(dig that steeep angle.)

(check out that clearance — TIGHT.)

(fucking LOVE this curved cut out in the seat tube.)

The Tumbler

i’m more excited about this bike than any other i’ve ever built. and i didn’t even build the headset! (more on that later.)

the 2010 version of the leader 725TR has been hotly desired by not just most of the team lope crew, but also by damn near anyone who wants an aggressively angled, light track bike that can handle the punishment of urban riding. it’s got a high bottom bracket, a very pitched-forward posture, sturdy mountain-bike welds, fat aero tubing, and from an aesthetic perspective, it’s available in raw with clearCoat, as well as matte black, among a few other hotly desirable choices. because it’s made of aluminum, it’s really light, very stiff, and pretty damn strong.

both massan (MASHSF, macaframa) and emi (MASHSF) ride this frame in various year’s iterations, and those dudes ball, so you know it’s good shit.

i’ve had my eye on it for a while, and after debating back and forth a bit for all the usual reasons when one’s about to drop a few hundred dollars, i finally pulled the trigger a couple weeks ago.

when i placed my order online, i’d actually ordered the aluminum forks, but i got a call that night from LEADER, who said that an error in their site’s construction or upkeep or whatever had caused them to miss the section of the site where i ordered the forks, as the forks i ordered were not available at that time. the options they gave me were to a) return my money, or b) upgrade me to carbon forks (whose regular price is TWICE what i ordered).

so.
duh.

so there i was, sitting on a 3-day delivery wait on a super dope frame and seriously upgraded forks. (and for the first time ever, i didn’t tell WR, who is always springing bike surprises on me. since i was going over there AFTER i’d have the bike assembled, i figured i’d just show up with it, which was AWESOME. hahaha!!!)

now now that it’s assembled and ridden, i have to say this bike is fucking badass. the new angles are FAR more aggressive than any other bike i’ve ever ridden, and the higher bb with these more aggressive angles also makes for a higher seat, which means i can see over more stuff. it corners tighter and faster, it’s super light, and i’ve upped my gear inches from loos3y(tm), so i’m going a lot faster. my house to WR’s in 50 minutes, in fact. take my word on it, that’s good time on a fixed-gear.

i’m LOVING this bike. it’s fast, light, strong, and it looks SUPER badass.

and my excitement hasn’t been marred by the couple of iffy issues with the bike, either. for one thing, it uses a zero-stack headset, which is the same as an INTERNAL headset, but not the same as an INTEGRATED headset. so i called my LBS and asked if they had a zero-stack, which they said was an integrated. i said i had never worked with this tech before, so i just needed them to validate what i needed and set it aside, which they did. and when i got there, i had done the research and found that zero-stack was NOT the same as integrated, so i checked what they’d set aside and explained myself to them, as, sure enough, what they’d set aside was not what i needed. i was sent to the shop. and the guy in the shop took my lack of knowledge about this particular tech as GENERAL lack of knowledge and started to tole how it was going to be. "i have some cups here that’ll lmake the integrated work with this head tube. i’ll press these cups in myself so you don’t mess it up." ??? "how much is that?" "$10." i decided that would be ok, but i tole, "you’re sure those cups going to make the integrated hs work in this internal setup?" he said yes. and then they didn’t. so he tole that he’d just need to get back to me tomorrow once he had it figured out. to which i replied, "no, i’m going to go across the street and have a drink and you’re going to fix this before you close in an hour. i didn’t come in here to have you do anything, and what you’ve done is wrong, so get it right." then i went across the street and had a jack and a PBR and waited for his call. as it turned out, he found a zero-stack, popped out the offending cups he’d tried to remedy the problem with, and only charged me for the price of the original headset i was gonna buy, and not for any of his labor. now that’s more like it.

(this marks the first time in a LONG time that i’ve had the LBS do anything to a bike of mine, and it will also be the LAST, goddammit.)

the other thing that would ordinarily mar a person’s feelings about a new scoot, but which isn’t bothering me, is that the bottom bracket creaks. because the bike is aluminum, it doesn’t have the normal flex of steel or even of chromoloy, so wherever there are extreme forces at play (fixed drivetrain, hello!), those pieces are going to now flex, and the noise they make is reverberated through the frame and amplified to audible. so basically, my bb creaks every once in a while, usually after a skid or a back-torque. i can help this problem with a new chain and a new, METAL left-side bb cup (mine is plastic, and cracked, so it’s flexing a LOT), but i fear it will always do this. who cares, though.

as i said, this bike is rocking my world right now, and that’s what counts.

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