I decided to ride the PVD Sopwith Camel (2019) on this years Headless Horseless ride in Fairfax. Similar to the Turkey ride, this is a mass mountain bike ride at night celebrating Halloween. It’s pretty awesome. There are several kegs of beer waiting at the top of Loma Alta. Everyone is lit up with jack-o-lanterns on their head. Whole families join in for some parts of the ride. It’s well worth doing if you haven’t. It’s really a special kind of experience.
The Camel is in the klunker class of bikes. A party bike, full rigid, huge front tire, and (in the current configuration) a seven speed drivetrain. It’s just a cool ass bike and projects a sick vibe. The seven speed drivetrain means that you need to keep pushing hard on the pedals to get up the hills and conserve as much momentum as possible going down. Being fast on a klunker is serious business.
I’ve been drawn back to klunkers lately. I’m not sure why. It may just be the vibes or the beefy feel on the trail. While the Camel is very nice, it’s using an antiquated front end geometry that isn’t as good as can be on the trails. I should build a revision of the Camel but with a better design that is improved on the 2020 Supermarine Spitfire that takes the last 5 years of development into account.
There are lots of cool things about this bike but one of the coolest is the Von Sothen Racing 26mm stubby stem. It’s just aggro AF and so modern. I was looking at the bike after the ride and couldn’t see past the ugly bolts in the stem.
I usually see this during an initial build but there was a lot of development going on at the time the Camel was being worked on. I was moving fast and swapping parts like crazy. Now, this needed fixing.
The bolts are M8x25 (2x) and M8x20mm (4x). I grabbed some stainless steel replacements from the bin and machined them to pretty them up. Now, it’s looking much better. It’s the little things like this that bring out another level from a bike.
You can see the difference in the bolts immediately.
