The Ketchum Krewzer (Hers)

The Ketchum Krewzer (Hers)

The Ketchum Krewzers were the first real Shitbikes.

The Story

The frame that ended up being the basis of this SB has a similar origin story to the Spinergy wheels on the ‘His’ Ketchum Krewzer. A friend noticed a posting for a 1993 Cannondale M500 frameset. Asking price - $25, but I haggled all the way down to 20 bones. I knew precious little about vintage Cannondales at the time, but I immediately loved the frame. The way that those old ‘Dales were built is just incredible. The oversized downtubes and perfectly smooth welds are beautifully constructed, and superbly highlight the craftsmanship that went into each USA-made frame.

The frameset itself was pretty hammered. The stays exhibited significant amounts of chain slap, and the bike had clearly been the victim of a few episodes of very hard chainsuck. There were also paint gouges (but no significant dents) from the handlebars spinning into the top tube along with various other bumps, bruises, and scratches. Because the paint and decals were shot, I decided that a paint job was needed in order to bring this thing back. As Jeremy Clarkson would say, “How hard can it be?”

My plan was to build this to be my SB, but I ended up finding a matching Cannondale that was more my size. So instead this frame became the basis of my wife’s Shitbike, SB2. Since we now had nearly identical frames, a color matching paint job and other matched parts were a must!

Design Goals

The primary design goal for this Shitbike, SB2, was to match the design of the SB1 that I was building at the same time with Spinergy wheels. The idea was to have a matching but reversed paint job, and the same overkill Shimano 1x11 drivetrain.

Similar to SB1, the goal of this bike was to create a comfortable, quirky, eye-catching, and wildly overbuilt town cruiser. Another goal of the bike was to see how far gone a frame could be and still be ‘rescued’ by a little bit of work and a new paint job. The hope was to minimize the various visual artifacts of the chain impacts on the frame, but the other various dings, dents, and scratches as well.

The Problems

IDK What I’m Doing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The biggest challenge of this build is that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Like, at all. The level of overall aptitude was ‘look up a Park Tool video by Calvin Jones’. (These are INCREDIBLE resources, by the way.)

Revenge Of The 90’s

Often times with projects it is the smallest issues that cause the largest problems. Case in point with this build: brake bosses. I purchased the frameset missing two brake bosses. I figured that it was no big deal, and that brake mounting posts were all basically the same size. I’ll order some from Amazon or grab some for 50 cents from the Boise Bike Project. Nope. This was my first lesson in what I elegantly call “90’s proprietary bullshit”. Every generation of bikes has this (Superboost, anyone?) and it’s infuriating every time. Cannondale, Klein, and a few others used a rare brake boss thread diameter and pitch that didn’t match anything else that was readily available.

After unsuccessfully pulling studs off of other frames, several incorrect Amazon orders, and MANY choice words, the vintagecannondale forums pointed towards a German company that still makes and sells these stupid proprietary studs. (Big thanks to these guys, the build probably would have died without them.) Many dollhairs and an international shipment later, I had some bosses that fit!

Chainlines, bro

Since this bike was a parts bin frankentein, I was trying to match up all sorts of weird things that were sometimes three decades apart. In this case I kept trying to use a cooler Race Face Turbine crankset that had an offset that just did NOT want to play nice with the rear parts of the drivetrain. After trying so hard to force it to work, I threw in the towel and reached for a lower end Shimano crankset and removed the chainrings to make room for a blingy parts bin Niner ring.