Today, we feature Spencer and his legacy Surly Steamroller. This bike was abandoned at his house, and over the past few years, he’s accumulated parts to make his early aughts fixed gear dreams come true, but in the 2020s. He thinks the Surly Steamroller was ahead of its time. Keep reading for this PiNP throwback… to the future…
Some of my first features on this site, when it was still called Prolly is Not Probably, were photos I took of my friends in the nacent fixed gear freestyle boom in the early 2000s. It feels pretty special to come full circle with a dream fixed gear here on the Radavist almost two decades later.
You Had To Be There
It’s 2007, I’m in my second year of college in Long Beach, just south of LA. I have a hoopty-ass fixed gear conversion with a Craigslist-found Motobecane frame and an eBay fixed gear wheelset. I hear about this new movie documenting fixed gear riders in SF called MASH SF. I had recently attended one of the first LAfixed rides and heard about the Mash folks planned to throw a race from Griffith Park to the showing in Hollywood. I struggled my ass up those LA hills on some absurdly tall gear and then sprinted back down the hills, watching multiple people crash as they clipped pedals or just lost control.
I made it safely to the premiere and sat in awe at the raw fun and chaos of the film. Splitting lanes, skitching cars, bombing hills brakeless. It harkened back to skateboard videos I had grown up on; I was hooked. If you were there, you may have noticed a bunch of folks rocking a front mag wheel, typically a Trispoke or five-spoked Aerospoke. I always dreamed I would be willing to shell out for such a silly and decadent front wheel of all things.
On a velodrome, the true home of fixed gear bikes, such mag wheels provide an aerodynamic advantage. On the streets, they were used for style, which grew out of an odd practicality adopted from bike messengers. The gaps between an Aerospoke’s blades were easier to quickly throw a chain lock through when locking up quickly. Also, the heavy mag wheels didn’t require truing. I don’t know the exact genesis of folks in Mash SF using the much lighter and delicate carbon trispoke wheels, but hot damn, it did look cool.
Fast Foward
I’m now living in Tucson, and a decaying Surly Steamroller is hanging in my bike shed. An ex of a friend of a friend left the bike with me, and it’s been a few years, so I’ve basically adopted it. It has a large crimp in the downtube from when someone tried to steal it before it came into my possession. It’s Surly steel, it’ll be fine, but just in case, my friend Hubert helped me roll some of the crease out with some wooden tube blocks.
Another friend who used to work at HED and happened to race track competitively at some of the highest levels admitted to me that he had a HED trispoke sitting in his closet, collecting dust. I gushed about the aforementioned track bike period of my life and how I’d always dreamed of having one. He simply said, “Pay for the shipping, and it’s yours.” Deal.
Now I had a bike to cobble together…
Ahead of Its Time
When Surly gave their fixed gear, in the aughts, clearance for 700 x 38 mm tires (conservatively), there were very few options to fill that space. Maybe you could find some Vittoria Randonneurs in that size, but back then, we were all living on 700 x 25 mm tires at the largest. Nowadays, the 700 x 42 mm tires I have on my build now are the absolute minimum I’d ride, even just around town.
With some aging, dry-rotted Specialized Sawtooths filling out the frame nicely, I believe this is how the Surly Steamroller should always have looked. It was a shame to see the Steamroller discontinued when large-volume road tires were finally en vogue.
Spencer’s Surly Steamroller
With the gifted HED trispoke as my centerpiece, I quested to make a bike I was happy to look at. Silver components complemented the dark brown of the frame. Narrow by my standards today, but wide compared to the grip width bars of my yesteryears, the Nitto Shred bars topped with Oury grips (IFKYK) make for a great modern cockpit.
A few silver bits with some help from the State and a borrowed seatpost from my road bike, and we have a bike! Time to slam that stem and hit the streets.
Maybe we can berate one of those marginal gain guys on the internet to let me take my gravel fixed gear into a wind tunnel to see how many watts I can save with my aero trispoke wheel. It’s gotta be worth some kind of watts, right? I’m enchanted with my Gravotark bike. It feels like a distillation of so many facets of my influences in cycling. Do you have a Surly Steamroller you love? Drop a photo in comments!
Keep an eye on the sorceresses and wizards at Surly, they may be performing some necromancy on the Steamroller…
Build Spec:
- Frame: 58 cm Surly Steamroller
- Fork: Surly Track
- Front Wheel: HED Trispoke
- Rear Wheel: State Silver Flip Flop
- Stem: State Silver 70 mm
- Bars: Nitto Shred 720 mm
- Grips: Oury
- Tires: Specialized Sawtooth 700 x 42
- Cranks: I honestly don’t know. They came on the abandoned bike
- Gear Ratio: 48×19 (skiiiiid patches bruh)
- Seatpost: Ritchey
- Saddle: Specialized Power 3D
- Bag: Bullmoose SG TT framebag combo