Ryan is one of our mechanics and has a very particular taste in bicycles and parts. This is his Bottechia, his winter/rain/general city-use road bike. He uses it as a utilitarian vehicle and as a recreational road bike for when he doesn’t want to use any of his nicer rides. That’s not to say this bicycle isn’t nice, because it has a lot of nice parts on it, but it’s extremely unique in how it’s put together, the parts variety used, and how it actually works very well.

On his Velo-Orange Tourist bars he has a Crane Bell he polished, lock-on grips, and vintage Shimano Deore XT friction thumbshifters. Also attached is the Velo Orange Porteur rack, a heavy-duty front rack that we can special order. He’s got a Carradice saddle bag attached to a very broken-in Selle Italia road saddle, to help keep the stuff he’s hauling off his back and on the bike. This bike is designed to be comfortable loaded, unloaded, and in all weather conditions.

Some would call this bike a frankenstein, as it uses a mix of vintage shimano mountain bike parts, road parts, and Campagnolo parts, and new stuff as well. The bike was designed to take 27″ wheels, but he’s using a 700c set of wheels with fat tires (700×32 Panaracer Pasela). If you came into the shop and asked us on advice in building a great city bike for winter and fair weather, none of us would tell you to build a bike like this. Due to Ryan’s intense attention to detail, knowledge of parts and mechanics, and extreme creativity, he’s put this bike together to match some kind of image in his mind – and he’s done it very well.