With just a passing glance, the new frame hobbyist frame builder Lyle Wiens built for himself looks like a regular awesome fat-tyre road bike. Lyle, however, is 6’8″ and the frame has a few cool tweaks to accommodate his height.
Lyle, based in Manitoba, Canada, is a graduate of Paul Brodie’s Framebuilding 101 class at the University of Fraser Valley, and we’ve already featured one of his bikes here on The Spoken. It was built for a mate, but this one is Lyle’s own.
The angle of the chainstays is similar to those found on contemporary carbon and aluminum gravel bikes because they’re trying to combine wide tires, short chainstays, narrow road cranks and large diameter carbon chainstays.
With a height of 6’8″, Lyle prefers 215mm cranks, which pushes the bottom bracket even further up. Lyle wanted to apply the solution offered by those carbon and aluminum bikes to a steel frame, and it could very well be one of the first attempts to do so.
Also, have a close look at those handlebars — they’re a pair of 48cm Nitto Noodles that have been cut in half, extending them out to 60cm and now held together by a sleeve and pinch bolts (and idea borrowed from Rick Hunter).
In Lyle’s own words: “It’s difficult to make bikes for big people that don’t look like a grizzly bear riding a minibike in a circus”, but we think he’s nailed it. It looks — and rides — just like a regularly-sized 650b road bike, built for a shorty.
