At long last, DW picked up his new Boxer on a beautiful Seattle Spring afternoon. We went for a brief ride around the park and sent Dan off into the sunset for a lifetime of fun on his new “Sport Wagon” concept bike.
Dan came to Boxer Bicycles with a vision to create the perfect marriage of performance and versatility for the riding that he does in and around Seattle. On paper, Dan’s bike looks a lot like the one built for Lisa earlier this year, but there are some subtle, though significant differences between the two.
Dan was interested in the best comfort as well as performance for his Boxer, so we built it for the excellent 42mm Grand Bois Hetre tires and fenders. As learned on the Oregon Manifest Bike, the Hetres are fantastic tires that are not to be trifled-with during the design and build process. To be frank, they are HUGE and require some specialized modifications to fit with proper fender clearances on a bike with 440mm chainstays.
That was another lesson learned with the Oregon Manifest Bike – shorter chainstays are pretty sweet for a bike that sees a lot of climbing. It’s easy to build a bike for Hetre tires with long chainstays, but cramming all that in there on a more performance-oriented bike takes care. On Dan’s bike, we took our time and did lots of checking and re-checking the clearances so it turned out perfectly. Dan decided to make it fun and requested a custom Kickstand mounting plate in place of a chainstay bridge.
See some detail photos of it here. I recommend viewing the pictures in the slideshow mode so the captions are easily viewed, though the best resolution photos are achieved by clicking the individual thumbnails.