The Devil's in the Details
R+E Cycles, and over time have been adopted by others in the industry. One such item is the outrigger cable stop. On a travel bike plenty of thought must be put into how easily the bike can be taken apart and put back together. Additionally, a lot of forethought has to be applied to protecting the paint or other finishes when the bike is boxed for travel. If this planning is not engineered into the bicycle frame before it's built, then it's too late.
Our 'Fit to Finish' manufacturing method helps us evolve our bicycle fitting and building techniques at a much faster pace than a standard bike company. But, there's more benefits to the rider as well.
In a product-focused manufacturing facility, every bike is built one at a time, and improvements are viewed as fluid and continuous, just like the rain water that flows down the ally out back of our shop. Even small detail improvements that you don't see unless you look really hard are constantly being developed. We don't have to wait until we've sold through a large production run, and then poll our dealers or customers. We can make the improvement on the very next bike.
Some of those little details were developed almost a decade ago right here at
Now, way back in the mid-1990's, we started making travel bikes. Because of the fact that we teach our travel bike customers how to put their bike into the box, and reassemble it again, we were able to rapidly come up with minor changes that made major improvements to dis-assembly and re-assembly. The use of the cable splitter became common use on our travel bikes immediately, but on the second travel bike, we designed and built our own cable stop that held the cable splitter away from the frame so that it wouldn't rub the paint off of the frame when you pulled the brakes. From bike number 2 on, the Rodriguez outrigger has been a standard on every travel bike we make.
Imagine my surprise when another company approached me in 2007 with a brand new product they had just developed.....I don't know what they call it, but it's 10 years too late, I told them. Our customers have been benefiting from Rodriguez outrigger stops since 1996.
It's not many bike shops that have their own machine shop and machinist. I could obsess here on dozens of similar components that make our bikes unique and ahead of their time, but the point is that at R+E Cycles, we don't wait if an improvement is needed, we just do it now....on the very next bike.
We have the machines and experience to make it happen.
Fit to Finish - Only at R+E Cycles
