A Second Life for a Richard Sachs Team Bike

It isn't only new bikes we love building at Above Category. Some of my favorite projects start with bikes that have already had a pretty interesting life.

This one definitely qualifies.

This Richard Sachs was originally a team cyclocross bike raced by Sam O'Keefe. It was later purchased by Mike Wilson, who some of you will remember as a member of the AC team, and Mike eventually sold it, still pretty much as it had been raced, to one of our clients and friends.

The obvious thing would have been to restore it as a cross bike. But our client doesn't race cross. He doesn't race at all.

And because this was a real cyclocross race bike, it doesn't have bottle cage mounts.

That left us with a choice. We could add bottle mounts and turn it into a really cool rim-brake gravel bike, or we could leave the frame alone, keep it clean, and give the bike a completely different second life.

We chose the latter.

We decided to make it into a commuter.

That sounds pretty simple, but building an older cantilever-brake bike exactly the way we wanted wasn't quite as easy as it sounds. A lot of the parts and solutions we would normally use simply don't exist anymore.

The whole build really started with the stem, which might be my favorite part of the bike.

We asked Rob English to build us a custom stem that allows the front brake cable to enter through the front of the stem, run internally, and exit from the underside directly above the front brake. Besides cleaning everything up considerably, it meant we could eliminate the traditional cable hanger underneath the stem and get the stem lower.

We also had Rob build it for a 1 1/8" steerer and used a shim underneath so the outside diameter of the stem would match up much better with the top of the Chris King headset.

It's a tiny detail. It's also exactly the kind of detail that can completely change a bike.

From there we went with a flat bar and a mechanical Shimano XTR group. This bike is going to get ridden in an area surrounded by some pretty serious hills, so we wanted gearing that would make it genuinely useful rather than just something that looked cool.

The wheels were another fun part.

We happened to have a set of 24-hole Zipp 404 rim-brake carbon rims, which aren't exactly something you can just go order anymore. We paired those with DT Swiss 240 hubs and sent the hubs to VéloColour in Toronto to have them painted to match the pink of the frame.

And speaking of VéloColour, they did an incredible job with the frame. They made sure the bike had the correct badging and even matched the particular shade of cream Richard uses on his bikes. It looks fresh again without losing what makes it unmistakably a Richard Sachs.

That's really the part of this project I love.

We could have tried to turn this bike back into exactly what it was. Instead, we respected what it was and built it for what its owner actually needs now.

It spent years as one of the best-looking cyclocross bikes on the circuit, and we think giving it a completely different second life that will actually get ridden is a pretty great way for it to spend the next chapter.

Thanks for reading, and if you have an old bike, a new bike, or just an idea for something a little different that you'd like us to help bring to life, give us a call.

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