Nick has been rocking his pink Meriwether 29+ since 2015. It’s been down Baja, to Croatia, and crossed Africa to name a few spots. Nick has tried a couple other hardtails in the last two years but keeps coming back to the pink bike with his signature portage handle. Apparently we got the bike right for what he was after.
This spring I got an email from Nick shortly after i stated, “Let’s make fatbikes great again!”
“Let’s make a fatbike. It’s gonna be purple, aka antique lilac… I’ve been teasing a series of non-winter fatbike tours to places like Namibia, Jordan, Australia, etc. After a few weeks on the Iditarod my fatbike evangelicism has been reborn.”
I got after the design and build a couple months later and below is the result (photos by @nicholascarman). It’s just about the same geometry as the pink bike but made to fit the Terrene Johnny 5 tires (26×5″) on 100mm rims and built around the Salsa Kingpin Deluxe fork but can also handle a 100mm suspension fork if desired. I increased the downtube diameter to 38mm from 35mm, used a mandrel bent seat tube instead of rolled straight gauge, and used hooded Sliding dropouts instead of tabbed. Other than that, and the addition of a puffy-stuff rack, it’s pretty much the same as the pink bike including the chainstay length (435-455mm from front to back on the sliders). It’s built for the SRAM Fat4 DUB crankset with a Q of about 203mm and a chainline of 66mm.
So we’ll see if this fatbike helps to MFBGA, but knowing Nick he will be a great fatbike evangelical.
Are you interested in making racks alone or only when paired with a full frame?
I can build racks for other frames but I’d need the frame shipped to me to use it as the “fixture”, so it would get costly. May need to add eyelets to the frame and that would mean a lot more work in stripping the paint, adding the attachment points, and repainting. So I’m up for figuring out something that would work but it isn’t super simple or cheap!