Velo City: Bicycle Culture and City Life

Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket

Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket

Recently, we featured a dazzling stainless steel disc road bike built by Sam, the proprietor of Leytonstone’s Local Bicycle Shop, Stayer Cycles. In a stark contrast to that immaculate machine, here’s Sam’s personal rugged roadie, the Snot Rocket.

Sam’s a keen photographer as well as framebuilder, and he built this dirt drop 29er as an overnighter/camera-carrying fully rigid mountain bike — in fact, these photos were taken with his medium format Mamiya RZ67 camera.

He tells us the story of how the Snot Rocket came to be: “There is so much to talk about with this bike. Firstly it is worth saying that this is my bike so I have a personal attachment to everything about it. But more specifically I built it to prototype a few ideas and to do a few things well that you can’t just get a bike to do well unless you design it that way.

Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket

I wanted to be able to run both single-speed for simple winter riding and gears for longer tours, camping and the occasional off-road adventure. My slightly more-specific second requirement was to be able to carry my medium format camera equipment and/or a heavy front load rather than a rear pannier or relying on a saddle bag and lots of weight behind. I live and cycle mostly in Epping Forest and I carry my camera most places so it needed to work for that as well as be a day trip or overnighter bike for rooty trail riding.

Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket

The dropouts are a flat plate design and in this instance, they were waterjet cut rather than machined with a larger batch manufacture in mind. Waterjet cuts a shape out of a flat plate without producing much heat so there is very little or no distortion of the material but it does mean that flat is what you get.

Any shaping then has to be done with a milling process afterward or, as we did in this case with the stainless faces, soldered or welded on to the surface. The rear dropouts were designed to work with both a single speed and a geared drivetrain, with integrated brass tensioners.

Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket

The head tube is machined 1 1/8″ and stacked much higher than my usual ride in order to put me in a comfortable position in the drops for the majority of the riding rather than on the hoods which is where I would usually be.

The rest of the bike is made from a Columbus Zona/T45 mix, it has a BSA 68mm bottom bracket so I can run my super cool WI ENO cranks on a square taper BB.

The rando bag is a Hasselblad medium format camera bag customized to hang from a decaleur with an Ortlieb pannier system and also attach to the underside of the rack with the straps on the bag.

Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket

The decaleur is custom stainless, like the rack, attached to the polished Ritchey bars with modified Hope light brackets. The saddle is my (very) old Ritchey Vector saddle from back in the day, lovingly restored by Hannah of the Grafton Saddler.

Hannah stripped and recovered it in new leather and embossed the bikes name on the back. Its great and is better than new. Hannah also made the handlebar tape! It must have taken ages! But it is very worth it as it feels great and should last and wear nicely.

Stayer Cycles offers a traditional list of services such as Sam’s framebuilding and Judith’s wheelbuilding (using their proprietary carbon rims). Our favorite product, however, even though you won’t find it hanging on a peg in-store, is definitely Sam’s Snot Rocket.

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Get The Holeshot: Stayer Cycles Snot Rocket