The One – Our Klunker Story
I’ve always maintained that we should be developing the type of bikes that we like to ride – in the belief that if we like them surely others might? This keeps us enthusiastic and eager to refine the bikes, and we have been having such a good time doing this over the last 6 months since chassis 001 rolled out of the workshop. So we have continued to refine the bike and we’ll update shortly detail on the build of bikes 002 and 003, and the subtle design changes we have incorporated.
But what else are we up to? Rupe and I ride all kinds of stuff, steel hardcore hardtails (our current design is the evolution of our ideas), full sus enduro bikes and also single-speeds….. I love the simplicity of the single-speed – you have one gear and just slog away. We train on single-speed road bikes, and to date, no hill has defeated us. In the last year or so I have been particularly amused by Rupe blitzing our local trails on a fully rigid Charge Cooker 0 single-speed, setting PBs on climbs and sticking one finger up to carbon full sus exotica! Since we started making our own bikes I’ve always wanted to do a single-speed…. the easiest would have just been to run one of our development frames with a single sprocket, but I had an idea in my head that we should make the bike look completely different. The thoughts behind the Wingit ‘1’ are that it should stand out, be different. I also wanted to build a bike with cheap easily obtainable parts, a simple bike to keep in the van, a ‘Van-bike’, the bike to take out and have a quick razz up and down that local hill that you see when on your way to work, or just to get out and clear your head, a bike not to take too seriously…..
Being into mountain bikes for over 30 years I’ve seen a lot of design fads come and go but I’ve always liked Klunker style bikes that hark back to the very origins of our sport with bikes like the Transition klunker. But after nearly killing myself on Rupe’s Charge I realised that front suspension was definitely required! So could we make a klunker style bike that handled properly both up and down hill? After I had completed brazing 003, I had a plan… Let’s use the same geo and make our own Slack angled klunker style single-speed! In many ways I wanted to make the klunker with parts I already had (or cheaply obtained). It was also to be the testbed for a few other techniques in construction I wanted to try. Using the same jig set up from frame 003 I mitred up the steel for the first Wingit ‘1’. This bike uses thinner diam tubing than our hardtail, and has used up offcuts and steel ends I’ve been collecting over the last few months. It has been fun buying all sorts of second-hand parts for this one, from the £6 BMX stem, the £4.50 hope clamp to the £130 X- fusion Forks…. the result is a bike I’m really pleased with, looks great in a retro kind of way but rides and handles like a Wingit!
Ben. December 2020. The WingIt workshop.
It’s now April 2021 and we are allowed out to some trail centres again! First stop Cannock Chase forest… Shots here of the WingIt ‘1’ #002 built up by Rupe compete with etched copper head badge. It’s amazing how well these bikes shread the trails. Climbing is hard work as you’d expect on a single speed, but they do climb well. Sharing the geo of our trail bike The Goat they rip downhill too…
Brilliant pub bike too… 😉
