late 1800s racing bike) can be new again — the Comooter looks like a highly advanced Raleigh 3 speed. Then again, I suppose I’m riding fixed wheel bikes now, too…